Building a Crysis PC, Part 1 - Page 3

Sorry, I've been in a post-World Series state of drunken euphoria....

Well, it looks like we're leaning toward a Vista 64 bit system with SLI and at least a dual core platform. We wanted to keep the cost down, but considering 1) frame rate results for the beta/demo, and 2) the fact that we already have core 2 duo stystems with XP or Vista 32 bit versions and single 8800 cards here in the lab, we might as well build something that's a little different and more powerful.

It seems like most folks are leaning toward Intel/Nvidia. Any thoughts on going with an AMD/ATI platform, especially considering some of the Nvidia driver issues?

Thanks for all the feedback, guys. It's definitely helped. Stay tuned for more Crysis stuff this week....

Go Sox.

WHEN is Part 2 coming out ?!?.. are we waiting for the game to come out or for the Q9850 cpus to come out with X48 motherboards?..
...
Crikey..

EDIT : Sorry just read Robs post.. you have to put a QUAD in the solution , because Cyril from Crytek said Quads run much better.. lol .. and he is Intels lapdog as well ..

I'm not having any Nvidia driver problems atm with 169.04. I did have some menu probs with 169.01 but it's fixed now. I think for Crysis atleast, the Nvidia drivers will be in a better state for it than ATI.

EDIT: For price wise I'd definatly go with SLI 8800 GT's! Seems like the only way to go.

Rob, I know that Crytek said that 64bit would be 10-15% faster than 32bit per core, but I ran both the cpu and gpu benchmarks in both their 32bit and 64bit versions that came with the single player demo and it is sadly but abundently clear that the 64bit version is actually running slower! Before you tell people that you recommend vista64 you should test this for yourself...and then call out EA and Crytek on it!

my system: q6600 @ 3.6ghz, p5k deluxe, 2gig ram, 2900pro OCed

The 32-bit seemed to run about the same as the 64-bit, but that was subjective, so I can't wait to see what your benchies say. Thankfully, it isn't TOO harsh on older stuff. I was running at 1920x1200, 0xAA, all settings to High on my: Vista 64-bit, FX-60, 2GB DDR, 8800GTX, etc. It was very playable, except the last cutscene. What was up with that last scene, my frames dropped from about 25-30ish most of the game to slide show?

BAHH!
I feel like I'm in the twilight zone. Ok, I just finished reading "Building a Crysis PC, Part II"

First: The lower priced PC should definitely have a couple of 8800GT's in SLI or maybe even a couple of 2900Pro's in Crossfire. Either will surely get better performance results than a single waste-of-money 8800Ultra will.

Second: I would definitely go with 2 8800GTX's rather than 2 8800Ultra's for the higher priced PC. I know we want to squeeze all the performance we can out of what we have, but I think that the $200 we save by going with 2 8800GTX's instead can better be used by getting even better cooling gear, or even better RAM modules.

Third: I've heard that there is a little text-edit you can do to get the "Ultra High" settings of the Vista version in the XP version. So unless there's been proof that Vista will run the game faster or better, then I would stick with XP.

64-bit is the way to go. On my machine at 1280x1024, 4x AA, all setting on high except for textures and shaders on Very High I'm getting 24 fps and the game plays very well. Not to mention Vista runs sooo snappy on 64 bit with the full 4gb of ram showing. It's always caching most of the ram and only leaving 1gb free.

Why does THG insist on building systems that cost $2000 + with a gtx. Now that the 8800gt is out, two of them in SLI is not only better performance but also cheaper. that with a 680i mobo, q6600 4gb ram vista 64, with a 320GB and 700W power supply would be about $1700. cheaper and a better performer than what they built.

Notice: the PC we have on campus is a "public use" PC, that is, because the college payed for it, only the professors get to use it. I figured I might add that, because some people might wonder why I am building a PC when I already listed one.

