UPDATE: DX11 AND hi-res texture pack Crysis 2 available NOW!

[Dribble]

I would have thought that 2 mil bought them a lot of copies of crysis to bundle with their cards. That said a guaranteed 2 mil upfront for the PC version + nvidia encouragement & support to do DX11/3d/etc probably did the PC development no harm at all.

 

[Genx87]

Like to see Anandtech rebench the higher end cards and see what kind of tesellation performance difference there is in this patch.

 

[tviceman]

You're guessing Crytek would take a step back in technology with Crysis 2 from Crysis 1? (I'm guessing) They would have made the patch regardless; they obviously spent resources getting the game running as best it could in DX9 for the consoles and didn't have the PC features ready when the game shipped.

Really? Then why on earth would Nvidia give anyone 2 million dollars (if they actually did) for a single game that would have been patched to uber dx11 features regardless, and would have ran better on Nvidia's cards (judging from Crysis DX9 performance). Even Cevat Yerli said that the DX11 patch was for high end users only, which account for a very small percentage of the pc gaming audience, so either Nvidia funded the development of the DX11 patch or Nvidia didn't give them anything and Crytek was making the dx11 patch on their on the whole time. For Nvidia to give them $2 million dollars to do something they were already doing is a really, really dumb thing to assume.

 

[cusideabelincoln]

Then why on earth would Nvidia give anyone 2 million dollars (if they actually did) for a single game that would have been patched to uber dx11 features regardless, and would have ran better on Nvidia's cards (judging from Crysis DX9 performance).

Marketing and performance tuning are other reasons.

Even Cevat Yerli said that the DX11 patch was for high end users only, which account for a very small percentage of the pc gaming audience, so either Nvidia funded the development of the DX11 patch or Nvidia didn't give them anything and Crytek was making the dx11 patch on their on the whole time.

That is one hell of a pointless made up either/or scenario. Bravo. The world isn't black and white.

For Nvidia to give them $2 million dollars to do something they were already doing is a really, really dumb thing to assume.

Don't veil your ad hominem attacks, especially considering you are assuming just as much about this situation as everyone else is. I find it offensive, hypocritical, and against the spirit of this board for you to do this.

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/35410/Cryteks_Expensive_Gift_To_Its_HighEnd_Players.php

"Crysis 1's intention was, if I were to play it three years later, it looks great. And it does, actually, it fulfilled that. But it made it difficult for entry-level players," Crytek CEO Cevat Yerli related to Gamasutra. "So with Crysis 2, we took a different direction, and it backfired a little bit."

"It backfired a little bit." Pride is one incentive - alternative or supplemental to $2 million - for them to release a DX11 patch. They put a lot of pride into Crysis and Warhead, and Far Cry before that. It's not dumb to assume they wanted to live up to their pedigree, now is it? I'll answer that, even if it is a rhetorical question: No, it's not. Because we're engaging in a thought process as to why they are doing their actions and neither I nor you have an specific confirmation of either of our explanations to their why. So stop being confrontational.

 

[RussianSensation]

There is no evidence to support the view that Crytek would have released a DX11 patch with so many improvements if Nv hadn't provided them with $2M. At the same time, one can't disprove that Crytek could have released the patch on their own either since they have a history of updating their games (Far Cry SM3.0, 64-bit patch, etc.). Either way, both of you are trying to present each other's side as fact. Yet, it's very difficult to prove either of your viewpoints without speaking directly with the developers.

The bottom line is Fermi is superior in Tessellation performance and hasn't been dethroned even after 6970 was released (see Lost Planet 2, HAWX2). The heavier use of Tessellation benefits the faster DX11 Tessellation architecture (which NV has at the moment). Granted, 36 fps @ 1920x1080 on a GTX580 isn't anything to write home about.

At the end of the day, the graphical improvements are nice but they are far less noticeable in motion. I still feel like Crysis 2 was developed with consoles as the primary platform and frankly needs a full PC overhaul vs. just improved textures and effects in some areas.

This video highlights the differences between DX9 Extreme and DX11 Ultra very well (and there isn't much to it):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o8z8knMzIBw&feature=related

....and at the end of the day, even IF NV paid $2M to push Tessellation in this game:

1) AMD could have done the same (i.e., work together to promote an even higher-res texture pack which takes advantage of 2GBs of VRAM for example);
2) It's good to see someone working together with a developer with a focus on pushing new technologies out which improve graphical quality. If that sells them more cards, you have to give props to their marketing team.

