InCrysis forum is comparing in-demo jpgs with earlier video screens from last year. It is clear that the lighting has
been reduced in the demo. To me, it looks like HDR is gone, and the graphics in the demo are kind of flat. CEO somebody
from Crytek says they had to remove the Shader, and drop it to a lower version because nobody has a box or video card
capable of running the advanced Shader. There will be a patch issued next year when the technology catches up with
Crysis. ... Hmmmm ... big case of dejaVu here. Sure sounds like the good old days with the Far Cry demo, and then the
game patches and drivers for a year before Far Cry ran very well at all. Nearly drove Far Cry off the market, and
I remember they didn't make a lot of money on it .. price droppped to $19 very quickly. I've been looking at details
in Far Cry, and sure enough, the Far Cry details and lighting are superior to Crysis, even with Crysis on Very High
( slide show ) settings. One guy on the InCrysis forum found the "light" variables, but clearly they have been blocked.
Changing them has no effect. I recall the debate around incompatible settings in Far Cry patch 1.4 between AA, AI,??
and HDR. And, that it was never worked out. So maybe CryEngine 2 has the same bug, and it still is not worked out.
Possibly that is the explanation for the 8800 cards having such low FPS .. While older cards, like my 7900 GTO has
much higher FPS .. ?? Kind of discouraging to think that those who paid $300 to $500 for their 8800s are running
old technology, and we are waiting on cards that don't even exist yet, before we will see Crysis with the lights turned
on. Also, if you want to see what a Crysis-level game looks like with HDR running ... get Gothic 3. Heh! That has
been a patch-battle that is still not resolved, and now the gamers themselves are writing the patches to fix that
game.

- No Crysis hasnt dumped hdr.
Perhaps you are confusing that with SLI? There have been quotes bouncing around the internet from an NVIDIA exec that states SLI will need to be added in a later patch, but I for one have not seen a reliable citation for this quote.

-No Far Cry didnt have a bug wrt AA and HDR, its was a limitation of the NVIDIA HW at the time.

-Only you can judge what it looks like for you, but for me the demo looks better on mostly medium than Far Cry ever did on VHigh/Ultra.

-Those with 8800s experiencing problems are generally in one of three camps.

a. They have no clue how to perform basic housekeeping on their own system and have introduced the problems themselves

or

b. They are using Vista. The percentage of people with problems here is significantly higher than with XP. That suggests that there are issues with the current drivers, but it should be noted that a large number of users also have no problem with Vista, possibly due to being savvey enough to tweak the config to limit whichever factor is crippling the other users.

or

c. They have totally unrealistic expectations for how 12 month old HW can perform with a games engine that is scaled to be cutting edge for the next 3 years.


-Deja Vu?
Yes.
Its wasnt until patch 1.3 was released that FC got SM3.0 and HDR, they had to wait for HW they were using to be released to the public.

From day one, Crytek have stated that the engine is capable of more than the current HW can support.

Also dont forget that this is a demo.
Just like the FC demo, the final product will work differently both at launch and I am sure any further issues will be addressed a short while after via patch. Sadly thats the way games are released these days...

Regarding Gothic 3, still not tried it. Doesnt appeal to me, where as Oblivion did...

Join the debate at InCrysis Forum. They are posting examples of it in the demo. I can tell that the demo is not as good
as Far Cry at High settings. The detail is just not there, and the lighting is flat. The Physics in Crysis is very
advanced. That alone is impressive, so I was ignoring the lighting until InCrysis forum started that thread. It is not
about SLI.

I was always confused as to exactly when HDR came to Far Cry. So, it WAS patch 1.3 ... I noticed a huge change in lighting
on my nVidia 6800 .. some really weird hot colors. When I got a 7900 GTO, all the weird went away, and Far Cry looked
super good.

I did all the Far Cry tests with patch 1.4, and I do remember something about part of it having to be removed. It just
did not work. I think I remember that being incompatibility between AA and HDR, and that is when I got a wide screen LCD
and used higher resolutions without AA. The jaggies were not bad, but that could not compare with high AA on my ATI 9800.

And Crytek did it again in the demo ... no toggle Crouch. I swear those guys are just brain dead about that. It took
patches to get it into Far Cry.

If you ever try Gothic 3, you will right away see the HDR effects .. and the weird Shading setting that cannot be run
higher than Medium. The detail in Gothic 3 is very very high, just like Crysis, and they put 20 or more characters
in action on the same screen. It will really drag down a lesser game box. And .. it has taken a years worth of tweaking
to get the screen stutter out of the game. And even then, the game is so big that I get stack crashes after about 45
minutes playing time. I feel sure that the Crysis team ran into this problem, and they can't solve it either. So the
game is being dialed back until the technology is up to it.

