Replaying Crysis

[chrisbard]

I just finished Crysis for like 3'd or 4-th time. I thought I'd give it a go and make a movie from the final level. It's a bit crazy because the final level is the most demanding and using fraps to record will slow the game down even more. But after heavy OC I gave it a go and this is how it came out.

YouTube - Crysis 9800 GTX Final Level (Watch in HD !!!)

Watch it in HD and enjoy !

[Samuknow]

What setting did you have it at?

[chrisbard]

1680x1050 all maxed with latest naturalmod no AA.

[Samuknow]

Very nice.

[MUff1N]

Originally Posted by chrisbard

I just finished Crysis for like 3'd or 4-th time. I thought I'd give it a go and make a movie from the final level. It's a bit crazy because the final level is the most demanding and using fraps to record will slow the game down even more. But after heavy OC I gave it a go and this is how it came out.

YouTube - Crysis 9800 GTX Final Level (Watch in HD !!!)

Watch it in HD and enjoy !

I wish I could crank up the graphics to that level but my card just isn't powerful enough to handle it & still give me smooth gameplay on DX10.
The best I can do is Medium & that's with my card OCed.
Forget about running Fraps at the same time recording too as this slows it down to a crawl which becomes unplayable.

Looks like you died a whole bunch of times as you were making that...LOL
That's the cool thing about games though, you can die & just reload & come right back!

Anyways Chris, your card is a very good performer to do that on Fraps while recording.
You must get perfect gameplay FPS with it off.

My next card I want is the GTX275 or 285.
By the time I have the money for it they will have moved on to even newer more powerful cards so the price should be good then in the mid 200+ range.

Before they discontinued my card it was down to $120.
Btw Chris, exactly which make & model GTX 9800 are you using? EVGA?
Link to the specs would be good, gives me an idea on what's needed for that level of gameplay.
The bench below is using drivers v185.85 on W7U (of course) using DX10 on Medium OCed to what you see in GPU-Z.

[Samuknow]

Are we confused today?

[MUff1N]

Originally Posted by Samuknow

Are we confused today?

Yea, looks like huh...
Oh wrong person...oops!
I don't know why Sam came to mind...just did!
I edited the post above so it's now correct...LOL
Not all the way awake on that post & I have a cocktail
mix of drugs in me right now getting over the Flu...

This strain of the flu I caught (from my bothers kids that were visiting) was the nastiest I've had in 10 years!
I had to go to the doctors for meds to get better...they even have me
on Steroids right now it was that bad as I couldn't breath!
I also got a Nebulizor too with Albutoral to help.
For about 5 nights I had to sleep sitting up or I would suffocate.

[Samuknow]

It's all good. I ain't mad at ya. I do hope you feel better.

[chrisbard]

Hey,

My card is a basic Gigabyte nothing fancy but I was lucky because I can OC it like hell. To back my card up with fast data transfer much needed for such games is my adaptec Sata2 raid pciEX ctrler+one separate WS Raptor. You guys have no ideea how important is to have access to 2 separate fast HDD (3 in my case 2xstrip +1 10000rpm) while playing these monster games. (hint, hint)

Btw Sam I am back to Bucharest now nice job and I hope you and yours are ok bud !

Catch ya latter guys.

Chris

[MUff1N]

Originally Posted by chrisbard

Hey,

My card is a basic Gigabyte nothing fancy but I was lucky because I can OC it like hell. To back my card up with fast data transfer much needed for such games is my adaptec Sata2 raid pciEX ctrler+one separate WS Raptor. You guys have no ideea how important is to have access to 2 separate fast HDD (3 in my case 2xstrip +1 10000rpm) while playing these monster games. (hint, hint)

Btw Sam I am back to Bucharest now nice job and I hope you and yours are ok bud !

Catch ya latter guys.