Still, releasing a patch many months after the game's release is unlikely to fix the poor reputation Crysis 2 already received (not to mention the game unavailable for sale on STEAM). It's questionable to me why it took this long to get the DX11 features out after all these years of development, other than the fact that they developed the game for consoles first and added DX11 as an afterthought (esp. after viewing that DX9 vs. DX11 video).

 

[Madcatatlas]

Marketing and performance tuning are other reasons.



That is one hell of a pointless made up either/or scenario. Bravo. The world isn't black and white.



Don't veil your ad hominem attacks, especially considering you are assuming just as much about this situation as everyone else is. I find it offensive, hypocritical, and against the spirit of this board for you to do this.

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/35410/Cryteks_Expensive_Gift_To_Its_HighEnd_Players.php


"It backfired a little bit." Pride is one incentive - alternative or supplemental to $2 million - for them to release a DX11 patch. They put a lot of pride into Crysis and Warhead, and Far Cry before that. It's not dumb to assume they wanted to live up to their pedigree, now is it? I'll answer that, even if it is a rhetorical question: No, it's not. Because we're engaging in a thought process as to why they are doing their actions and neither I nor you have an specific confirmation of either of our explanations to their why. So stop being confrontational.

Good points.

personally I would not like to see any benchmarks of another batman fiasco for Nvidias sake. All that negative publicity that would be generated for a paid dx11 patch for a subpar console game. Not worth it. Im sure some sites will do it though, time will show if a "higher res" texture pack, actually makes use of the higher VRAM found on AMD hardware, thus giving it an advantage. Dont misunderstand me, but it would be naive to think Nvidia didnt set some rules for this "contribution" of theirs.



@Russian
I dont call this "working" with a game company, more like buying out or instructing a game company. Fair enough that you want to overutilize tesselation, since that is the only area Fermi is superior to Cayman, but when it penalizes your own cards that much for what i doubt people will think is good enough compensation (in terms of detail), its just trowing debris infront of your competitor.

What AMD did with Dirt2 and 3 is "working" with. Working with should be something unconditionally good for us, the gamers. Not something that means half of us get screwed for going with the wrong architecture.

 

[OCGuy]

Glad nV is contributing cash to help developers push our hardware to the extreme. I wish AMD would do this more often as well.

 

[RussianSensation]

What AMD did with Dirt2 and 3 is "working" with. Working with should be something unconditionally good for us, the gamers. Not something that means half of us get screwed for going with the wrong architecture.

I don't think AMD owners got shafted. 6970 is getting 29 fps vs. 36 fps for the GTX580. If anything, if I spent $500 on a GTX580, I would be pretty disappointed that I was getting only 7 fps extra, but which still doesn't make the game playable in my eyes.

I think Tessellation, like all the high-end features of the past (think SM3.0, HDR lighting, DOF, Bump Mapping, Soft shadows, etc.) is just too advanced for current architectures. But with time it'll be just another feature that runs perfectly fine on future videocards. The current performance "advantage" is academic in nature only. 36 fps is simply unacceptable for a first person shooter imo. So it's not like you can even use those settings on a single-GPU NV card. Another thing is, Crytek threw together this patch in just 3 months. How much optimization did they do then? Games take 2-4 years to develop, and with that comes a long time to optimize the game engine. Another way to look at it is: GTX580 is 10x faster than a 7900GTX. Does Crysis 2 look 5x-10x better than the PS3 version? Not a chance. There is no reason this game shouldn't be running at 60+ fps on a modern videocard given that its graphics are hardly better than Crysis 1 in 2007.

If you looked at the DX9 vs. DX11 video I linked, there is almost no difference between running this game at DX9 vs. DX11 in motion, but yet DX11 takes a significant performance hit. DX10/11 have been the greatest disappointments imo. They bring almost nothing to the table and outside of BattleForge and WOW (and perhaps CIV5), they carry a huge performance hit with little to no visual impact.

 

[Skurge]

Glad nV is contributing cash to help developers push our hardware to the extreme. I wish AMD would do this more often as well.

I don't know if AMD contributed cash, but they did get DX11 support into Dirt 2, BFBC2, Stalker COP, AvP and Dragon Age 2. So I would say AMD are doing a fairly good job at that.

 

[3DVagabond]

Isn't anyone else bothered by seeing the tessellation "kick in"? At around 20 to 30 meters in front of the camera you can see the cobble stones in the road, for example, rise up in front of you. The water @ 0:25 doesn't look like water at all. It looks more like smoke. When the soldier walks through it, it looks more like some type of atmospheric distortion than water splashing. The refraction and Fresnel reflectivity effects are well done, though.

