[Guru3d] Crysis DX11 Benchmarks (AMD vs Nvidia)

[Firestorm007]

Ridiculous. AMD and Nvidia are *the* reason that game development advances quickly for PC - or else we really would have just console clones and no progress at all.


It is their loss. i wanted to review it, but i am too late to the game as 2 major sites covered it thoroughly. So i am reviewing Crysis 2 for 3D Vision - which now works with DX11 with the latest beta 275.50 drivers as confirmed by THG early this morning

Crysis 2 is an decent shooter that has sold well and is only now being discounted a bit; it is easily as good as Crysis and perhaps better as a game - the visuals in the second one are definitely much better. i'll let you know about 3D Vision in a bit; it is said to be outstanding.

I totally agree with you. So what if Nvidia threw them a few bucks. If they hadn't, we probably would've been stuck with DX9. I look at it this way; sure Nvidia outperforms AMD in this game...That's not a deal breaker for me by any means, and like I said AMD will catch up with their drivers. I'm just glad that the game looks a lot better now, and if Nvidia helped with that; that's just fine with me.

 

[apoppin]

I totally agree with you. So what if Nvidia threw them a few bucks. If they hadn't, we probably would've been stuck with DX9. I look at it this way; sure Nvidia outperforms AMD in this game...That's not a deal breaker for me by any means, and like I said AMD will catch up with their drivers. I'm just glad that the game looks a lot better now, and if Nvidia helped with that; that's just fine with me.

We actually don't know if ANY money changed hands between Nvidia and CryTek. From what i have researched. that was just a vicious rumor started by KitGuru based on a "shrug" from a member of the original Crysis (1) team year ago that was also speculated on then. Then a lot of other sites jumped on it as if it were true and a "$2 million" figure was borne.

Crysis 2 already made most of its money and it is good to see dedication to improving the PC game far beyond the consoles after release. The latest beta drivers fix the 3D Vision issues with DX11 and the game is spectacular looking in 3D.

Same thing happened with Far Cry and Crysis. The games did not ship looking spectacular - the 64-bit pathway took a couple of years to patch into FarCry unless i am mistaken. i am glad waited to play Crysis 2 in DX11 and you can now get it for $40 regularly and it is sometimes on sale.

i understand it also looks great in HD3D and i am about to set it up on a HD 6970/6990 for a performance comparison at 2560x1600 and 5760x1080.

 

[AnandThenMan]

Nvidia didn't assist CryTek out of the goodness of their heart, there was obviously compensation involved, so I'm not sure exactly what your point is? If Nvidia gave CryTek a bunch of hardware and man hours instead of cash, does that change anything? CryTek would have used the cash to buy hardware and hire people anyway, it amounts to the same thing.

 

[RussianSensation]

Nvidia was the one to pay them $2M for DX11 features, it's not a surprise the game runs better on Nvidia.

No way. ()

Did anyone read this article?

http://www.hardware.fr/articles/838-5/plus-details.html

When running in DX9 at the same 1920x1080 resolution, the 6950 and 560 Ti produced almost identical performance.

Once Parallax Occlusion Mapping and Tessellation are enabled in DX11, the GTX560 Ti experiences a 20% drop in performance while there is 38% drop in performance for the HD6950.

Upon closer investigation, the vast majority of the performance drop actually comes from Tessellation. This can be arrived at by manually forcing Tessellation factor = 0.

Take a look at what happens:

Now normally, we'd say OK, no problem. NV's Fermi architecture is superior in Tessellation performance - no biggie, but.....then things get interesting.

In one scene, there is an extreme level of Tessellation used on a sidewalk border but it has no difference in visual quality, yet is accompanied by an enormous performance hit.

DX11 - no Tessellation

DX 11 - with Tessellation and POM

DX 11 - Tessellation Wireframe - Extreme level of Tessellation geometry on the sidewalk/border

In an more absurd scenario, an entire level of water is Tessellated in a scene where there is no water at all!

DX11 - city scenery

DX11 - same scene with Rendering Wireframe showing Tessellation of Sea Water!

This "questionable" use of "random" Tessellation results in all Radeon cards taking a 2x or more performance hit by enabling the settings for POM + Tessellation in Ultra mode in DX11:

You can see that when they lower the Tessellation factor in AMD Control Panel, there is a huge performance increase - this is rather predictable:

So basically NV paid Crytek to slap on extreme levels of Tessellation, and in some instances on scenes that don't even need Tessellation to make their cards look better.

NV $$$ = +20% performance hit on AMD cards as a result of clever Tessellation techniques.....

 

[AnandThenMan]

So basically NV paid Crytek to slap on extreme levels of Tessellation, and in some instances on scenes that don't even need Tessellation to make their cards look better.

Does this come as a surprise to anyone at this point? Remember Batman: AA? Nvidia seems to be as interested in crippling their competitors cards as they are with improving the visuals.

