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Wednesday 23rd January 2008

Tweak Crysis

Phil Hartup explains which settings you need to tweak in Crysis to achieve a good balance between frame rates and fancy graphics.

So you want to play Crysis at the highest settings and still have a decent frame rate? Well, unless you're reading this in the middle of 2008 or later, you've got no chance. Crysis might be a fairly orthodox shooter, but the demands from its physics and graphics engine are much higher than any game before it.

Let's start with the game's world, as the size of the areas in which you play results in them hogging your PC's resources, as does the movement of foliage and destructible objects. It's also worth noting that your machine's performance will differ between levels. The early stages are hard enough, but the final showdown levels place an even heavier strain on your system and, if you tuned the settings too ruthlessly early on in the game, you'll need to tune them for the final stages.

As Crysis is very much a forward-looking game, you may find that you'll have to drop your standards in terms of your minimum frame rate too. If 25fps is your aim, you're going to struggle with Crysis at the moment. Bear in mind that occasional chugging when you trigger a scripted event may drop the minimum frame rate on a benchmark, but it won't completely ruin the gaming experience.

As long as you maintain an average frame rate somewhere between the high 30s and low 40s, you're doing fine, since this means that any slowdown in heavy combat action, should it occur, won't be too severe. It's also worth remembering that while a game might look pretty in the screenshots, there's also a lot to be said for the visual appeal of a smooth frame rate.

Resolution

The first factor to consider is the resolution. For many people, particularly those with GeForce 8800 cards, the default action is to bump up the resolution, but this may not be the best strategy. We tested Crysis at its lowest settings with a GeForce 8800 GTX at 1,024 x 768 and 1,920 x 1,200, and the frame rate between the two resolutions hardly changed. We saw minimums of 38fps and 35fps respectively, and averages of 70fps and 67fps.

This indicates that the GPU was comfortable at this level, and the frame rate was more limited by the CPU. However, if you increase all the settings to High, the frame rate at 1,024 x 768 drops to a minimum of 23fps and an average of 45fps, while at 1,920 x 1,200, it plummets to a minimum of 14fps and an average of only 23fps. Using a lower resolution makes it possible to add a little anti-aliasing without incurring a severe frame rate drop, and this takes the edge off those chunky pixels.

Tweaking the settings

Setting up Crysis to run at 1,920 x 1,200 at Low settings provided an average frame rate of 67fps, which meant that we could afford to lose around 25fps by beefing up various settings before the game became unplayable. Shadows are traditionally a bugbear of smooth frame rates, and this is one of the first features to start tweaking. There are no shadows at the game's lowest settings, whereas soft shadows are cast by nearly everything at the highest settings.

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