Crysis Performance

[andrewshenk]

I'm sorry to bring it up, as I'm sure a good 50% of threads here are made simply to ask this question, but I'm getting very worried myself about this system's performance after unsatisfactory handling of the Crysis demo. How well should this build actually be running Crysis?

AMD Phenom II X3 720
SAPPHIRE Radeon HD4850 x2
Antec 300
G.SKILL 4GB (2 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 1066
CORSAIR CMPSU-650TX 650W
WD Black 640GB
GIGABYTE GA-MA790X-UD4P

I don't know what these 3dmark Vantage scores mean, but I'll post them anyway:

Overall: "P9975"
GPU: 11513
CPU: 7121

 

[tidefan94]

That should be able to run Crysis solidly on medium...

 

[andrewshenk]

That's rough. It's probably also important to mention that my monitor's default is 1680x1050.

 

[Kraynor]

Medium sounds about right. Remember, the demo doesn't have the performance updates that the final retail version has with current patches so you'll see marginally better performance in that. Nothing huge though.

 

[ill b ben]

*Cough* high.. ive finishd it on a single 4850 and a e6400 oc to 3.2 with an avg of like 35 fps on 1680x1050 no AA ofc the patches indeed give ''some'' btr perf but not a lot

 

[Kraynor]

I prefer 60 fps with worse graphics than 30-40 fps myself, so I'd run medium.

 

[andrewshenk]

Well, the demo is playable on Medium, but at around 30-40 fps, and even dropping things to Low doesn't give me a consistent 60 fps. At this point I'm almost positive that something in my system isn't performing at full potential, I'm curious if there would be any way for me to figure out what's giving me such bad handling of the game? Or will the full patched version just be worlds away in terms of playing nicely with ATI and AMD?

 

[ill b ben]

well that totaly depends on the game, i dont mind play 20-25 fps on supreme commander for example when a fight is going on . but grid on the other hand yeh id like it to b consistent.

Just try running it on high anrewshenk at 1680x1050 and check your fps ofc no AA again and try upping your cpu a bit if you havent alrdy like i mentiond i played this on my c2d e6400 on diff sets and i noticed i got a 1-3 fps gain per 200 mhz.

 

[werxen]

i can crank out crysis at 1680 x 1050 on my old monitor on high no problem with my setup. you cant do it on yours with 4850x2....? hmm.

 

[andrewshenk]

That's exactly why I brought this up werxen. Every other description of the 4850x2 makes it sound like it should blow Crysis out of the water, so I'm a little curious about why it refuses to do anything near playable.

Just remembered another question: is driver support bad enough for Windows 7 that I'd be seeing this severe of a performance loss? I might be able to get a copy of Vista 64, but all I have right now is 7.

 

[wh3resmycar]

Well, the demo is playable on Medium, but at around 30-40 fps, and even dropping things to Low doesn't give me a consistent 60 fps.

upon reading your post, i tried to fire up crysis:warhead @ minimum settings (low). saw fps readings @ 60fps+. well im curious, when you said consistent 60fps, do you have vsync-on? because i tried to turn that on and still it cant do constant 60fps. gtx260-216 here btw + c2q 3.0ghz.

ps: the game looks bad @ low-min settings. the game game looks wonderfully @ very high detail settings. and fps dips to 20fps is not that much a news with this game.

and oh i just remembered, isnt the original crysis game a crossfire bust?

http://www.guru3d.com/article/amd-ati-radeon-hd-4850-review-force-3d--powercolor/17

 

[werxen]

also another thing that will help is to overclock those 4850's. stock levels they really suck with very demanding games.

 

[andrewshenk]

An update: I just tried playing both Left 4 Dead and the Crysis Demo with 2 copies of GPU-z running in the background. One of the "4850 2x"s that shows up in GPU-z was getting a full GPU load, and the other was getting absolutely none. Unless GPU-z has somehow messed up, this seems to imply that crossfire isn't working correctly, not just in Crysis, but everywhere. I've had the "enable Crossfire" box in Catalyst Control Center checked, so I don't know how else I could get Crossfire to get up and running. Maybe the 4850 2x just doesn't play well with Windows 7?

 

[wh3resmycar]

but a single 4850 1gb is as fast as a 4870 512mb in crysis @ middle resolutions. the increase can be attributed to the overclock but im leaning more to the fact that the 1gb memory alone helps to bump those fps counts

http://www.guru3d.com/article/gigabyte-radeon-hd-4850-1gb-gvr485oc1gi-review/8

this test was done on an old e8400 running @ stock btw.

 

[andrewshenk]

Very interesting development: I ran two benchmark tests, Furmark and 3dmark, again, and during both of them, both GPU cores were active. Then, just to make sure, I booted up L4D and Crysis again, and only one core was active again. Any possible explanation for why crossfire seems to be working in benchmarks but not in actual games? Did I just happen to pick two games that hate crossfire?

 

[spuddyt]

Very peculiar behaviour, you are certain that CCC is detecting crossfire as present and everything is plugged in correctly? Its not the games hating crossfire, My brother's two 4870's ran well with it.

 

[andrewshenk]

Very peculiar behaviour, you are certain that CCC is detecting crossfire as present and everything is plugged in correctly? Its not the games hating crossfire, My brother's two 4870's ran well with it.

Was that with the Crysis demo or the actual game? I'm guessing that patching might make a big difference. Also, at this point I'm pretty sure it's a software issue, since I'm seeing good performance in 3dmark Vantage, my scores match the expected ones for my card. There's only one card showing up in CCC, but I "enabled crossfire" on that one. Should there be two, even though it's a "2 in one" deal?