Hey,
I played the beta and to my amazement the game played really well on my system.
Heres my Specs
Mobo: DFI 875P(not lan party version) rev.b socket 478
CPU: Pentium 4 Extream Edition 2mb L3 cache 3.4GHZ (not oced)
Memory: 2 gig dual channel OCZ PC3200 Platinum rev.2 (2-2-3-5)
Video card: HIS X1950pro agp 512mb factory overclocked (590MHZ core/1.54ghz Memory) (ati 7.10)
OS: XP HOME SP2
Hard drive: SATA 120 gig Diamond MAX Maxtor
PSU: 500watt Antec Basiq
Sound: Intergrated 5.1 "C-Media Xear"

I was able to run everything on "High" but mind you there is another higher level which it can be set to but it was grayed out. I guess if you have DX10 then it can be enabled. I am able to play this at a maxium resolution of 1024X768 with no issues. Unfortunately when i enabled AA even to 2X, i got horrible FPS. So to sum things up i had everything on to the second highest level but no AA. Even with no AA damn this game looks sweet with my current setup. And to think i was going to get a new rig just to play this.

Tom's-
I have to say, at this point, if you are building a system for Crysis you have to opt for 2 x 8800GT over one GTX for the $. I waited until now to upgade, the release of 8800GT was exactly what I was waiting for. Crytek claims more cores the merrier for Crysis, because of that I also think you must start with a Qxxxx (I am awaiting someone to benchmark the difference). I am anxious to see if moving up to 64 bit Vista + 4GB of memory makes that much of an impact as well, I opted for 32 bit + 2GB. Otherwise I think I chose the best bang for buck ($134 for the MB, the case was a luxury item {8^)).
Lian Li A-16
MSI P6N Diamond
2 x 74GB Raptors in RAID 0, 500GB 7200.10
Q6600
2 x 1GB G.Skill DDR2/800 4-4-4-12
2 x Leadtek 8800GT SLI
PC Power & Cooling Silencer 610W

Folks, I'd like to run the following specs by you and see what you think of them:

Antec - P182
BallistiX 2GB PC2-8500 DDR2 Kit (2 x 1GB) - two kits for 4GB
500GB Barracuda 7200.10 SATA II w/ NCQ, 16MB Cache
THERMALTAKE - Toughpower 850W Modular Power Supply
GA-P35-DS4 w/ DualDDR2 1066
e-GeForce 8800 GTX 768MB PCI-E
E6850 3.00GHz

I am not convinced I want to go to Vista. From what I read I'm not sure whether I can make XP Pro SP2 recognize all 4GB of RAM even with boot.ini switches of /PAE /3GB. Also I have ViewSonic VX924 and it only go up to 1280x1024 so I likely don't need more powerful machine. I was looking at eVGA nForce 680i SLI board but it isn't specifically meant for 1066 MHz DDR2 RAM only for 533/667/800/1200MHz. I am not planning on getting a second video card to run SLI plus I like the thermal solution on the Gigabyte. So, if I want to stick with XP Pro, getting Q6600 2.4GHz would not be optimal in my mind.

Any thoughts or criticism?

Thanks

The funny thing is that a 32-bit OS should be able to see 4GB exactallyno more though as thats the limit. if you take 2^32 (is how you find the memory allocation) then you get 4,294,967,296 bytes or (divided by 1024) 4,194,304 KB or 4,096 MB or 4GB even. I guess its just that the OS is set not to.

A 64bit OS/CPU can allocate up to 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 bytes or 17,179,869,184 GB theoretically. Hell lets go to Terabytes which would be 16,777,216 or 16,384 Petabytes or 16 Zetabytes(I think Zeta is the next after Peta). We haven't even reached 1 Terabyte so thats a long...long way off. Now we only have to find a way to load that much onto a board. I am sure though it would be nice to be able to have that much memory. You could pretty much get rid of hard drives as you could load everything into memory and pretty much kill a huge bottleneck. Well for load times at least.

I for one don't think 4GB ram will make much of a difference for Crysis where as a high end video card(i.e. 8800GTS 640 or HD2900Pro and up) will along with a Quad core CPU. Since the game seems to be based around large detailed textures then a high memory video card(i.e. HD2900Pro/XT 1GB) will make more of a difference since there will be more video memory to load the textures into.

I think lisiors PC will handle it fine at 1280x1024 at high settings since he has a good video card. But unless they decide to release DX10 to XP(which I doubt since they plan on stopping support for XP by 2009) you will miss out on a lot of nice things such as the God Rays(which amaze me more and more) or the motion blur which makes things look real when you turn around fast.