Chris

Yea, sometimes you'll get a card (Just like CPU's & mobo's) that will perform better than usual & OC much higher than
an identical one of the same make & model! Looks like you got one of those as those are outstanding OC speeds & still remain stable!
The best OC I can get is 26% on the GPU & 30% on the memory.
Of course mine is also the older G80 & yours is the newer G92. Even still that's a Great OC on that graphics card & the game looks amazing at those settings!!!

Oh Yea I know how important really fast HD access times are! Makes a World if difference with everything but games more than any.
That's why I have my Pagefile on another partition on the front part of my second drive to help out with that to give me faster access times between the two drives!

I'd love to have 2 really fast SSDS HD in RAID for gaming...that would be great!
It's on my wish list just like everything else I'd like to get on my next upgrade.

[ThunderRd]

Originally Posted by chrisbard

You guys have no ideea how important is to have access to 2 separate fast HDD (3 in my case 2xstrip +1 10000rpm) while playing these monster games. (hint, hint)

I keep my game directories on a RAID0 array with two Raptors. This way they are separate from the OS drive.

However, I may be wrong, but I have been under the understanding that although it helps heaps on speeding up the loading of levels[and that it does extremely well], the actual play speed of the game isn't affected as dramatically vs non-RAID setups.

Am I wrong?

[chrisbard]

With a highend PC that for some reasons lacks a correct hdd setup (so it only has one HDD 7200 rpm (or even 1x10000 rpm) not feeding the data fast enough leads to low fps in critical gaming moments. To make this clear for those that don't know how this works (not you RD) I will take crysis as example and the level where you are driving the hoovercraft. Extremely demanding level because youre no longer on foot and you are traveling fast thru the landscape thus making the above PC struggle. While say your GFX card can cope with this at 25 fps the lack of speed in feeding data because you only have 1 hdd makes the game unplayable in that level with high details on. You get 25 fps then 20 then 15 then maybe 10 then 25 again. Lol I just remembered nero buffer going down, if you guys know what I mean, when uninteligent optical units were destroying cd after cd after cd lol.

Because we're talking about this I will also tell you guys that my PC isn't using pagefile at all. I have 4 GB RAM and while I have some friends that have trouble and they have to have some PF I don't have any issues. Ocasionally while playing GTA the game will be minimized and a low memory warning will appear (when I forget to close most of the apps that I dont need running) I close some apps and ignore the warning maximize the game and keep playing it happy.

So

1. OS is on RAID
2. Demanding game is on Raptor
3. Pagefile inexistent
4. Fraps always recording on the HDD that doesn't have the game that I record on it.

[MUff1N]

I've talked with programmers that have told me it doesn't matter how much RAM you have installed as "Windows" NEEDS the Pagefile by design.
So it's better to have pagefile for file swapping than no pagefile at all!
Since these guys know WAY MORE than I do about software & operating systems I would tend to believe them as they aren't getting anything out of it by lying to me. They said there is hard proof to back this up & I don't know enough about it to think otherwise.

I've tried it both ways & I think it is smoother with pagefile enabled providing it's on a separate HD partition & not on the same one as the OS.
That way you have two separate streams of data coming in from 2 sources rather than have the HD data reader arm jumping back & forth like crazy trying to get the file swap to you while keeping the game & system going.

But hey, bottom line is if it works for you & your system great, go with it!

[chrisbard]

PF is designed especially for MT. When you have low priority stuff in background and you want to play a game using the PF will only slow everything down.

"The operating system uses a small amount of space in the pagefile even when RAM is not exhausted, but in general terms, this is not particularly important. The main thing is that space in the page file will be allocated to virtual memory pages for which no corresponding RAM page is available.

If the minimum and maximum pagefile sizes are not the same, the pagefile will initially be allocated to the minimum size, then expanded as more space is needed, up to the maximum. On most systems, this will mean that the pagefile will be fragmented, possibly in widely separated parts of the disk. If there is a significant amount of paging activity, this can lead to unnecessary performance degradation. Setting the minimum and maximum the same size may still result in a fragmented pagefile, but does reduce the likelihood of serious fragmentation.

