Cryostasis Performance Mod

[Xiaopang]

Originally Posted by shaq

You don't think they could have at least allowed a low, medium, high settings for the advanced PhysX? We can configure resolutions, textures, effects etc but nothing for the advanced stuff just on or off.

yeah, actually i'm quite disappointed about the few features you can configure, while the configs allow you to personalize your gaming experience so well. i also thought about using profiles for the physics settings, so yes, i absolutely agree they should have built in a controlling option. at least they could have included seperated control over cloth and fluid rendering. that already has a great impact on the performance

Originally Posted by shaq

Crysis is still too slow for my liking even with SLI. I think GT300 SLI will be enough to run it right. And right after that Crysis 2 will be out with DX11 effects and then we will be waiting for GT400. lol

lol is that already in the making? on second thought it must be. how could they stop with such a successful franchise... so far i only played crysis for a few minutes and i had 30+ fps on max res with everything maxed out, but i heard that performance goes way down when the game shows its icy side. according to what i read, the gtx300 are supposed to have twice as many stream processors, so the performance boost must be tremendous. those should be capable of competing against sli-setups...imagine a sli, or even tripple sli system with those...but i guess you're right. once crysis 2 comes out, it will dwarf that processing power lol

Originally Posted by shaq

There is a benchmark built in that I haven't tried yet, but you should be able to up the particle values and run it. I assume it is the same benchmark that came out last year.

yeah, i have seen the benchmark folder too, but i haven't meddled with it yet. also kind of weak that the devs didn't include direct access to it. far cry 2 does it and that's certainly no disadvantage

Originally Posted by shaq

3D vision basically cuts your FPS in half because it renders everything twice. That's why I said it would be awhile before we could run that with all the effects turned on.

so it is like the shutter effect. guess nvidia just re-labeled it with a fancy name. i wouldn't mind trying it. with my first mod i get 40-70 fps, which would be enough even if cut in half

Originally Posted by shaq

And I mentioned Windows 7 rebalancing because if you have DCS:Blackshark it only uses one core if you run it under XP. But if you use Vista/7 and set the affinity to use all 4 cores it will increase FPS by 50% even though it is not multithreaded. Setting the affinity to all 4 cores in XP doesn't help at all.

i don't know this game, but it certainly is multithreaded, or else it wouldn't be able to utilize more than a single core. xp has a massive limitation in form of a missing descriptor variable that was introduced with vista and that defines how many cpu-cores the system has. there have been quite a few software titles reported that suffered from not being able to recognize more than one core due to this shortcoming. after all, just one more reason not to use an 8 year old operating system on modern hardware. but just to get back to the supposed multithreading-capabilities of windows 7. it is impossible to cut a single thread into small enough portions to spread them among cpu-cores. windows 7 has improved multithreading support. apparently the multithreading performance is much higher than in vista due to optimized thread handling, so may be this also played a role when running blackshark on it.

Originally Posted by shaq

And for some reason I can not turn SLI off for this game in the drivers. I turned it off in Nhancer too and even deleted the profile but SLI stays on. lol If I totally disable SLI it will run on one card but the other one goes into low power 3D and stays there. So if it were calculating PhysX it would slow it down because the memory is at 100MhZ. In the Batman demo you can disable SLI in the profile and it does give a 10FPS boost using 1 card for graphics and 1 for PhysX over using SLI. I guess the drivers are still not mature enough for SLI and PhysX. It must not distribute the load efficiently.

very interesting! thanks for the info on that one. btw, batman demo? i have seen batman files and wondered already, but i haven't looked into it. guess, i was too busy playing the real game lol

Originally Posted by shaq

Any idea why the water cannon will not work? Does it work for you when you lowered the fluidwater number? I will try starting a new game or something. I have played about half way through and only 1 flashback scene ran very badly..14 FPS with the lowered values. Everything else is good so far and you get to see all the bursted pipes and steam they added in the patch.

oh i gotta try it with your lowered values first. i only experienced two states so far: either it worked nicely with advanced physics enabled, or it only pumped out a measly stream of pixel-thin water when i deactivated it.

btw, great video. i missed quite some of those effects, like the water gushing through the open door (no wonder if you try not to drown), or the water coming out of the pipes. the video also showed impressively that the effects still not look very believable on a strong system, i mean, the way the water flooded the room, or the way water fountains are created when something falls into water. also, i never realized that shards of ice fall down when you shoot an enemy. why does that happen anyway? are they frozen? if so, why don't they shatter into a million pieces? (or rather 20000 lol). THAT would have been a cool effect worth having, but no... considering all this, i could have done without all these unrealistically looking effects. shading, caustic, normal and specular mapping were already impressive enough for me.

