Posts by Thrik

FFS. More young lives extinguished by another mental fuck who seems to like the idea of going around a school and indiscriminately murdering people.

What is it about schools and colleges that nutters want to go around killing anyone they see? I seem to hear about it happening in schools and colleges more than I hear about it happening in, say, shopping malls and stuff.

Horrible stuff, and genuinely frightening knowing some psychotic fuck in your own kids' school could end up doing it. Good job guns are relatively difficult to come by in the UK, especially for kids.

I think it's quite obvious this is simply a matter of performance.

I mean, if Crytek could release the engine looking as good as it does in the first image without reducing everyone's machines to 5 frames per minute, don't you think they would?

There's no way Crytek had machines capable of running the game smoothly several years ago (even my top-spec PC has trouble at 'Very High'), so I'm guessing a lot of promotional footage was sped up or something like Sony did with the Killzone 2 demo. I doubt they just pre-rendered a load of shit to fool everyone, and instead just overestimated how powerful your average computer would be in late 2007.

I'm fairly certain Crytek said in an interview I read that as hardware progresses they will 'unlock' new levels of detail in the options.

I'm assuming this means that a lot of the extra detail is actually already there, but the console commands/settings aren't linked to anything in the interface. As a lot of people already know, the difference between 'High' and 'Very High' is pretty much just a bunch of console commands and numbers (hence why you can use 'Very High' on XP), so the chances are there're more. It also looks like a lot of the 'Very High' console commands can go much higher if you mess with them manually. At the cost of extreme performance loss, of course.

Don't forget Crytek also did this with Far Cry, introducing stuff like HDR long after the original release.

It seems pretty simple to me: no hardware can run the engine at its absolute maximum potential. It's a matter of Crytek trying to get it as good as possible with what hardware people actually have (imagine if a top-of-the-line rig couldn't run it on 'Very High' at even 5 fps), which they've done very well.

Yeah, it's pretty hilarious. I don't think anyone (who actually knows what they're talking about) is likely to deny that DirectX 10 is a significant and good step forward, but it's not the revolutionary leap that Microsoft market it is.

It's just another iteration, just like DirectX 9, DirectX 8, DirectX 7, DirectX 6, etc were. Despite this fairly consistent history of DirectX development, Microsoft has managed to pull the wool over even hardware aficionados' eyes and made them think it's something supreme, when in reality it just makes certain things a bit easier for programmers, alleviates some circumstances that can cause disproportionate performance loss, and of course introduces more complex shaders. In other words, the same thing every version of DirectX has done.

Lame as hell.

Well, I didn't really think it was something the players would be having anything to do with dissonance -- just a way for the developers to do more animated, fancy HUD elements (possibly useful for the RTS-like overview thing in Natural Selection).

I guess if you introduce the whole 'community content' aspect there's room for issues, but I wouldn't imagine it'd be too bad considering we run .swf files all the time anyway.

I've never really heard of .swf files being very insecure in the dramatic way you describe. In fact, I haven't really heard of .swf security issues at all. Is it really that bad?

How is using .swf files for the GUI insecure?

You can enable blood in the gameplay options. For a reason I cannot fathom it's disabled by default.

It's quite a realistic implementation of blood, though. You get spurts if you land a headshot and there'll be a nice dark pool of blood beneath bodies, but don't expect crazy over-the-top gore.

But yeah, the sound in Crysis really is astounding. The sound effects and ambience alone are amazing, but when the music kicks in I can't help but get a bit excited. I really like how it uses Lost-like punches of music when you're sneaking around and there're enemies in the area, and dynamically varies in intensity almost flawlessly as different things happen.

The best part of all is that it doesn't use EAX, which means no fancy dedicated sound card is needed to get the beautiful sound quality. Crysis stands as a pretty good demonstration to all developers that EAX isn't necessary, and Microsoft have been pushing to get developers to do it all in software like on the 360 with Vista.

I'd be quite happy to see the end of sound cards because they simply aren't necessary considering an Intel Core 2 Duo can pump matching sound out with a fraction of its overall power.

Source games don't use EAX either, but I do find their reverb effects a bit crappy. Crysis is an awesome example of how to do it right.

I think your resolution is the factor there, dux. I can run it much better on 1680x1050, but when I go up to 1920x1200 I have to take the most intensive stuff (post processing and shadows) down a level.

Resolution makes all the difference with such a GPU-heavy game.

I guess high-end hardware is usually accompanied by a high-end monitor.

I guess you're right. It's still not £100, though.

The US is unsurprisingly getting a much better deal than us. The difference between the two is only £20-£30.