Another weirdy .. I can't get Crysis to run in Vista more than about 2 minutes, and then Vista just shuts it down.
But, if anything, Gothic 3 runs better in Vista than in XP. Almost no screen stutter .. just brief area loads .. and
no stack crashes at all. I'm guessing video drivers.

In the Sandbox2 editor under Tools>User Commands there are 6 different lighting settings including HDR. When you click it it does make a difference too. You get a bit more color saturation and bright spots have a bit of bloom.

Personally I think HDR can be seriously overdone to the point of making scenes look unrealistic and cartoonish.

I'm loving the editor but am having problems like others are with the ground textures becoming bright white, in my case after an AI flow graph is made and I click generate all AI navigation.

Some theories as to why this happens include low system spec, lighting settings, a bug in the editor, or ATI driver problems. I do meet the minimum requirements for the game but I don't meet the requirements for the editor having a 32 bit system, though many that do are having no problems with the editor.

Another odd thing I noticed is when I enable System Budgets Info in the editor under RollupBar>Render Settings (Monitor Icon), Debug/Profile Options>Budgets (sys_budget_...), I get a warning that says I'm over system memory budget even though I meet the RAM requirements for SB2.

quote:

Originally posted by Six_Gun:
In the Sandbox2 editor under Tools>User Commands there are 6 different lighting settings including HDR. When you click it it does make a difference too. You get a bit more color saturation and bright spots have a bit of bloom.

Personally I think HDR can be seriously overdone to the point of making scenes look unrealistic and cartoonish.

I'm loving the editor but am having problems like others are with the ground textures becoming bright white, in my case after an AI flow graph is made and I click generate all AI navigation.

Some theories as to why this happens include low system spec, lighting settings, a bug in the editor, or ATI driver problems. I do meet the minimum requirements for the game but I don't meet the requirements for the editor having a 32 bit system, though many that do are having no problems with the editor.

Another odd thing I noticed is when I enable System Budgets Info in the editor under RollupBar>Render Settings (Monitor Icon), Debug/Profile Options>Budgets (sys_budget_...), I get a warning that says I'm over system memory budget even though I meet the RAM requirements for SB2.

Yep. That is where the guys are figuring out how to turn HDR on in the demo. The demo was dialed back for a number of reasons which I guess we will see in the game. If you get Gothic 3, you will see that Piranha Bytes did a better job with HDR than Crytek has done. The game is really nice looking as a result, and it is not overdone. If you are still on ATI
cards, you should change to nVidia. They work much harder on fixing the driver problems, that ATI will ignore for years
... and even try to convince you that the fault is not theirs. I got really tired of that with them. NVidia is somewhat better, and freely admit that they will have to fix their drivers once in a while.

The stack crashes I see generally occur just after I start losing backgrounds in the games. I can tell that the game has overwritten the OS, and it is just a matter of a very short time. Word is to fix the size of the swap file, so that your ram size plus the swap file size is 4 gigs.

quote:

Originally posted by johns1234:
If you are still on ATI
cards, you should change to nVidia. They work much harder on fixing the driver problems, that ATI will ignore for years
... and even try to convince you that the fault is not theirs.

Yeah, still using ATI, and even bought another one, very reluctantly. Nvidia was not a cost effecive option for this temp AGP upgrade while waiting for the 9800GTX. I use my PC multipurpose and the next one I plan to integrate what is now a dual display setup into one 27" 1920x1200 display. That means an uber card because I'd rather not buy into Nvidia's SLI.

Thus I was left with the choice of nearly $300 for a 7950GT 512MB AGP (which has seen lots of problems) or the X1950Pro 512MB I ended up getting for only $109 refurbed.

The driver issue is really not a big deal for me because I have been using Omegas with no problems for some time now. Don't get me wrong though, I thoroughly agree that ATI's drivers and support suck and look forward to going back to Nvidia, even if they have gone a bit crazy since they started obsessing over SLI.

On the driver thing it's kinda funny how I'm reading about all these guys with much higher end rigs using E6600 Core 2s or faster and 2900s getting lousy performance on Crysis even with Low settings. I can run the demo at Medium textures, High sound, 2xAA, everything else Low at 1024x768 and get 35 FPS.

I get the feeling if they'd just use Omegas or revert to pre Cat 7.10 drivers like some are doing they'd be fine though.