The reason for the big performance hit is we are still dealing with a game that is made without tessellation. Adding tessellation just increases the complexity of the models. It doesn't take advantage of having the models be very low poly before tessellation and use tessellation to increase model complexity to necessary levels of detail as they approach. They are already pretty high poly, for running in Dx9. They could increase the poly count more gradually and at a greater distance if the model complexity was lower to begin with. The complexity of the models at long distances is hurting game performance.

 

[Firestorm007]

Working with and paying off are completely different. Do we really know if NV paid Crytek the $2 mill, or is it just speculation. Either way, it's a good game and with the patches its better. But, I can't help feeling that it's still a mediocre console port when I look at it. But, like I said, I'm glad the patches came along.

 

[SirPaulie]

Good points.

personally I would not like to see any benchmarks of another batman fiasco for Nvidias sake. All that negative publicity that would be generated for a paid dx11 patch for a subpar console game. Not worth it. Im sure some sites will do it though, time will show if a "higher res" texture pack, actually makes use of the higher VRAM found on AMD hardware, thus giving it an advantage. Dont misunderstand me, but it would be naive to think Nvidia didnt set some rules for this "contribution" of theirs.



@Russian
I dont call this "working" with a game company, more like buying out or instructing a game company. Fair enough that you want to overutilize tesselation, since that is the only area Fermi is superior to Cayman, but when it penalizes your own cards that much for what i doubt people will think is good enough compensation (in terms of detail), its just trowing debris infront of your competitor.

What AMD did with Dirt2 and 3 is "working" with. Working with should be something unconditionally good for us, the gamers. Not something that means half of us get screwed for going with the wrong architecture.

Some allow idealism to be the enemy of good. There is so much good with this DirectX 11 ability for Crysis and yet it becomes AMD vs nVidia.

 

[Vdubchaos]

It's really sad that people actually bought this game...and support EA ways. :thumbsdown:

 

[Carfax83]

I don't think AMD owners got shafted. 6970 is getting 29 fps vs. 36 fps for the GTX580. If anything, if I spent $500 on a GTX580, I would be pretty disappointed that I was getting only 7 fps extra, but which still doesn't make the game playable in my eyes.

Um, where did you get "only 7 fps extra?"

 

[SirPauly]

This may be where:

http://www.pcgameshardware.de/aid,8...t-fuenf-neuen-Grafikkarten/Action-Spiel/Test/

 

[Carfax83]

This may be where:

http://www.pcgameshardware.de/aid,8...t-fuenf-neuen-Grafikkarten/Action-Spiel/Test/

Strange how there's such a big difference between the two websites. Anyway, 7 FPS extra still amounts to over 20% and is very noticeable; especially when you're in the 30s.

 

[Madcatatlas]

Um, where did you get "only 7 fps extra?"

You just know Nvidia cheated or optimized purely for their own hardware when you see the 460 SE! beating the 6850... haha, hilarious.

 

[toyota]

You just know Nvidia cheated or optimized purely for their own hardware when you see the 460 SE! beating the 6850... haha, hilarious.

yes how dare them. maybe you should complain to AMD for "cheating" for trying to optimize games like Call of Pripyat, Dirt 2, or Dragon Age 2 for their own hardware too.

 

[SirPauly]

Nothing one can do! Extremism is part of forum lore. Now, nVidia is cheating. Good grief!

 

[tviceman]

Marketing and performance tuning are other reasons.

That is one hell of a pointless made up either/or scenario. Bravo. The world isn't black and white.

Don't veil your ad hominem attacks, especially considering you are assuming just as much about this situation as everyone else is. I find it offensive, hypocritical, and against the spirit of this board for you to do this.

Your very own link shows that the dx11 patch is a gift to HIGH END PLAYERS. And don't try to argue with me now that either high end players (pc gamers able to run this game with the a highest settings at playable rates) makes up most of Crysis 2 players, OR that releasing this patch will produce a significantly large surge in sales. Neither is true.

I'm not disguising anyone. I am speculating just as much as anyone, but my speculation is founded with way more common sense.

AMD guy: Nvidia paid Crytek to make the game run worse on AMD cards. Nvidia is cheating.

ME: No, either Nvidia paid Crytek to create the DX11 patch, or Nvidia did not pay them at all. $2 million dollars for a PATCH to a game that has already been out for several months and has already grossed most of it's revenues makes absolutely NO business sense whatsoever.

