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[Red Hawk]

I think that may be a matter of opinion. You say "ahead of its time" and I say "piss poor optimization". I'm also one of the few who doesn't think it's aged that well in the looks department and has no business being so demanding for what it looks like now. You have to mod it to high heaven to get it to look as good as people claim it looks like.

How about both? It was the first game to try using that level of detail and effects. It wasn't well optimized because that was optimization at that point. ^_^

 

[tidy]

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[BFG10K]

I told you, look in the shipyard. The game is hopelessly CPU bottlenecked.

I've finished the game three times with different hardware, and at no time did I observe any CPU bottleneck. In every low FPS situation that I came across, if I reduced AA or resolution settings, my performance went up dramatically.

Additionally, I carried out numerous tests back in the day, and changing the shader setting clearly showed it's the primary bottleneck, by far.

Dropping from high to low gains 115% (i.e. more than double the performance). The next closest setting is shadows which is about 35%, and the rest are lower than 20%, with many not even reaching double digits.

I can't imagine how you're not seeing this, being on stock Sandy Bridge like me.

Between the frametime graphs you posted and the artifacts you saw in UT3 and Fear 1, I think there's something seriously wrong with your setup.

I looked through numerous windows in Fear 1 and tried numerous the menus in UT3 with variable TrSS/SSAA levels, but I couldn't replicate any of your problems.

You said you had some CPU related tweaks in place too IIRC.

Actually they pretty much all reduce GPU load (e.g. not running SSAO).

EDIT, not even in the shipyard and just look at it, 36fps with a single GTX 780 sitting at 60%, and you can see the problem CPU thread 100%:

Why does that screenshot look like you're flying through the air, and why is there no lighting (e.g. sunlight) being applied to any of the scene?

 

[Dekk]

I am also observing cpu bottleneck in crysis, even with 4,5Ghz 2500k.
First time you can notice it in the village in the Recovery map. And i can confirm that bottleneck appears only when you look in specific direction.Shipyard map is cpu limited most of the time for me, using HD7870 and high settings. I also found that crysis has big problem with performance, when you fight many enemy soldiers at once. When i managed to lure about 15 of them in one place my fps dropped from 50 to 35.Im not sure if its cpu bottleneck situation or some engine limitation.
Crysis is my favourite shooter and a great game, but it could benefit greatly from some multithreading.

 

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[BFG10K]

I'm in a tower, and it's early morning.

How about you post a screenshot in the same place with the same readings before we draw any further conclusions.

The tower is in front of the barrier, but your screenshot is showing you're behind it. Have you knocked it over or something? Because that's the only way your screenshot makes sense.

Here's mine from in the tower (2560x1600, 2xTrSS):

P.S. I have lighting and shadowing being applied to the rocks and to the shack on the beach, where yours seems to be missing.

Also if I drop the resolution to 1920x1200, my performance goes up to about 56 FPS, indicating that even this area causes my Titan to bottleneck to some degree.

PS., I believe I solved the F.E.A.R issue. I think it was actually the game's 'Soft Shadows' which were suppressed whilst using the in-game MSAA options. I disabled that AA when I applied SSAA, so the soft shadows started working. They cause some mighty strange 'effects' if you look at them through glass. I also happened to find a lighting bug in the game at that moment, which I blamed on SSAA. And as for the UT3 issues, yes, that was just SSAA, SGSSAA was fine. You never told me which flavour of SSAA you were using in that game.

I think you're confusing TrSS with SSAA. Also SSAA won't work without an MSAA component.

It's not a good idea to tinker with nVidia inspector unless you know what the settings do, because you can royally screw things up, including odd issues like you're describing.

In either case I've ran both types in UT3 and I've never seen any menu artifacts.

 

[BFG10K]

I am also observing cpu bottleneck in crysis, even with 4,5Ghz 2500k.
First time you can notice it in the village in the Recovery map. And i can confirm that bottleneck appears only when you look in specific direction..

Sure, there might be rare parts that are CPU bottlenecked to some degree, but it's largely a waste of time worrying about those fringe cases because the overwhelming majority of the game is GPU limited.

 

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[BFG10K]

I'll post some more examples to clarify my situation for you:

I think we've found the problem. Those settings won't be playable on anything, not even quad-SLI with a 5GHz CPU.

If you're not happy with the performance then you're going to have to lower your settings, it's as simple as that.

