Six years later and Crysis still dips below 60 fps in certain spots

[AdamK47]

Decided to play through Crysis again. Not modded! 2560x1600 all settings maxed. 64-bit executable.

There are still locations in the game that for unknown reasons will dip under 60 fps. When this happens I can see that all three of my Titans are using less than 50% GPU and are not boosting (still at 836MHz on all GPUs). All cores on my 4960X are low with the highest physical core hitting just 60%. The second highest at 30%. Granted, the dips aren't much. At the most I've seen it dip to 48 fps. The fact that it does this with plenty of PC power to spare is really confusing.

 

[alcoholbob]

That's because GPU power has increased significantly more than CPU power in the last 6 years. GPU increases are measured in double digits each year, CPU power, particularly for old games that are dual-threaded, only gain single digits or fractionally in terms of IPC on an annual basis. When this is compounded over 6 years, you might have something like a 12% CPU increase but a 230% GPU power increase.

Most of this is AMD's fault in their inability to compete with Intel's R&D, and as a result Intel staggers their product releases over an extended period, adding minor improvements per release, instead if AMD was actually competitive, you might be seeing far more significant CPU gains on an annual basis.

The bottleneck is obvious. Unlike Crysis 2 or 3, which are basically corridor shooters, Crysis 1 is basically open-world in terms of game size and how much of the map is rendered, and heavily relies on IPC for performance.

 

[Maximilian]

Dont think it supports more than 2 cores. Its humped basically.

 

[Majcric]

That's because GPU power has increased significantly more than CPU power in the last 6 years. GPU increases are measured in double digits each year, CPU power, particularly for old games that are dual-threaded, only gain single digits or fractionally in terms of IPC on an annual basis. When this is compounded over 6 years, you might have something like a 12% CPU increase but a 230% GPU power increase.

Most of this is AMD's fault in their inability to compete with Intel's R&D, and as a result Intel staggers their product releases over an extended period, adding minor improvements per release, instead if AMD was actually competitive, you might be seeing far more significant CPU gains on an annual basis.

The bottleneck is obvious. Unlike Crysis 2 or 3, which are basically corridor shooters, Crysis 1 is basically open-world in terms of game size and how much of the map is rendered, and heavily relies on IPC for performance.

Pretty much. But you'd think at the rez he's playing the cpu wouldn't be that much of a bottleneck.

 

[magomago]

That's because GPU power has increased significantly more than CPU power in the last 6 years. GPU increases are measured in double digits each year, CPU power, particularly for old games that are dual-threaded, only gain single digits or fractionally in terms of IPC on an annual basis. When this is compounded over 6 years, you might have something like a 12% CPU increase but a 230% GPU power increase.

Most of this is AMD's fault in their inability to compete with Intel's R&D, and as a result Intel staggers their product releases over an extended period, adding minor improvements per release, instead if AMD was actually competitive, you might be seeing far more significant CPU gains on an annual basis.

The bottleneck is obvious. Unlike Crysis 2 or 3, which are basically corridor shooters, Crysis 1 is basically open-world in terms of game size and how much of the map is rendered, and heavily relies on IPC for performance.

LOL what are you replaying to?

(a) His CPU and GPU aren't maxed out at all. I'm assuming he is logging it at a high frequency to see what is happening
(b) LOL @ spending 1/2 reply blaming AMD for his slowdowns when he has an intel system
(c) Again, he says that he is seeing maybe 60% utiliziation on a single processor and low utilization on his gpus.

Whatever is going on is far more than a question of simply IPC and blaming AMD.


OP: Can you try to force your GPU and/or CPU to operate at a higher frequency rather than let it throttle up and down? Try to use only 1 or 2 Titans? With so many options, and many potential interaction relationships, its tough to pin it down.

Maybe get a program that logs CPU and GPU usage at faster rates (ie. 10Hz) and time align that with your playing experience. Go back and see if some kind of spike or rise in usage occurs at that time period.

Maybe its not related to any of that - maybe something is being loaded from your HDD at that point in time. Lots of potential issues and it ain't easy to sort out

 

[Grooveriding]

Interesting.

Can you tell me any of the save points or areas ? So I can see what happens there on my machine.

 

[Shadowknight]

How's gaming with thips monitor? I'm in the market for an ips in that resolution, but heard there might be problems if the response time is over 6ms.

 

[SPBHM]

the game is also pretty hard on the CPU, and can only use 2 cores... back in the day people didn't notice much because of how slow the GPUs were anyway...

but if you had a higher clocked Haswell it would probably be running a little better.

 

[AdamK47]

Interesting.

Can you tell me any of the save points or areas ? So I can see what happens there on my machine.

The second level with the camp. If you stand in the corner of the camp by the beach and look towards the mountains the framerate will go down a little. If you go on top of the building where the archaeologist is being held (after taking out the tanks) and look towards the mountains it happens again. It only goes down into the 50s, but it's something I can feel.

 

[Grooveriding]

I get the same slowdown. On top of that building with the girl and your contact within it. When I look at the mountain in the middle that looks like it has a lot of jagged outcroppings on it, the system slows down. Also see low-gpu usage.

Weird. Maybe drivers. I am using 331.40

 

[Skott]

Crysis, IMHO, really isn't efficient with pc hardware. If it was then you wouldn't see some of the fps problems people have trying to reach 60fps even with today's hardware. IMHO its something to look at in bench mark testing but its not the ideal game for it either. People keep trying to use it as such though.

 

[BTRY B 529th FA BN]

If you really are using 4x512 GB SSD drives then this is puzzling. I remember when 1 SSD would cure the fps dips due to some map problems.