But yes Nexus, you really should have waited. If you haven't opened it yet I highly recommend you return it, as if the law in your country is anything like ours you're perfectly entitled to do that.

I'm guessing the GTS cards will just be phased out as of the GT's release, so the retailer was probably trying to offload one onto you before knowledge of their obsolescence becomes widespread.

There is pretty much no incentive for anyone to buy one of the GTS cards. They're more expensive, they have inferior performance, and they run hotter. You were warned, Nexus...

It's not a £100 difference. You must have gotten the US exchange rate messed up or something.

The minimum you can realistically get the GT for is roughly £170 in the UK and $240 in the US, while the GTS is £180 and $260.

There isn't a huge difference, but the fact does remain that the 8800 GT:

a) Costs approximately £10 less than the 8800 GTS 640mb

b) Has performance closer to the 8800 GTX 768mb than the 8800 GTS 640mb

It is therefore a no-brainer to go for the 8800 GT over anything but the 8800 GTX. That's why I told Nexus he ought to wait a little while, because if he did he'd have the 3rd most powerful graphics card in existence rather than the 4th.

But then, a PS3 wouldn't have a hope in hell of running it on 'Medium' either.

The 8800 GT the guys above are talking about, based on the new G92 chip that's basically a more efficient chip and thus allows them to squeeze more out of roughly the same price point as the GTS.

It's generally assumed this is all we're getting and that the GeForce 9s will be next year, seeing as NVIDIA have got such a powerful card that still leads the pack.

Agreed. I think I did say a new GeForce 8 card was about to come out in your original thread Nexus, and indeed one did just two days ago.

Not that the 8800 GTS is a bad choice, but I think you could have saved a little money with the GT. It's newer, more efficient, and as a result gives better bang for the buck.

I have to say, this is quite amazing.

Someone tried it with Crysis?

I for one love the way Crysis has implemented cutscenes. I kind of enjoy being able to just sit back and enjoy a cutscene as a reward for all my hard sneaking around and stuff, while in HL2 you have to follow the action and move around yourself.

I can't even visualise how third-person cutscenes could look better than the ones we have.

I think I have to mention that the sound in Crysis is really amazing. I mean not only is the music great and the sound effects exciting, but the way the music changes depending on the context is superbly done.

I was having another go earlier and it almost felt like the music had been scored just for what I was doing, it so perfectly matched my actions. I almost felt like I was in a film as the music slowly built in tension as I sneaked up to some guys, increased in intensity as I took them out, and then finally exploded into a climax once their reinforcements arrived, forcing me to dive into a jeep and get the fuck out of there.

The only other game I can remember in recent history doing context-sensitive music as well as Crysis is Metal Gear Solid 3. Weirdly, the majority of that game also took place in the forest/jungle and had a similar musical style.

A fantastic job has been done with the sound, and I suspect it won't be acknowledged anywhere near as much as the graphics.

I call them mentioning at some point the E3 stuff (or footage from some event) was on an 8800 GTX with 2GB of RAM, and presumably a dual-core processor of some type.

It seems that the most burden definitely falls on the GPU though, which is why using higher resolutions can literally halve your performance: each of those extra pixels takes its toll on the GPU performance, while with processor/RAM stuff the resolution makes little difference.

I'm guessing they took the E3 footage in a relatively low resolution because there's no way they got 'Very High' running smooth enough to demo on 1920x1200, or even 1680x1050.

Yeah I do, and yes it isn't terrible. It's still not as good as a competent television though because they tend to have better rescaling chips in them due to the likelihood of many things being in standard definition.

Kind of comparable to how the Xbox 360 (and PS3?) upscale to 1080p, except hidden inside the television.

I didn't enjoy playing Crysis in a lower resolution much though because although it was okay in the night areas, when I was on the beach with shitloads of detail it all seemed a bit blocky and there just wasn't that much definition. It definitely looked worse in the day when things were lit up more for me.

It's worth noting that resolution is a big factor in Crysis.

It's like mine can easily copy with it running on 'Very High' at 1024x768, but as soon as I run it in my native 1920x1200 is drops like a rock down a well.

Hardly surprising when you think that it has 1,517,568 more pixels to render, but still.

The problem with these big LCD monitors is they don't up-scale anywhere near as well as televisions do and it's made even worse by you being so close to them, so although you can run it in 1280x768 or 1680x1050, it is distinctly blurry.

I wish I had the room for a good HD television as I bet it'd be great running it in a lower resolution and just sitting back with a wireless mouse/keyboard. Might be wireless, but who cares when you're that comfortable?

780p would be roughly 1280x768 and 1080p would be roughly 1680x1050, both of which run much better for me.