[shaq]

I reinstalled the game and lowered the res to 1600x900, dropped the water reflections and caustic and left the default physx values and it actually runs pretty well. Reflections and caustic while running at 1080p cut my FPS in half. Re: the values I had before are good for icicles, bullets and the sparks. I didn't notice much of an increase in visual quality with them at default. Water definitely needs to be higher than 200 though. There is so much water at 20,000. It's like a waterfall in a few places. lol I would leave the icicle count at 16 and particles at 300 as well as bullets and sparks with water up as high as you can. I am tempted to put all the settings down and run 1,000,000 water. lol I bet that would be awesome. I imagine there is a limit to the game engine at some point though. I haven't gotten to the water cannon yet but I imagine it won't work when the water count is below a certain number. It wouldn't work at 2000 either.

Have you looked to see if the AI can be adjusted? A lot of places in the game are really easy and I wanted to make it harder. Some of them won't chase you they just keep doing somersaults. lol

Crysis 2 is supposed to be out next year with their new engine: Cryengine 3. It will be for consoles too so hopefully it won't be cut down to the console level. At 1920 res Crysis really starts to slow down...1680 isn't too bad. 1 GT300 might be enough for it...I hope so anyway...but with AA it will slow it down a lot. Especially since it needs a 2GB card for high resolutions and AA.

The new batman demo arkham asylum has breakable objects, steam and cloth physx but no water yet at least. Here it is:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vINH6...eature=related

[Xiaopang]

Originally Posted by shaq

I reinstalled the game and lowered the res to 1600x900, dropped the water reflections and caustic and left the default physx values and it actually runs pretty well. Reflections and caustic while running at 1080p cut my FPS in half.

interesting. i wonder how the performance cuts on your sli-system compare to mine with those settings. it seems that water reflections and caustics seemed to have a bigger impact on your setup, but this might have also been due to the resolution.

as far as your particle values go, i'm just re-installing the game and will check them out. they seem reasonable to me. 1 icicle count is a little bit too few lol, but 16 sounds alright

Originally Posted by shaq

I am tempted to put all the settings down and run 1,000,000 water. lol I bet that would be awesome. I imagine there is a limit to the game engine at some point though.

lol i'll beat you to it and will post a screenshot. i also think that there will be a limit, but it will most likely only be set by the the datatype.

Originally Posted by shaq

Have you looked to see if the AI can be adjusted? A lot of places in the game are really easy and I wanted to make it harder. Some of them won't chase you they just keep doing somersaults. lol

indeed i have, but not very thoroughly, so i wasn't able to dig something up. an AI tweak would certainly be nice. imagine a hundred monsters charging at you and all you have would be your mosin, or even worse, your lock with the chain lol...it would be necrovision all over again

Originally Posted by shaq

Crysis 2 is supposed to be out next year with their new engine: Cryengine 3. It will be for consoles too so hopefully it won't be cut down to the console level.

yeah, i also hope they won't use the console as a reference, but knowing crytech, they certainly won't limit themselves to that. the console versions of crysis were cut down compared to the pc-versions, so i think there is little reason to fear that for crysis 2 suddenly consoles would be the reference hardware.

Originally Posted by shaq

Especially since it needs a 2GB card for high resolutions and AA.

ah damn, i should have opted for that 1792MB card then... too bad that using sli doesn't add to your memory count.

that batman demo looked awesome! THOSE physics look nice and well implemented and not so cheap and unrealistic as in cryostasis. tearable cloth, dynamic paper, destroyable objects...sweet... now why do all icicles in cryostasis shatter the same way? last time i checked, real ones break off in one piece and only break into a few pieces when hitting the ground...if at all...let alone shattering... if the physics in cryostasis looked as believable as those as in batman then most people wouldn't have so many issues, because those physics use a whole less processing power while looking more realistic

[Xiaopang]

alright, i tested the particle settings for water and as i already wrote in my very first post, those are limited to newly started games. you can't just mod them and load a save in the later game, which is a shame. anyway, here are two screenshots:

normal particle settings:




particle count for all particle settings raised by factor of 10:




update: half the particle count for each particle flag




there is little, or even no difference between both pics. it looks like the particle count is capped. in fact, the framerate showed no impact by the values, even though i restarted the game after using them. i assume that the values are capped at 32768, which might be still too low to see no difference to 20,000. using like 300 or 400 made it look like a mix of turned off advanced physics and with the same feature enabled, showing the normal thin water streams with only very few of the "big" water bubbles coming through the door. i guess i'll experiment with other values now. may be lowering the count to 10,000 or even 5,000 would already be enough for no visible difference

[shaq]

You should be able to have a high icicle count but lower particle count if you think that is more realistic. I would leave the particles at least 50 so you can see the ice particles on the baddies. They are frozen but not solid it seems. It would be cool if they shattered though, but I don't think they could walk if they were that cold. lol

I wanted a few of them to chase you and maybe knock you down and stuff but that would require new animations I imagine.

