Interesting Nvidia Geforce 8800 series video card Image Quality Comparison for Crysis with the latest video card drivers

[pcslookout]

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[thilanliyan]

lol at NVidia...fortunately the performance difference isn't massive.

 

[vhx]

Too bad the link is dead.

 

[pcslookout]

Originally posted by: vhx
Too bad the link is dead.

Actually it works fine for me.

 

[elmer92413]

Took a few clicks for me to get through to the site. Interesting graphical bug. I bet Nvidia tried to improve performance in Crysis by doing that, not realizing that would happen.

 

[Cookie Monster]

Originally posted by: elmer92413
Took a few clicks for me to get through to the site. Interesting graphical bug. I bet Nvidia tried to improve performance in Crysis by doing that, not realizing that would happen.

That could be one of the reasons. "over optimizing".

Or cheating?

You can decide.

 

[n7]

EliteBastards' site always times out or takes two years to load for me
Been an issue for me for literally a year or two...which sucks since they do great reviews.

 

[DrMrLordX]

Originally posted by: n7
EliteBastards' site always times out or takes two years to load for me
Been an issue for me for literally a year or two...which sucks since they do great reviews.

I see what you mean . . . getting the page with charts to load was difficult to say the least.

 

[CrystalBay]

Here is more discussion about the topic

 

[nitromullet]

Originally posted by: Cookie Monster

Originally posted by: elmer92413
Took a few clicks for me to get through to the site. Interesting graphical bug. I bet Nvidia tried to improve performance in Crysis by doing that, not realizing that would happen.

That could be one of the reasons. "over optimizing".

Or cheating?

You can decide.

169.04 is a beta driver... Let them tweak a little. If it makes it into WHQL, especially after this expose, I would consider it cheating though.

On a side note, I wasn't able to reproduce the results that EB had by renaming the executable. I didn't see a difference in fps or visual quality - the reflections in the water looked correct with the executable named Crysis.exe and Crysix.exe... I'm running Crysis in DX9 though, and I don't have everything ticked up to High. Does anyone know which setting(s) in particular would be affected by this? Is this only a DX10 thing?

Edit... In answer to my own question...

I tried it out in DX10, and sure enough I could see the reflections getting stretched when the executable wasn't renamed. It looks pretty bad actually because they stretch and then snap back every half second repeatedly. Performance showed a difference also:

Crysis.exe DX10 1680x1050 all settings High except Shadow quality = Medium and Post Processing quality = Low 4xAA/16xAF: Play Time: 94.17s, Average FPS: 21.24

Crysix.exe DX10 1680x1050 all settings High except Shadow quality = Medium and Post Processing quality = Low 4xAA/16xAF: Play Time: 124.37s, Average FPS: 16.08

Disappointing to say the least. Let's hope this isn't an issue in the WHQL drivers or the ones for the final retail game.

 

[SickBeast]

Geez...Nvidia said in the notes that this driver is to improve Crysis performance. It doesn't bother me if they're 'cheating'...the game still looks great to me, and can actually run OK on my aging 8800GTS.

BTW how did they cheat? The site is down. Is this like the 'Quack 3' debacle?

 

[PepperBreath]

Isn't that the point of those game specific driver optimizations? They "cheat" by turning off features that will slow a game down.

 

[nitromullet]

Originally posted by: PepperBreath
Isn't that the point of those game specific driver optimizations? They "cheat" by turning off features that will slow a game down.

No, that is not the point of optimizations. Direct3D has a specification that the gpu makers must adhere to. Likewise, the game developers have a vision of how the game is supposed to look, and they wrote the game engine to function a certain way to achieve that vision.

The idea of optimizations is to optimize the driver to make the card run at its full potential by increasing the efficiency of the way the card processes the graphical instructions from the game, while remaining within the Direct3D specification and maintaining the artistic vision of the developer. The point is not to secretly reduce the image/effect quality of the game to make the card appear to run faster then it really can.

If Crytek wants to release a game that simply will not run at playable frames at maximum settings on currently available hardware, that is their concern. It is not up to NVIDIA to decide for me which sacrifices to make in image quality to make the game playable. All NVIDIA can do is put out the best card they can, and I'll decide if I want to reduce some of the eye candy to make the game playable or wait until hardware catches up to software.

 

[Cookie Monster]

This is more along the lines of a game bug/glitch.

This is far far from being anywhere close to the quake3 debacle however.

 

[ronnn]

Looks like nivida has fixed the bug, but at a loss of the 7% performance gained for the release reviews.

 

[bryanW1995]

those guys seem very professional. It would have been very easy for them to pull out the flamethrower on the green team, but they just threw the facts out there and waited for the response. I, however, am not bound by impartiality, and I must say that I'm glad those sneaky bastards got caught. Things like this make me glad that I went the 3870 route. Of course, if amd is cheating on 3870 then they're in major trouble!

 

[BFG10K]

Isn't that the point of those game specific driver optimizations? They "cheat" by turning off features that will slow a game down.

LMFAO, no, that isn't what an optimization is. An optimization should pretty much do exactly the same thing as before but faster.

As for this fiasco, I'd chalk it up to a simple driver bug really. The fact that renaming the application fixes it doesn't mean much since both vendors detect and optimize based on executable names. I'm not entirely happy with it myself but that's the nature of the beast these days.