OGSSAA doesn't need MSAA - that's SGSSAA. I don't use plain Tra-SSAA because it's piss-useless when it comes to covering all transparencies. If you look very closely in games like Oblivion, you'll see that it's highly selective about what it thinks is a transparency, eg, grass might be smooth, but a fern frond right next to it will be aliased. Another great example is UT2004. In ONS-Dawn, all the trees are antialiased, so one might think it's working fine. But then open ONS-Torlan and you will see that it is not applied to the creeper/ground cover foliage on the cliff walls of the central canyon. I also find it to be of limited value because it doesn't touch shader aliasing. That's why I prefer a full scene OGSSAA or SGSSAA.

OGSS doesn't function in DX >= 10, and it doesn't work properly in most games with AA flags. Or to put it another way, I never expected somebody to be trying to force it into modern games like UT3.

I shall remove every Korean on the island and see if I can replicate anything like your 51 fps. EDIT2: made no difference.

You're going about it the wrong way. What you need to do is fire up the game and set everything to low/off (including the resolution), and disable AA.

Then load up your tower screenshot; is the framerate higher than 36FPS? If not I really have no idea what's up with your system. If it's more than 36FPS, start turning up settings until you attain an optimum balance of performance and IQ for your tastes.

 

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[BFG10K]

This is the information I was trying to extract from you, but all you mentioned was disabling SSAO and GPU bottlenecks.

Eh? I made it clear in my benchmark thread that I run custom game settings because full detail levels slideshow any system.

I'm going to assume that you must have 'Objects' cut down, because that is the one that seems to crush the CPU, but even with Objects at Medium, constant 60fps is still an impossible target, and I'm not willing to make such a sacrifice.

Of course; running objects at 'very high' is pretty silly when 'high' looks practically the same but runs much faster.

The thread was always dealing with 'Very High' as per the OP, so I'm not sure why you persisted with the GPU bound theory if you knew full well that it was horrifically CPU bound without some notable sacrifices.

I thought the point of the thread was to discuss the performance dynamics of the game? I mean, the answer your original question: CPU that can actually support 60fps in Crysis [at my settings] is none. Is that what you wanted to hear?

Take your 27.8 FPS above and assume your CPU is turbo'ing to 3.8GHz, and assume you're always 100% CPU bottlenecked. You'd need 2.16x more performance to reach 60 FPS.

3.8 GHz x 2.16x = 8.208 GHz. So that leaves you three choices:

1. an 8.2 GHz liquid nitrogen overclock (if even possible and stable).
2. wait 10-15 years for Intel to reach the equivalent speed through IPC.
3. enjoy your 27.8 FPS.

I personally prefer option 4:

4. use game settings to smartly achieve an optimum balance of IQ and performance, and get on with enjoying the game.
​

And after all of this, the reality is that game is overwhelmingly GPU bound in the vast majority of cases, so your GPU setup will hold you back most of the time, no matter how fast your CPU is.

 

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[BFG10K]

I can't really agree. I had about a years break from Crysis, and the first thing I noticed when I got back into it in 'High' (which is what I always used to play at), was the draw distances of objects and foliage. Next to modern games it was starting to show it's age, and I found the 'Very High' objects to be a very pleasing improvement. And High still doesn't get me 60fps.

Well IQ can definitely be subjective, but for me there's no way any of those extra IQ notches are worth dropping from (e.g. the tower spot) from 51 FPS to 36 FPS, as that performance loss has a far bigger impact.

I tried the same tower area in my shot above but with everything maxed (like your settings), and aside from the awful motion blur, there was very little IQ impact. I'd much sooner raise 2xTrSS to 4xTrSS if I could, as the IQ impact is vastly greater.

Those settings netted me 31 FPS (against 51 FPS). And look, I'm now completely GPU limited on a single Titan. I put the white line to show 99% GPU load within the flat line, which is where I'm looking from the tower in-game:

...and miserable improvements in consumer CPUs these recent years...

I have to agree there. Thanks to no competition from AMD, Intel is basically drip-feeding miniscule IPC improvements to us, and making hotter and hotter processors in the process. At this rate my i5 2500K will keep me going for 5+ years.

 

[Stringjam]

Gah.

I forgot just how much better Silent's High-Res Foliage looks than the vanilla vegetation.

You should fix that.