However, if there is significant paging activity, the best way to improve performance is to add more RAM. This will be far more effective in improving performance than any optimization of the pagefile location or size.

If your PC is properly configured having no PF at all will make everything startup faster (ex: Corel, Office, Games) I know this for a fact after testing PF on more than 50 PC's with XP, Vista 32, Vista64.

PS. When it comes to talking with programmers I have spoke with some of my friends that are into programming and usually they have no clue about how things are beyond their programs.

[MUff1N]

OK you got my attention again Chris & I'm going to give this a go & see what happens in my games as I've got 4 gigs installed.
If the 32bit OS doesn't like it because it's running out of memory I guess I'll have to swith over to the 64 bit system.

I got what I got right now & I WANT as much performance as I can get out of this system with it's current HW config...

If you got any Tips for me I'd appreciate your time Chris!

[MUff1N]

Originally Posted by MUff1N

OK you got my attention again Chris & I'm going to give this a go & see what happens in my games as I've got 4 gigs installed.
If the 32bit OS doesn't like it because it's running out of memory I guess I'll have to swith over to the 64 bit system.

I got what I got right now & I WANT as much performance as I can get out of this system with it's current HW config...

If you got any Tips for me I'd appreciate your time Chris!

Well, I did my experiment & got some interesting results with Pagefile set to 0...

1. In Crysis some level textures wouldn't load & were GONE & Missing in the game!
You'd go to go into a room & fall through the floor down to the Ocean below the ship!
Yea it was weird...
But once I re-enabled Pagefile it was back to normal again & the levels loaded 3 times faster...

2. Performance of loading times was significantly Decreased by about 30%!
Slowed WAY DOWN with PF disabled!

Maybe its because I'm running the 32bit OS or Windows 7 but I don't think that's all there is to do with it.

So for me on "My" system disabling Pagefile really made my gaming performance go down drastically & had really bad effects on the game as well...

[chrisbard]

I am sorry I can't tell you much about your problems. For example a similar setup with mine;

Q6600 @ 3,5
4 GB
Intel mobo
onboard sata raid with 2xsata2 seagates+1 sata seagate
better gfx card with a lot more memory nv 260
same creative X-Fi gamer

either crashes with bsod after gaming for 2 min or gives some other error. I also have a friend that has a rig with a better CPU, 8 GB, nv 280, but no raid and he experienced some problems aswell.

I didn't have enough time to figure out whats wrong in their cases. I honestly don't know why they have this problems. On my PC I have Vista 32 and 64. Both are running with PF disabled. I finished Crysis, Crysis Warhead, playing a lot of Crysis Wars (all maxed no AA), Far Cry2, Wolverine, CSS, GTA4, BF2 and rarely after a time of perfect gameplay the game (only GTA4, Crysis, BF2) minimizes itself and I have a window warning of low vm, I simply close steam, avg, yahoo and whatever other program I left running and alt+tab back in game no issues and until I exit the game the error will not show again. This is what happens in Vista 32. In Vista 64 I only get this when playing GTA4 no other game does it.

In Vista 64 I have to say the gaming is a lot smoother; more constant FPS, so I suggest Vista 64 for gaming.

One thing that comes to mind is the fact that I have a pciEX Adaptec Raid card but I am not sure if that's the reason why I don't have problems while running everything on no PF.

You have to make sure your disks are not badly fragmented tho. The experience of running games and everything else so fast is so good that I think if you have a good PC you should play with the settings and stuff untill you get smooth gameplay (with or without PF enabled)

GL

[MUff1N]

I am a defrag NUT!!!
I do this no less than 3 times a day to keep everything nice & speedy!

I'll go out for a cig & start PerfectDisk & come back to a defragged partition so I never have more than 2% fragmentation at any one time...usually less.