BTW I ran through the demo again and used the Koreans machine gun, whatever it is called, and used the tranq darts the whole time. It made things easier especially when you could just walk up to 10 sleeping enemies and headshot them all instead of running around being shot at. That plus the cloack was fn. Or that and the cloack and point blank face shot using the single burst rounds. What fun it was.

no
it runs fine @ 20fps to me @ max settings etc
but you dont have to play the game today just wait a year upgrade and then play it, also it will be cheaper.

game requirements are higher on vista because the vista OS uses more memory (thats why you also see the 512MB (768 for vista) requirement for many games also

vista has twice as many running processes at startup, it uses 8 times as much memory at startup and it's processes take much more cpu time

what they need to do is test the game using the video card 6800-8800 ultra

also test it using processors like x2 3800+ - 6000+ and as many other dual cores as possible and also the high end single cores

and for a final test, get the most high end machine at the lab and overclock it as high as it will go then after that, test the game again

also it is true that theres no need to go overboard with the money and parts because usually a $3000 computer this year will be crushed by a $1000 computer next year, if the current latest hardware cant run the game at 60FPS then why do things upgrade from a 7900 to a 8800 when the 7900 runs every current game except crysis smoothly

when the geforce 9 seres comes out, they will run crysis smoothly and will cost less than going SLI now

Well Murdock, I don't know whats wrong with your PC. I am running a supposivley lower video card (HD2900Pro) and I can set it to 1280x1024 very high settings and it runs fine. Then again you might have had a higher resolution than mine. Only thing to suggest is lower the resolution down a step each time to see what you get.

I disagree with darkice00. A Quad core will make more of a difference than a higher clocked Dual core since it has mor cores to run the background apps while the game can run on one or two or three cores. Plus with a Q6600 you can OC it easily to that of a E6850 and still have low temps and with the G0 stepping a low TDP and better performance.

And razor512, Vista is not that bad. At startup My Vista machine uses roughly 350-400 MB ram and my XP machine uses maybe 50MB less. Also the processes used when first installed are maybe 10 more than XP and thats with more features running than XP. Turn them off and it goes to about the same.

I for one think that Crysis requires way too much for resources in a game. Yea you could run it on a older machine with say a P4EE 3.4GHz, 2GB DDR, ATI X850XT AGP but thats at low settings, no AA and probably at 1024x768 which is not very enjoyable visualy.

Thats where games such as HL2 have their strengths. Even though they keep updating the Source engine it will still run on older systems with great graphics at good resolutions.

Don't get me wrong. I think Crysis has great graphics with new features that are great and a interesting storyline but people are not going to be very willing to dish out 3 grand now for a high end PC that wont play a game it was built for. Then have to wait another year to build another PC to be able to play this game like it was meant to be.

I might buy the game but I am kind of dissipointed with one thing from Crysis. The requirements. Then again maybe with driver updates and patches it will run better.

Having downloaded the demo and been playing it now for over a week, I have been very impressed.
I am currently running it @ 1680x1050 medium settings on my 22" Asus (2ms response time) the auto detected "optium"
I have zero issues with frame rates or jagging, at these settings I am quite impressed with the picture quality and playablity of the game.

My System:
e6400 (stock)
2GB 667 mhz RAM
2x 160 GB 7200 HDD
x1950 pro Extreme 512mb (factory Overclocked) (7.10)
XP SP2

(I will post exact numbers when I get home and check) EDIT:

With a bit of tweaking I was able to get most settings to high. note: no AA. (1280x800)
If you leave the water on low I was able to get about 18 fps. @1680x1050 with the settings on Medium I can get a respectable 28-32 Fps.


I will be building a "Crysis" machine for a friend of mine with the following specs.
Please feel free to comment
Q6600 (should get it O/C to 3.0 ghz
2GB 1066 mHz RAM (I chose not to go with 4gb + as he will not be upgrading to Vista for at least 12 months)
x/150GB Raptor HDD
8800 GT 512mb
Gigabyte X38-DS5 M/b
Zalman 9700 CPU cooler
Corsair HX-520 PSU

to me, going SLI is a waste of money. SLI doesnt double your performance, it gives you like a 30% increase (for 100% higher cost, you get a 30% increase)

when nvidia releases the 9800's they will beat 2 8800 gtx cards in SLI and cost the same much as a 8800 GTX


if 1 8800 cant run a game, then 2 wont help much

it is like trying to pull a mobile home using a moped, 1 can probably pull it an inch or 2 every few minutes but that wont get you out of state to camp any time soon, and adding 2 mopeds to pull it wont help much either, as you still wont get there in your life time


the best way to run crysis is to wait for nvidia and ati to release cards that are designed to run games like this.