 

[Carfax83]

The fact that it does this with plenty of PC power to spare is really confusing.

Not really. Crysis only uses one thread for rendering, so you're massively CPU bottlenecked.

It's a legacy of the old days. Modern native DX11 engines have done much to mitigate that problem, but it's still a work in progress.

 

[reallyscrued]

Crysis is not multithreaded.

That's your problem.

Turn off all your cores except 1, put some LN2 on your CPU, OC to 8 ghz, then enjoy stutter free Crysis.


A remade version that takes advantage of multiple processors would be awesome, though I doubt they'd ever actually do that.

 

[BrightCandle]

Most games today have the same problem, they render on one thread and are really CPU limited on SLI/Xfire PCs. If you have a single card today you don't notice but when you get higher end cards in a few years time and play this years games you'll see that its very hard to get a high frame rate out of them and that they mostly use just 2 cores.

Its a sad reality of games development that it is very hard to use more than 2 cores because there isn't an obvious way to split a game up.

 

[AdamK47]

If you really are using 4x512 GB SSD drives then this is puzzling. I remember when 1 SSD would cure the fps dips due to some map problems.

It's actually 8x512GB (4096GB array). Even if I enable precaching it doesn't fix it. It's not level streaming causing the dips. If I stay looking in one direction the framerate will maintain sub 60 fps.

Like some have mentioned, I believe the game just isn't properly written for newer CPUs. Crysis barely uses any of the 4960X. A single core doesn't even get near to be fully utilized.

 

[futurefields]

Slow engine. Nothing to do with your hardware. Lotta games are effected by slow engines, usually console ports though. Batman Arkham City, Bioshock Infinite, Saints row 3/4 etc....

 

[Fallen Kell]

Pretty much. But you'd think at the rez he's playing the cpu wouldn't be that much of a bottleneck.

Except that the original was a HORRIBLE engine. Very poorly optimized. While I am glad that it succeeded and generated the later CryEngine 2 and CryEngine 3, the original guys really did not know what they were doing, or at least learned it on the job.

 

[futurefields]

Horrible engine, programmers who didnt know anything yet created the best looking game of its time.

Rock on, keyboard warrior.

 

[TechBoyJK]

Except that the original was a HORRIBLE engine. Very poorly optimized. While I am glad that it succeeded and generated the later CryEngine 2 and CryEngine 3, the original guys really did not know what they were doing, or at least learned it on the job.

In interviews, the founders say CE1 was their first commercial engine. They were engineers taking their first stab at it.

I mean, if they redid Crysis 1 on CE3+, you know it'd look sick.

 

[TechBoyJK]

It's actually 8x512GB (4096GB array). Even if I enable precaching it doesn't fix it. It's not level streaming causing the dips. If I stay looking in one direction the framerate will maintain sub 60 fps.

Like some have mentioned, I believe the game just isn't properly written for newer CPUs. Crysis barely uses any of the 4960X. A single core doesn't even get near to be fully utilized.

It was overbuilt for hardware of it's time.

They actually did update things to take advantage of newer hardware, but they updated the entire engine, not the game. if the game was made today on today's engine, it'd be much more efficient with resources.

 

[Stringjam]

LOL @ didn't know what they were doing.

It was just the first game to use SSAO (which they invented) and sub-surface scattering. Not to mention full-blown dynamic lighting, including giving us an SDK where we could drop-in real-time at any moment, and adjust lighting and watch the environment interaction in real-time.

Pretty cool stuff for an engine that started life in 2004. There was no other engine even in the same ballpark during that time. What they were able to release in 2007 was groundbreaking.

How many modern games render vegetation that looks like this? There certainly was nothing like it at the time.

 

[Carfax83]

One thing you could do is use the 32 bit exe, as I believe it's more optimized so it should perform better. The 64 bit exe was just tacked on and doesn't really do much other than raise the memory ceiling; which is useless, as the game was never designed with 64 bit in mind so it doesn't even take advantage of it.

 

[reallyscrued]

LOL @ didn't know what they were doing.

It was just the first game to use SSAO (which they invented) and sub-surface scattering. Not to mention full-blown dynamic lighting, including giving us an SDK where we could drop-in real-time at any moment, and adjust lighting and watch the environment interaction in real-time.

Pretty cool stuff for an engine that started life in 2004. There was no other engine even in the same ballpark during that time. What they were able to release in 2007 was groundbreaking.

How many modern games render vegetation that looks like this? There certainly was nothing like it at the time.

Wow, that's a whole lot of useless info there Stringjam. Although I don't agree with "they didn't know what they were doing", they could have been more forward thinking and pushed Physics/Sound processing on other threads to make use of other cores in the future.

Experiment: Use 2 (or more) monitors, keep the game running on one, and CPU/GPU usage graphs on the other. You'll notice that on areas that experience slowdowns, the GPU usage is low while CPU usage shows one core being maxed.


Processing architecture went in a completely different direction after the game was released; no more Ghz wars, but instead it was "lets-slap-as-many-cores-as-possible". Games that pushed the limits of a single core chip will forever be bottlenecked as long as CPUs move in this direction.

 

[kyrax12]

LOL @ didn't know what they were doing.

It was just the first game to use SSAO (which they invented) and sub-surface scattering. Not to mention full-blown dynamic lighting, including giving us an SDK where we could drop-in real-time at any moment, and adjust lighting and watch the environment interaction in real-time.

Pretty cool stuff for an engine that started life in 2004. There was no other engine even in the same ballpark during that time. What they were able to release in 2007 was groundbreaking.

How many modern games render vegetation that looks like this? There certainly was nothing like it at the time.

If you told me that picture was taken IRL, I would have probably believed you.

0.0