1,000,000 water should fill the whole floor and get up to your waist! LOL

Have you tried the cinematic mod for halk life 2? I just installed it and 64 bit Windows 7 RC and it is great what they did with it.

Batman is nice and I am getting that on release day for sure. I do like the water in Cryostasis though. I believe before the patch that the locker doors didn't even move. I'm glad they made it. It's much more immersive now with the extra effects.

LOL you beat me to the reply. I was hoping the particles could go higher than that. I guess we will be able to max out this game quicker than I thought. Unless it is limited in one of the scripts somewhere.

[Xiaopang]

Originally Posted by shaq

You should be able to have a high icicle count but lower particle count if you think that is more realistic.

oh not at all. i found your value of 16 to be perfect. it looked much more realistic that way. i wished the game would allow for more dynamic icicle shattering = real physics. it's alright that they shatter a lot when you open
an icy door, but if you punch them, they should shatter a lot less due to the pressure that concentrates only on a tiny spot...oh well...

Originally Posted by shaq

I would leave the particles at least 50 so you can see the ice particles on the baddies. They are frozen but not solid it seems. It would be cool if they shattered though, but I don't think they could walk if they were that cold. lol

lol wouldn't it be funnier that way? i'd also vouch for a freezing feature in the game. imagine using the water gun to water the walkway, it would freeze over and the enemy slips and shatters to a million pieces

but to come back to the particle value. the first time i beat the game, i played it unmodified and i didn't even recognize the particles. may be i had advanced physics disabled, but i only saw them for the first time in the video you posted.

Originally Posted by shaq

I wanted a few of them to chase you and maybe knock you down and stuff but that would require new animations I imagine.

why would you ever want them to chase me? what did i ever do to you? lol

actually i think the animations are already sufficient for that. they can walk and run. they take also cover if i remember correctly, so all's good. someone has just to modify the spawn numbers and they should charge automatically.

Originally Posted by shaq

1,000,000 water should fill the whole floor and get up to your waist! LOL

lol not if you're an experienced drinker. don't forget, you play a russian in the game

Originally Posted by shaq

Have you tried the cinematic mod for halk life 2? I just installed it and 64 bit Windows 7 RC and it is great what they did with it.

of course! i'm a huge fan of it! actually, it was that mod that raised my awareness for high-res textures and also my disappointment in the original game, because it didn't contain any. i also think that this mod is one of the few redeeming things about the game that would make people play it even today. i know it did that for me.

is your windows 7 still timebombed, or is there already a patch?
that's the only thing that keeps me from upgrading. i read that it was benched to be quite a notch faster than vista, so it should be great for gaming, especially for such power hogs as cryostasis

Originally Posted by shaq

Batman is nice and I am getting that on release day for sure. I do like the water in Cryostasis though. I believe before the patch that the locker doors didn't even move. I'm glad they made it. It's much more immersive now with the extra effects.

you wanna tell me that you don't have the RC of batman yet?

i do think the water in cryostasis is a two-edged sword. standing in a room with melting ice and seeing the water dripping from the ceiling looks just fantastic. on the other hand, the water of the water gun, or any concentrated stream of water for that matter looks just unrealistic. it's even more obvious in the video that you posted, where you can see how the water shoots in batches through the open hatches. i haven't played the game unpatched so i don't know if they patched the open hatches in, but it is possible, seeing how big the patch is and how many files are being updated. those can't be all scripts. they can't weigh in that heavily.

Originally Posted by shaq

LOL you beat me to the reply. I was hoping the particles could go higher than that. I guess we will be able to max out this game quicker than I thought. Unless it is limited in one of the scripts somewhere.

possible! although variable handling should be hardcoded directly into the executable. that doesn't mean that it's not possible to hack it, but considering how weak the effects look reality-wise, i don't think it would be worth the effort.

[shaq]

Originally Posted by Xiaopang

oh not at all. i found your value of 16 to be perfect. it looked much more realistic that way. i wished the game would allow for more dynamic icicle shattering = real physics. it's alright that they shatter a lot when you open
an icy door, but if you punch them, they should shatter a lot less due to the pressure that concentrates only on a tiny spot...oh well...