But I think we'll see the same thing as with Crysis 1, AMD will optimize and all the cheating will be for nothing.

 

[RussianSensation]

Does this come as a surprise to anyone at this point? Remember Batman: AA? Nvidia seems to be as interested in crippling their competitors cards as they are with improving the visuals.

But I think we'll see the same thing as with Crysis 1, AMD will optimize and all the cheating will be for nothing.

But not only that, they are even crippling their own cards by throwing Tessellation at these levels. They basically pulled a Unigine Heaven demo style BS in a real game, 'forcing' people to get a GTX580 when the same game could have ran at least 20% faster and would have been fine with a GTX560 Ti.

 

[AnandThenMan]

But not only that, they are even crippling their own cards by throwing Tessellation at these levels.

That part is unfortunate, especially for people with lower end cards. I really wish Nvidia would stop with this nonsense, who at NV actually thinks this helps them in the long run? It just makes them look stupid and hurts PC gaming in general.

 

[amenx]

^ Conspiracy theories, wild conjecture. DX11 performance has been known to favor Nvidia in other games/benches too where there has been no $2 million "paid" to developers.

Unigine Heaven 2.1 Nvidia leading AMD...

http://www.legitreviews.com/article/1488/15/

I guess its kind of similar to butt-hurt AMD CPU owners vs "Intel compiled" benches.

 

[Skurge]

No way. ()

Did anyone read this article?

http://www.hardware.fr/articles/838-5/plus-details.html

When running in DX9 at the same 1920x1080 resolution, the 6950 and 560 Ti produced almost identical performance.

Once Parallax Occlusion Mapping and Tessellation are enabled in DX11, the GTX560 Ti experiences a 20% drop in performance while there is 38% drop in performance for the HD6950.

Upon closer investigation, the vast majority of the performance drop actually comes from Tessellation. This can be arrived at by manually forcing Tessellation factor = 0.

Take a look at what happens:

Now normally, we'd say OK, no problem. NV's Fermi architecture is superior in Tessellation performance - no biggie, but.....then things get interesting.

In one scene, there is an extreme level of Tessellation used on a sidewalk border but it has no difference in visual quality, yet is accompanied by an enormous performance hit.

DX11 - no Tessellation

DX 11 - with Tessellation and POM

DX 11 - Tessellation Wireframe - Extreme level of Tessellation geometry on the sidewalk/border

In an more absurd scenario, an entire level of water is Tessellated in a scene where there is no water at all!

DX11 - city scenery

DX11 - same scene with Rendering Wireframe showing Tessellation of Sea Water!

This "questionable" use of "random" Tessellation results in all Radeon cards taking a 2x or more performance hit by enabling the settings for POM + Tessellation in Ultra mode in DX11:

You can see that when they lower the Tessellation factor in AMD Control Panel, there is a huge performance increase - this is rather predictable:

So basically NV paid Crytek to slap on extreme levels of Tessellation, and in some instances on scenes that don't even need Tessellation to make their cards look better.

NV $$$ = +20% performance hit on AMD cards as a result of clever Tessellation techniques.....

So turning down tessellation in the AMD control panel would likely give you higher performance with with the same visuals as the nvidia cards? That quite funny.

On a related note, I'm defiantly not getting this game anymore that's for sure. Was excited that they actually did some work on the game to make it look better, but if this is what they did on top of that, then I'm not buying it, no matter how good it looks. Same thing if AMD did something similar.

 

[Skurge]

^ Conspiracy theories, wild conjecture. DX11 performance has been known to favor Nvidia in other games/benches too where there has been no $2 million "paid" to developers.

Unigine Heaven 2.1 Nvidia leading AMD...

http://www.legitreviews.com/article/1488/15/

I guess its kind of similar to butt-hurt AMD CPU owners vs "Intel compiled" benches.

It isn't a question of DX11 games running faster on nVidia cards. It just depends on how the game was coded. shader heavy games usually favor AMD DX11 or not.

The EGO engine DX11 but AMD leads nvidia in that game, BC2 is dx11, but nV leads AMD there, shogun 2 is DX11 but AMD leads nvidia there, civ5 is dx11 but nV lead AMD there. I could go on and on. Each arch has its strengths and if the game or settings utilize those strengths than that card will perform better.

 

[notty22]

I don't understand why you think that is a story, the facts are there are many visual improvements in Crysis 2. You could do the same with Dirt 2 or Dirt 3, easily show there is a 25% performance hit on AMD cards between dx9 or dx11 and then grab a bunch of stills showing exactly no differences.

 

[AtenRa]

Something is wrong with 69xx series cards, either the driver is not optimized as of yet to actually take advantage of the second tesselator engine, or the Stream Processors for each Tessellator engine are not enough to compute all the extra vertices produced by the Tessellation effect.

