My Crysis fears confirmed

Why you should NEVER try to buy the best PC possible...

Published on March 15, 2008 By Dabih In FPS

Yes...I've recently bought a new rig, and today attempted to put Crysis on there and play it on the highest settings. Yes, I also failed. Not only did I fail, but I had the humiliating experience of having to switch the settings to LOW before it was playable. Note that this was a completely unpatched version of Crysis, so it will improve once I patched it, but the experience taught me a lesson, as well as giving a healthy blow to my pride. Never attempt to buy the best PC and run the most CPU/GPU intensive game out there on the highest settings.

Most people are going to read this and shake their heads for one of two reasons:

Why bother gaming? Get a real life; OR
How did you expect to run Crysis on full settings unless you are green with large red eyes and come from Mars?

To the first, I can only say, I do what I find fun, and since I find games fun, then please let me enjoy them. To the second, I can only say, I had no idea exactly HOW CPU/GPU intensive the game was. I am running a Q6600 (that is, four cores overclocked to 3.00GHZ), with an 8800GTS and 2GB of Team Xtreme RAM, on a SATA hard drive in Vista, and it never occurred to me that a game out there would not run smoothly on that hardware. I mean, S.T.A.L.K.E.R. played great on the highest settings, as did Bioshock, Oblivion and Neverwinter Nights 2. I just figured Crysis would be another conquest...so I was totally unprepared.

I'm hoping the patches fix some of the issues I've been having, and allow me to admire the beauty of this game on a higher setting. If not, then it'll be a resolution decrease, a texture quality downgrade and reduce the viewing distance to 5 feet...

Well...now I have to get back to doing something productive...just haven't decided on whether it's going to be Stalker, Bioshock or Neverwinter Nights 2...

Enjoy your timezone.

Comments

erathoniel

on Apr 14, 2008

Crysis is a crysis. As is Guitar Hero 3. I maintain that 2.4 GHz is too much to ask for a shiny light show.

Pyrion

on Apr 14, 2008

Haha, two flaws in your assumptions:

1. The 8800GTS. If you want to run Crysis, I suggest at least two 8800GT's in SLI. If you want to run Crysis with everything ramped up to the max, get two 9800GX2's in SLI.

2. The 2GB of RAM in Vista. Go to x64 and get at least four gigs of RAM. You get a good 20% speed boost by running the x64 version of Crysis.

Alfonse

on Apr 14, 2008

it never occurred to me that a game out there would not run smoothly on that hardware.

Before you purchased Crysis, did you read anything that was ever written about the game? Because I doubt you could find a single article that didn't mentioned that the game would bring anything less than the ultimate God-Box with SLI'd GPUs to its knees, and even that couldn't run it at full settings.

I think that the CryTek guys were pretty sloppy to make a game that's basically unplayable for most people. To be frank, the game doesn't look that good at its highest settings, so I imagine most of their performance is being thrown away by crappy code.

However, at the same time, I can't really sympathize with you, because even 5 minutes of research would have told you it would kill your machine.

dragoon

on Apr 14, 2008

I'm using a ATI x 1950 pro, with a 3.6 gig processor, and 2 gig of memory. Yet I am running crysis on Medium settings with only a small touch of slowdown.
In fact, i could run it better, but my Power supply unit is not powerful enough to supply my system with what it needs. As a result i've had to underclock my gfx card to ensure I don't get system lock up and crashes.

I have to say that i'm surprised you can't run the game at roughly similar settings to me. Though i'm not using Vista, so perhaps that may be a factor.
To be honest, I didn't find crysis that great a game. If anything, I found Bioshock to be a much better game.

Still hope you get the game running at a decent setting.

kryo

on Apr 15, 2008

I have to say that i'm surprised you can't run the game at roughly similar settings to me.

I'd say the same. My e6750+8800GT can do it playably on high at 1680x1050, so unless you've got a G80 GTS and a truly enormous display, your results should be similar.

Glitch

on Apr 15, 2008

Seconding the extra GBs of RAM and 64-bit Vista, it really does make a difference.

Another point that's worth making is that Vista and DX10 are slower than XP and DX9. Might be worth finding out how to run the game in DX9 mode, or switching to XP, just to see what that does for your performance.

For the record, I'm running the game in 32-bit XP on 2.2Ghz Core2Duo with 2GB RAM and an NVidia 8600GT, and I run fine at 1280x800 on Medium settings.

Misaniovent

on Apr 15, 2008

I can run it on medium at 1280x800 on a dual core with an 8600M GT. If I had to guess, I'd say you have the resolution pumped way up. Drop it down and try again.

It should run at least decently, and contrary to what people are saying, it is an enjoyable game. Really!

Phazon88

on Apr 15, 2008

I have the game running at all high at 1650x1050 on a E6850 CPU + ATI HD3850. I have a PCI-E 2.0 bus, I wonder if that has been helping somewhat.

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