I'm sure you could do some scripting and make that happen. lol

Originally Posted by Xiaopang

lol wouldn't it be funnier that way? i'd also vouch for a freezing feature in the game. imagine using the water gun to water the walkway, it would freeze over and the enemy slips and shatters to a million pieces

but to come back to the particle value. the first time i beat the game, i played it unmodified and i didn't even recognize the particles. may be i had advanced physics disabled, but i only saw them for the first time in the video you posted.

How does that water cannon work anyway? If they are already frozen it must be hot water that comes out and melts them. Maybe that is boiling water that makes the sound when you have the water cannon in your hand. lol So it wouldn't freeze the ground unfortunately. I beat the game before the patch came out and it was missing a lot of the effects that were in the benchmark last year. There weren't any blue sparks and a lot less water was in the game. I believe only on the walls and none dripping from the ceiling and none from any of the pipes. Also the locker doors weren't movable and none of the extra cans and barrels. I don't think you could even knock the barrels and shovels off of the wall. So it is much better now than before.

Originally Posted by Xiaopang

actually i think the animations are already sufficient for that. they can walk and run. they take also cover if i remember correctly, so all's good. someone has just to modify the spawn numbers and they should charge automatically.

Each enemy has a different strategy. One of them does somersaults and keeps going for cover. Most of the others chase after you. One of us needs to see if we can add more enemies at least to add more tension to the game. It should be definitely possible to decrease the players health to make it harder and maybe less damage per shot.

Originally Posted by Xiaopang

of course! i'm a huge fan of it! actually, it was that mod that raised my awareness for high-res textures and also my disappointment in the original game, because it didn't contain any. i also think that this mod is one of the few redeeming things about the game that would make people play it even today. i know it did that for me.

is your windows 7 still timebombed, or is there already a patch?
that's the only thing that keeps me from upgrading. i read that it was benched to be quite a notch faster than vista, so it should be great for gaming, especially for such power hogs as cryostasis

Did you get CM10? I downloaded all 10+GB of it the last two days. lol There is a beta3 patch on top of the 9GB base file. I don't see why you need 64-bit Windows though as I only see it use up to 450MB so far. I already preordered it for $50 so I just use the RC. I got it since I only have XP and Windows 7 has DX10 and 11 so I had to get it. And $50 is crazy cheap for an OS.

Originally Posted by Xiaopang

you wanna tell me that you don't have the RC of batman yet?

i do think the water in cryostasis is a two-edged sword. standing in a room with melting ice and seeing the water dripping from the ceiling looks just fantastic. on the other hand, the water of the water gun, or any concentrated stream of water for that matter looks just unrealistic. it's even more obvious in the video that you posted, where you can see how the water shoots in batches through the open hatches. i haven't played the game unpatched so i don't know if they patched the open hatches in, but it is possible, seeing how big the patch is and how many files are being updated. those can't be all scripts. they can't weigh in that heavily.

There is an RC of Batman? Where? Where? It's still a month away, but Wolfenstein will be out next week. I have to get that one. And don't get me started on next year. About 20-30 really good games are scheduled to come out. lol It will be almost as good as 2004 was for gaming.

Originally Posted by Xiaopang

possible! although variable handling should be hardcoded directly into the executable. that doesn't mean that it's not possible to hack it, but considering how weak the effects look reality-wise, i don't think it would be worth the effort.

I actually like the water though. Have you tried it at 20,000 through the whole game? I am halfway through and I am liking it. There may be a hard limit to the overall number of particle effects and it could be determined by the engine itself. Did you try lowering everything else before you upped the water value? It might make a difference.

[Xiaopang]

Originally Posted by shaq

How does that water cannon work anyway? If they are already frozen it must be hot water that comes out and melts them. Maybe that is boiling water that makes the sound when you have the water cannon in your hand. lol So it wouldn't freeze the ground unfortunately.

yeah it must be hot water and it's a very powerful weapon. i constantly switched to it once i got used to the low range. i also thought it would shoot cold water and found that rather odd, considering that all the enemies crave the cold, but then someone actually wrote it was hot... that makes sense, since you can also see steam rise up when it's being used. also, since it's sooo cold in there, the water would cool down and freeze quickly you know the outcome of that famous experiment where you put equal amounts of boiling water and ice together? what will happen?

Originally Posted by shaq

I beat the game before the patch came out and it was missing a lot of the effects that were in the benchmark last year. There weren't any blue sparks and a lot less water was in the game. I believe only on the walls and none dripping from the ceiling and none from any of the pipes. Also the locker doors weren't movable and none of the extra cans and barrels. I don't think you could even knock the barrels and shovels off of the wall. So it is much better now than before.

wow, how limited. great patch then!

