What does it take to enjoy crysis

[MajorGuru]

New to the site the site I usually use couldn't help me out with this question. My computer specs are below, I finally thought I had a computer that could blow past crysis and I know it may be an old topic for debate but I dint even touch the game until the tech and price balanced out right to allow me to build a machine that could run the games maxed out on 1920x1200 but I was wrong. Just built the system and crysis runs at a disappointing 20fps at best maxed out.Nothing is overclocked but with this hardware dint think it needed to be. I mean bioshock 2 mass effect 2 farcry 2 fear 2 left 4 dead 2 and on my computer blows trough at 70+frames plus easily probably more if I wanted. any help would be appreciated

p.s. i heard somthing about crysis being a poorly written game and so no matter what system you have its hard to impossible to run at 40+fps maxed out confirm or deny if known thanks

windows 7 pro 64-bit
Samsung Syncmaster 24 inch 1920X1200 main
dual acer 17 inch 1280x1024al
Evga nvidia gtx 285
Evga p55 FTW
G.SKILL 4GB (2 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM 1600
500GB hdd sata weastern digital
Ultra Lifetime Series Professional 750W
Intel Core i7-860 Lynnfield 2.8GHz 8MB

 

[Confused Stu]

That's certainly a nice rig you've got yourself there - you are right to be proud of it mate!

Crysis isn't a badly written game and in fact scales very well, I've even had it running on Intel integrated graphics with a Core2Duo at 1.8GHz! OK, it was only running at 800x600 with everything on low and it looked pants, but it did run. Crysis is actually pretty well written and the graphics give you options to run it much higher than any other game and in most cases higher than modern PCs can perform. When it was first released, they intended the top of the range PCs to be able to run it in Medium, High and Very High were for the next few generations.

Anyway, enough history lessons (sorry). Dumb questions first - are you running the latest nVidia drivers from their webiste? If not, get them ASAP. Assuming you are, how much AA are you running in the game options? With my crossfired 4870 setup, I can run 4xAA OK but 8xAA kills it completely except in the indoor sections. Try 2xAA and see how that runs, then up to 4xAA and see where your max is.

It's been a while since I ran an nVidia setup (the 6600GT was my last) but it might be worth poking around the nVidia control panel for any settings regarding AA and AF. Set them to "Application Controlled" or however they're labelled - the game setting 4xAA is easier to run than the Control Panel setting 4xAA.

According to the first review Google threw up on the GTX285 ( http://www.trustedreviews.com/graphics/review/2009/03/09/nVidia-GeForce-GTX-285/p3 ) you should be able to run Crysis pretty well at 1920x1200 so hopefully there will be a setting somewhere that's causing your current problems and once found you should be flying.