Horrible performance with overkill PC

[BloodBath]

Originally Posted by primithras

Hello everyone,

I bought Cryostasis yesterday but I think something is wrong with my copy. I have an overkill game pc that can flawlessly run Crysis and other recent games on high but for some reason I can't juice more then 10 FPS out of Cryostasis?
I'm running the game on 1920*1080 with every setting on high, lowering the settings doesn't help either. Anybody got any ideas, maybe a wrong setting enabled or a damaged copy?

Specs:
*Windows XP SP3
*Phenom II X4 940 @ OC 3,4Ghzx4
*Sapphire HD4870x2
*8GB DDR2 1066Mhz RAM
*Foxconn A7DA-S

I must agree 100%. It's sad too because this game had so much potential.

I have huge issues with mouse control @ 800x600 (my usual game reolution is 1024x76. It is laggy, choppy and was so unsmooth (yes new word I know) I knew it wasn't my PC since I can play any major game out today without the issues I have with this game.

It was SO bad in the beginning I was forced to look at the options menu to see if there were sections that would mitigate my issue. Naturally I went to the video options first and noticed something that surprised me;

- all options were either LOW or OFF except for the following:

- Hardware Physics was ON
- Shader Model Set to 2.0 (even though I have a DX10 card with Shader 4.0 backwards compatibility)
- Dynamic Shadows were set to MEDIUM

WTF? Even in Crysis or other demanding games my settings are by default higher than this. I was looking for ways to increase performance and found that almost all graphics performance settings were ALREADY almost non-existent.

With limited options I started with item 1. on the list.

When I installed the game I noticed something unusual in that after the game installed it installed something non-game related (to me) - nVidia Physics. I thought this was strange but didn't think it would affect the game. I was SO wrong.

Once I turned Hardware Physics OFF mouse control improved dramatically. So much so that I was able to turn on Ansiotropic filtering. As I suspected, turning off this feature DID NOTHING in terms of visual enjoyment/gameplay. All I noticed was that a bunch of moveable cans and waving hanging items disappeared (nothing required for gameplay).

If that was the end of the story I wouldn't be writing here now (well maybe I would if not to tell people to turn OFF Hardware Physics, you're not missing anything except better performance).

I'm a gamer. When I play, I play for hours at a time. Even though turning Physics OFF helped me greatly with my problem, it only lasts so long unfortunately.

When I start the game everything is great. It would appear however, that the longer I play the worse my mouse control gets. Slowly but surely my control worsens after each graphics intense section. It's like every new scene takes on the baggage of the previous scene. A cumulative effect that you can do nothing about, rendering the gameplay experience to sheer frustration.

In short, I wouldn't recommend this game to anyone until a patch is available that addresses the performance issues since I'm convinced they're game related and not hardware or driver related.

I base this opinion on my hardware primarily. I have an average machine (see below) and feel my gameplay experience is probably tipical of many users out there. To you I'd like to say - it's not you it's the game. You, like me, have a PC setup that Cryostasis just doesn't like.

Too bad too. This game has potential.

BloodBath:
Windows XP Pro SP3 (32 bit)
Stock AMD X2 5600 (dual core @2.8 Ghz) CPU
Stock 2GB Dual Channel Crucial DDR2 800 RAM
MSI K9N4 Ultra Socket AM2 motherboard
Stock nVidia geForce 8600 GTS 256MB GPU