Originally Posted by shaq

One of us needs to see if we can add more enemies at least to add more tension to the game. It should be definitely possible to decrease the players health to make it harder and maybe less damage per shot.

i think the player's health is fine. meddling with that might also throw the game off balance in sections that are designed that you barely make it through alive. for example the outside areas, where your health can drop to zero quickly. i also think that the power of the shots are fine. after all it takes 3 bullets to even a simple servant down. just upping the numbers of enemies should be enough to keep the game interesting. the more important question is, whether or not the enemies could deal with the cramped space if suddenly like 5 or more would gang up on the player. they might get stuck

Originally Posted by shaq

Did you get CM10? I downloaded all 10+GB of it the last two days. lol There is a beta3 patch on top of the 9GB base file.

oh no. somehow i never had the urge to mess with it. i'm not much of a mod fan unless it comes to the cinematic mod.

Originally Posted by shaq

I don't see why you need 64-bit Windows though as I only see it use up to 450MB so far. I already preordered it for $50 so I just use the RC. I got it since I only have XP and Windows 7 has DX10 and 11 so I had to get it. And $50 is crazy cheap for an OS.

yeah, that is really cheap. may be even the cheapest windows there ever was (and most likely will be). as for 64bit, ram consumption has little to do with that. the memory allocation limitation is limited to single applications or services. windows itself uses dozens, with explorer being the biggest. yet, it rarely gets over 200MB, so there is enough headroom for that. 64 bit operating systems have other strengths, e.g. you can utilize the full power of your 64bit cpu, meaning that windows can access additional hardware supported features, instead of emulating those through software, or not being able to utilize them at all. using a 32bit OS on a 64bit cpu forces it into 32bit mode and making it deactive its 64bit enhancements. it's like driving a car. using 32bit would equal driving in town. you'd disable the 4th and 5th gear, because you can't drive that fast anyway (in this case technology limits your speed and not the law lol). 64bit would be driving on a highway which would allow you to use your full potential and full speed. other important features are practically getting rid of the limitation of memory paging, because each page can now be up to 18TB in size, while in XP those were limited to 4MB. if you load a game like cryostasis in xp and it eats 1gb of ram, then that gb will be split to 250 pages and handling those is much slower than accessing only 1 big page with all the data in it. but enough for that...microsoft released a many thousand pages thick document that lists all of vistas new features, of which many include performance enhancements for 64bit architecture. no way to give an even slightly comprehensive list here... only consider this: always update, because newer software can usually make the best use of newer hardware

Originally Posted by shaq

There is an RC of Batman? Where? Where? It's still a month away, but Wolfenstein will be out next week. I have to get that one. And don't get me started on next year. About 20-30 really good games are scheduled to come out. lol It will be almost as good as 2004 was for gaming.

just kidding i once saw a video of wolfenstein a year ago and it looked only merely better than return to castle wolfenstein. i hope that was just an early beta and the game gives me a good reason for having a high-end gfx-card

Originally Posted by shaq

I actually like the water though. Have you tried it at 20,000 through the whole game? I am halfway through and I am liking it. There may be a hard limit to the overall number of particle effects and it could be determined by the engine itself. Did you try lowering everything else before you upped the water value? It might make a difference.

oh yes, as i said earlier, i beat the game unmodified first. but i also remember using lower shader settings through half the game. btw, i uploaded another pic with half the particle count (check the post above). the pic looks like there wouldn't be much of a difference, but it looked a lot worse animated. you could clearly see those thin sparks, that are only present when you deactivate advanced physics.

there is a way to modify values in ram. i guess this would be the only way to reliably check for a cap. having to re-start the game after changing the values is just too tedious. the alternative would be to use a level cheat to directly jump into a water-heavy level.

[homes513]

I think your mod affected my game more than it should. It works great of course it boosted my fps by 50. The problem is that i think it took out an item needed to pass a certain part. The part of the game im talking about is when the character is in a mental echo. Its where you in a scuba suit and some mutant drags the character out of the water and cuts it open with an axe. I cant get passed this part because the point where you have to take the axe to kill the guy the axe just disappears. Im not able to pass the game now

[Artas1984]

So this mod strips lots of things to improve the performance. But...

In my experience the only thing, that really puts the frame rates down is shadows. I set my all settings to minimum with shadows disabled, and then set all settings to maximum with shadows also disabled - got almost the same frame rates no matter the AA, effects or resolution!!!

Then i turned on maximum with shadows enabled, and then maximum with shadows disabled - the frames went sky high when no shadows were turned on. I was testing on GTX 280.