2 8800 ultras still wont allow you to max the game out and get 60+fps a game can look god but if it doesnt play smooth then it will look like crap

many gamers now are still using their geforce 7800 and 7900's and will continue to use them for probably another year.

if a game is able to lag a 7900 to the point that you cant play it because your getting like 5FPS, then getting a 8800 wont make much of an improvement (it will be smoother but not smooth like how you would want it (60+ fps at a good screen resolution)

Soldier37 looks like a good setup until you see the Pearl Harbour poster. Didn't Team America have something to say about that? Plus all those neons/cathodes would annoy the crap out of you trying to actually play games or watch movies.

I'll make do with my 1950s and hope they cut it until the 3800s come out.

I would really love to see a REAL budget system to try and run crysis. like say an amd dual core 2.6 black edition or 2.8. hopefully on an asus mobo of some sort or another, But i've noticed you don't do much on small form factor so that would be cool as well (cuz i think crysis will be a big lan game if it turns out to be what everyone expects. some inexpensive ram like 50 bucks or so for 2 gigs ddr2 800 (a reliable but inexpensive memory eg: wintec) and the only real budget/performance card thus far, the 8800gt. possibly a nice sub 150 dollar sff case just to get those load temps up for those of us who don't plan on buying massive cases with 20 120mm fans. :-p

or you could do like I just did, sell your pc for too little money, and run an old socket A out of a cardboard box for a substitute untill your crappy job pays you enough to buy a new one and stop harassing THG members on the forums?... oh, and change the article from crysis to "mythtv on crappy systems, yes it's possible"

but seriously, i'd like to see most of the major parts fall around the 100 dollar mark (minus 8800gt) and see what that does.

Sadly, Razor512 is prett accurate -- when it comes to SLI, you're spending money for two video cards but only getting a small performance upgrade. In my experience, it usually delivers around a 20 to 30 percent upgrade in frame rates. Sometimes it's higher (depending on the game, the hardware and the settings) and sometimes it's lower. Concerning Vista Games and DX10, we did some comparisons earlier this year, and the results weren't exactly flattering, especially since Nvidia drivers for Vista and SLI were causing some issues. It's important to point out that ATI Crossfire delivers pretty much the same pros and cons.

Still, if an SLI setup means the difference between playing Crysis at "very high" settings and getting an average of 30 FPS instead of 20, then it's probably worth it for our Crysis PC.

Here are the DX10 test articles:

http://www.tomsgames.com/us/2007/0 [...] ting_dx10/

http://www.tomsgames.com/us/2007/0 [...] ting_dx10/

What exactly is the hardware used by the developers of crysis in making the game.
I believe if we can get that information maybe we can have a better idea on what PC to build.

I am on the verge of ordering a new system to be built to handle the latest games, and while I was going to with eVGA e-GeForce 8800 GTX 768MB, the article on TH re: Radeon HD 3800 series pending product launch on November 15th gave me a pause. Should I wait and look for one of these instead? They will support DX 10.1 while GeForce 8800 supports DX 10.0 only. Alternatively, I could pick either ATI Radeon HD 2900XT 512MB or Radeon HD 2900 PRO 1GB as the top range ATI cards from my local supplier today. I haven't seen too many people wanting to go with ATI for their new Crysis ready rigs. What am I missing?

Appreciate your thoughts

Hey RobWright, I only have 1 suggestion which I haven't really seen posted yet.

I'm wanting to see the results of a difference strictly based on 1 GTX VS 2 in SLI on the same rig. I currently have 1 8800 GTX and just want to know if it's even worth it to SLI another one (in Vista) in order to get 40-60 fps.

Thanks.

They have already shown that the "exclusive" DX10 effects in Crysis can be enabled in Crysis running on 32 bit Windows XP.

Read about it here

I would think that with that enabled, along with some game configuration tweaking you will get better performance with the game than you would with one running Vista.