I would say that the driver needs a lot of work in order to fully utilize the full potential of the dual core design (Dual Tess Engines) of Cayman.

In the beginning I was under the impression that 69xx series had the same Tesselation engine as of 6870 but double the count. Now im starting to believe that there is a possibility that 69xx don’t use the same Tess engine as Barts and in fact it could be a smaller design (Less capable).

Does anyone know if both Tessellation engines (Edit: Between Barts and Cayman) are the same or not??

 

[Skurge]

Something is wrong with 69xx series cards, either the driver is not optimized as of yet to actually take advantage of the second tesselator engine, or the Stream Processors for each Tessellator engine are not enough to compute all the extra vertices produced by the Tessellation effect.

I would say that the driver needs a lot of work in order to fully utilize the full potential of the dual core design (Dual Tess Engines) of Cayman.

In the beginning I was under the impression that 69xx series had the same Tesselation engine as of 6870 but double the count. Now im starting to believe that there is a possibility that 69xx don’t use the same Tess engine as Barts and in fact it could be a smaller design (Less capable).

Does anyone know if both Tessellation engines (Edit: Between Barts and Cayman) are the same or not??

According to the anadtech article, it has the same tesselator as barts, but 1 in each graphics engine. So it has 2 of them.

 

[Mr. President]

So turning down tessellation in the AMD control panel would likely give you higher performance with with the same visuals as the nvidia cards? That quite funny.

Unfortunately, no. Turning down the tessellation factor in the AMD control panel just ruins the effect of having tessellation.

Here's the difference between 64x and default from another forum:

Edit:

On a related note, I'm defiantly not getting this game anymore that's for sure. Was excited that they actually did some work on the game to make it look better, but if this is what they did on top of that, then I'm not buying it, no matter how good it looks. Same thing if AMD did something similar.

To be honest, most of the response to this 'scandal' is purely reactionary. While there's an occasional scene that may be wasting resources it's far from the rule, and the game runs perfectly well maxed out at 720p on my HD6850. Accusing Crytek and nVidia of corruption (or whatever) is just silly when the fact is simply that nVidia has stronger tessellation support than AMD.

 

[Skurge]

Unfortunately, no. Turning down the tessellation factor in the AMD control panel just ruins the effect of having tessellation.

Here's the difference between 64x and default from another forum:

Edit:



To be honest, most of the response to this 'scandal' is purely reactionary. While there's an occasional scene that may be wasting resources it's far from the rule, and the game runs perfectly well maxed out at 720p on my HD6850. Accusing Crytek and nVidia of corruption (or whatever) is just silly when the fact is simply that nVidia has stronger tessellation support than AMD.

I imagine the top image is default cause it looks much worse. Might as well turn off tesselation altogether then.

I'll have to agree with your second point.

 

[Silverforce11]

This is so last gen stuff.. in a few months it's all about 28nm GPUs.

ps. Crysis 2 has horrid gameplay. Much worser than Crysis. Didn't even sell well for the PC.

edit: LOL @ NV for putting in the entire ocean of tessellation.. on a land map. They sure got their $2M worth.

 

[Mr. President]

I imagine the top image is default cause it looks much worse. Might as well turn off tesselation altogether then.

It's not the default setting for AMD, but the top image is rather running with the Catalyst driver overriding the game's tessellation settings. It's not a default setting but it's something that you can enable in the driver in the same way that you can force AA and AF. It's also set to 64x which is supposed to be the 'best' setting. It's also completely borked.

The bottom image is without interference from the driver and looks like the game designers intended the game to look with tessellation. It's how the game looks at default on AMD hardware but is also difficult for the hardware to handle.

 

[Mr. President]

edit: LOL @ NV for putting in the entire ocean of tessellation.. on a land map. They sure got their $2M worth.

nVidia likely have little to do with it. Cryengine has always worked the way that landmasses get placed on an ocean and (as far as I know) the ocean just shines through in that one place. It's happened before in their games and it's probably just a clipping error due to the original level design. It just wasn't an issue before because the ocean wasn't tessellated.

 

[96Firebird]

nVidia likely have little to do with it. Cryengine has always worked the way that landmasses get placed on an ocean and (as far as I know) the ocean just shines through in that one place. It's happened before in their games and it's probably just a clipping error due to the original level design. It just wasn't an issue before because the ocean wasn't tessellated.

Hey! Stick with the status quo here, Nvidia is evil and is a money-hungry beast that loves to pay off businesses.

:awe:

Take time to read your posts, and then compare them with the better ones here. Some members here have taken the time to research and present facts, linking to sites/reviews, and even embedding pics or graphs. And at the very least, there are those who try not to be flamebait-y. Looking at those posts and the effort and analysis placed on them (whether pro-AMD or pro-NV), doesn't it make you feel inadequate that all you can "contribute" are derails and flamebaits?