So, again, it makes a whole lot more sense that if Nvidia did pay crytek, then that money was the driving force behind creating the patch to begin with (essentially paying for it's development). If the patch was coming no matter what, for Nvidia to pay them $2 million dollars to tweak a patch to a game that had been out for 2-3 months already makes zero sense whatsoever. The game already ran significantly faster on Nvidia cards in DX9, every single other DX11 game shows that moving to DX11 would not change this fact.

It's too bad you're easily offended, because if you could take a step back and look at this logically you'd see it just makes way more sense to be less cynical.

 

[Dribble]

In the mean time Kyle has some trouble installing it and then decides to throw all his toys out the pram rofl: http://www.hardocp.com/article/2011/06/29/crysis_2_dx11_tessellation_highres_texture_pack

 

[GaiaHunter]

Your very own link shows that the dx11 patch is a gift to HIGH END PLAYERS. And don't try to argue with me now that either high end players (pc gamers able to run this game with the a highest settings at playable rates) makes up most of Crysis 2 players, OR that releasing this patch will produce a significantly large surge in sales. Neither is true.

How many players did buy Crysis 2 expecting the DX11 that was promised before the game was released?

How many players did buy Crysis 2 because of the graphic prowess of its ancestors, Far Cry and Crysis?

http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums...9-DX11-will-be-quot-later-quot-with-an-update

http://www.qj.net/pc-gaming/news/crytek-admits-crysis-2-backfired-a-bit.html

 

[Genx87]

Nothing one can do! Extremism is part of forum lore. Now, nVidia is cheating. Good grief!

Well of course. They are winning in that benchmark!

 

[cusideabelincoln]

And don't try to argue with me now that either high end players (pc gamers able to run this game with the a highest settings at playable rates) makes up most of Crysis 2 players, OR that releasing this patch will produce a significantly large surge in sales. Neither is true.

Well it's pointless "arguing" with you because you just like shoving words into my mouth. I never argued either of those things. And, again, the situation IS NOT BLACK AND WHITE. You keep trying to turn it into a black and white situation for some inexplicable reason.

I'm not disguising anyone. I am speculating just as much as anyone, but my speculation is founded with way more common sense.

You have not shown your theory is of any more common sense than my theory, yet you are quick to create a straw man and then call the theory "dumb." The only thing that's dumb is some of the irrelevance I'm reading from your "logic."

AMD guy: Nvidia paid Crytek to make the game run worse on AMD cards. Nvidia is cheating.

ME: No, either Nvidia paid Crytek to create the DX11 patch, or Nvidia did not pay them at all. $2 million dollars for a PATCH to a game that has already been out for several months and has already grossed most of it's revenues makes absolutely NO business sense whatsoever.

So, again, it makes a whole lot more sense that if Nvidia did pay crytek, then that money was the driving force behind creating the patch to begin with (essentially paying for it's development). If the patch was coming no matter what, for Nvidia to pay them $2 million dollars to tweak a patch to a game that had been out for 2-3 months already makes zero sense whatsoever. The game already ran significantly faster on Nvidia cards in DX9, every single other DX11 game shows that moving to DX11 would not change this fact.

I never said anything about the speculated money Nvidia paid being used to purposefully make the game run worse on AMD cards. So don't muddle my argument with others' statements. And again you use your black and white scenario as the foundation of your argument? That is just a ridiculous, and borderline strawman.

It's too bad you're easily offended, because if you could take a step back and look at this logically you'd see it just makes way more sense to be less cynical.

This statement makes no sense because of your misuse of cynical; it's a long stretch to call my argument cynical. And I find your accusation that I have not taken a step back to be laughable. I believe it was inevitable for Crysis 2 to get a patch. Releasing patches and updates to games does not have to be about the immediate bolster in sales. It's a service that can function as a way to appease the fanbase and make them more favorable to your past, present, and future products, which is something Valve has shown can have a very positive affect on the sales of games. And that is exactly the point I was showing with the quote, "it backfired a little bit." So the base of your argument - it wouldn't immediately increase sales of the game to release the patch - doesn't really negate my argument at all. So this is one reason why I'm laughing at "not taking a step back."

 

[3DVagabond]

Um, where did you get "only 7 fps extra?"

You just know Nvidia cheated or optimized purely for their own hardware when you see the 460 SE! beating the 6850... haha, hilarious.

There's 5 different processors and 3 different mobo's listed in, what I assume is, the system specs part of the graph. Do they test all cards in multiple systems and avg. the results? Or, do they test the cards on different systems and then just combine the results on one graph?

Can we even compare the results on the graph with each other, never mind other sites?