It wasn't enough for you to insult the entire "red team" barely two days ago of being butt-hurt, and now you go ahead insulting the entire forum of having unfavorable status quo regarding nVidia?

Do you actually plan to contribute something useful to this thread eventually, or do you plan to just go ahead raging for your team?

The status quo seems to be members who insist on derailing threads, inciting flame wars, and/or professing their innocence as they cast stones to the [Red|Green] sinners.

Stop it.

Moderator jvroig

 

[Rifter]

Ridiculous. AMD and Nvidia are *the* reason that game development advances quickly for PC - or else we really would have just console clones and no progress at all.


It is their loss. i wanted to review it, but i am too late to the game as 2 major sites covered it thoroughly. So i am reviewing Crysis 2 for 3D Vision - which now works with DX11 with the latest beta 275.50 drivers as confirmed by THG early this morning

Crysis 2 is an decent shooter that has sold well and is only now being discounted a bit; it is easily as good as Crysis and perhaps better as a game - the visuals in the second one are definitely much better. i'll let you know about 3D Vision in a bit; it is said to be outstanding.

100% this.

Who cares who is throwing money at who when in the end it means us gamers get better looking games.

Sure it sucks when its not your current GPU maker doing the money throwing but thats life, if you really like crysis 2 that much buy a 580, or if you like a game AMD contributed to more then buy a 6970.

 

[SirPauly]

That was a nice investigation by HardwareFR.

 

[Saico]

This is Batman AA all over again. "Change your vga vendor ID and get a free perfomance boost". Well I doubt they haven't fixed that exploit in Crysis 2.

 

[SirPauly]

This is so last gen stuff.. in a few months it's all about 28nm GPUs.

ps. Crysis 2 has horrid gameplay. Much worser than Crysis. Didn't even sell well for the PC.

edit: LOL @ NV for putting in the entire ocean of tessellation.. on a land map. They sure got their $2M worth.

Hopefully, their 28nm chips can handle tessellation more efficiently and the need of downplaying, finger pointing, rumor mongering, going behind the applications back are not needed.

 

[RussianSensation]

I don't understand why you think that is a story, the facts are there are many visual improvements in Crysis 2. You could do the same with Dirt 2 or Dirt 3, easily show there is a 25% performance hit on AMD cards between dx9 or dx11 and then grab a bunch of stills showing exactly no differences.

So you are saying it's reasonable to artificially reduce performance of both NV and AMD cards by wildly throwing Tessellation onto scenes for no visual improvements because other games have done it? The Tessellation used in Dirt 2 is minimal (it's only used on water ripples as far as I am aware). I play Dirt 2 all the time and the Tessellation use in that game is laughable. It's not worth even 2% performance hit.

This sure is a good way to sell more videocards when most games are just console ports.

Accusing Crytek and nVidia of corruption (or whatever) is just silly when the fact is simply that nVidia has stronger tessellation support than AMD.

NV cards do perform better since they have superior Tessellation performance, but that's not an excuse to use Tessellation inefficiently.

So turning down tessellation in the AMD control panel would likely give you higher performance with with the same visuals as the nvidia cards? That quite funny.

Their analysis indicates that going to 32x or sometimes even 16x samples is OK (for walls they said going below 32x is noticeable already). But beyond that there is a very noticeable decrease in visual quality. My point is, I have no problems with using Tessellation when it improves visual quality. For example, imo Normal Tessellation in Unigine Heaven is much preferable to Extreme Tessellation, both visually (I think extreme looks too artificial) and as a trade-off in performance.

 

[apoppin]

So you are saying it's reasonable to artificially reduce performance of both NV and AMD cards by wildly throwing Tessellation onto scenes for no visual improvements? It's like they selectively threw Tessellation at scenes to reduce performance on purpose to get you to buy a much faster videocard - that sure is a good way to sell more videocards when most games are just console ports. The Tessellation used in Dirt 2 is minimal (it's only used on water ripples as far as I am aware).

NV cards perform better since they have superior Tessellation performance, but that's not an excuse to use Tessellation inefficiently.

I'd like to see some *proof* of that nonsense you just stated as fact. No one cripples their own games on purpose.

http://www.nowgamer.com/features/967965/exclusive_crytek_interview.html

All it shows is that there is further room for improvement in optimizing Crysis 2 as this recent interview indicates:

There are a couple of things we’ve invented that are unique to Crysis 2 and CryEngine. There are things that everybody does, like tessellation, for example. There are features that we’ve been thankfully able to bring back, that were not friendly to consoles.
So we’ve been able to put those back in for the high-end. And a couple of surprises that people won’t have seen anywhere else. And it’s not finished yet – the beauty of DirectX 11 is it’s a door into a renaissance for graphics programming.

DiRT 2 is an awful example of early tessellation; try DiRT 3