Building a Crysis PC, Part 1 - Page 2

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I'm running XP SP2. In a situation like this I don't want to speculate what might work. The problem these days is expense. Video card prices don't seem to be dropping like they used to. I guess it's because we are all waiting for DX10 stuff to come out to buy. The problem is DX10 is a waste. I'm not upgrading my OS so that I can see an extra particle or two on a screenshot of a game that I'm playing. I'm sorry but Vista = crap. Almost all of the amazing demos we have seen of Crysis are DX9 based anyway. All I want to know is how much of an increase in FPS I would get with one of the cards you mentioned.

My biggest problem is probably my monitor which has a native res of 1680x1050. I would like to run at this res but so far see poor performance in other games like Bioshock and Jericho.

I have a feeling that Crysis will flop due to this performance issue. Only a select few of the PC gamer community will be able to play it with its full feature set enabled. When Doom 3 and HL2 were the big performance benchmarks for games a system for under 1k could easily handle the games. Now it's a different story. I see many people are spending 1k on just their vid cards in SLI.

I don't understand what everyone is saying about the performance issue being so huge. Look at what the game is doing. Your card can only do what your card can do, so what if you can't pick all the highest settings in this game but you can in others. With those settings on other games they aren't going to tax your comp as much as this game is considering what it is doing. This is open for discussion but if you really think about it's not the games fault.

Mind you I do think that the game on a world wide sales point of view won't be huge or gigantic because of the system demand, and I think Cevat is hinting at the right thing, that he'd be happy if cysis does 5% (I think he said this) better than Far Cry. But Oblivion did good and when it came out not many systems could play it, and just now can you justify turning everything as high as possible at a high resolution.

You don't understand because you are sitting pretty with an 8800GTX. Not the kind of card I's expect someone to have if they were willing to accept low quality settings. If I can barely play Crysis now, what will I possibly be able to play in a year? How about 2 years? My current PC has lasted about 2 years in terms of playing games with high graphics settings and a solid 30-60+ fps. Now we are talking about barely getting those framerates with real expensive machines.

You don't need to speculate. The cheap x1950XT runs 2.5x faster than your 7800GTX and the 8800GTX is 4.7x faster. Oblivion is a good benchmark to test and get a rough guess because of the large area, foliage, and HDR. It's worth spending a lot on the video card because that still makes the biggest performance impact in games. If you want to play Crysis @ 1680x1050 with 4x AA and MAX setting and get 60+fps, you need a card with unearthly performance. Play with the benchmarks below.

http://www23.tomshardware.com/grap [...] &chart=297

When do you plan to have this build done by? There is alot of hardware coming out before Crysis comes out so should we shoot for what is available now or available at / near release?

If now here's my go...

CPU: Intel QX6850
Mobo: Asus Extreme Striker
Mem: Mushkin XP2-6400 Xtreme 2x2GB
Vid: 2x Evga Superclocked 8800 Ultra's
OS:Vista Ultimate 64bit
CPU Cooling: Thermalright Ultra-120 extreme + 120mm fan. (for major overclock)

+ 1 pillow to cry in after you spent this rediculous amount of money.

the prices of a quad core at the time was a bit too much!
the price for a quad core was 4x more than the core2duo i have at the moment.
i will be upgrading the cpu in a few weeks, the prices are better now!
but as i stated before, the mp demo runs great!

It's all about selling the engine $.

The developers are not forcing anyone to upgrade to Vista 64bit or Dx 10. You will still be able to play on XP and Dx 9, but if you want to play at the higher settings you may need to need to upgrade, but you shouldn't sell a kidney to afford the ultimate upgrade for just one game, it is as simple as that. Without games that push the spec limits we would never have gotten to this level of detail in the first place.

I think I should be in good shape to play the game on high to very high detail at a decent frame rate. I get over 60-70fps, max for my monitor refresh rate, on Bioshock at 1920 x 1200 on max detail so I should be ok with Crysis. It all depends on how well they code the game. Look at the Half Life 2 engine and UT2004 engine those games run and look great on the minimalist of hardware.

CPU: Core2Duo E6600 Oc'd to 3.5
Mobo: Asus P5W-DH Deluxe
RAM: 4gb G.Skill DDR2 PC800
VID: Sapphire 2900pro 1gig OC'd 850core 1000mem
OS: XP and Vista 64 Dual boot
Sound: X-FI Fatality
HD: 2 36gig Raptors Raid 0 with 250gig xtra storage
Case: Thermaltake Armor w/ custom water cooling
Weight: Very heavy

First, max settings on in this game, are meant to push the enevelope. That's why they have so many programmers working on it, and so much invested. The hardware guys want this game to force people to upgrade, again.

Build it yourself, and you can build that 3k machine for 2k. Partially upgrade your system, sell your old parts on ebay. You won't spend as much as you think, be patient and watch for sales on parts.

It would be only speculation on what would happen with the extra cores. I think though that you would be better off (not knowing your budget or what GTX you're talking about) making sure you have an adequate vid card with a dual core over opting to spend more on a quad core.

EDIT: Just saw you have a 8800.

Whatever system you build requires a really comfy chair, it might take several days and nights without sleeping. And don't forget the bar fridge full of ice coffe and coke, weeks supply of chocolate and most importantly, the colostomy bag and travel urinal.

Seriously, the only Crysis build needs to be the best hardware which money can buy. Sell a soul or two and use HARDWARE FROM HELL. You guys already know what the best is - qx6850, 2x8800ultra, 2x2GiB, Vistax64, King Kong monitor, 5.1 sound. If better hardware is released then use that.

It's more interesting to know what is possible if I spend a months pay on upgrades, I can find out how well my current hardware works when I buy the game.

Interested to see results comparing:
Vistax64 v Vistax86 v XP
Quad v Dual core

What kind of PC hardware are they going to use when building the PCs for the "older hardware" test?

Take everything you read about the crysis beta needing insane computers with a grain of salt. A lot of the issue was with nvidia drivers...useing the latest beta driver gives a *huge* performance increase. We are running the beta on two setups in my household.

System 1
----------
Athlon 64 4000+ @stock
2 gigs of low latency ram (cas 3)
7800 GTX 256m
windows xp
Results: Great gameplay on low settings @ 1280x1024. A few placeholder textures for the first 5 minutes of play.
EDIT: Low settings look very good, better then BF2 IMHO. Placeholder textures are small and non noticeable 95% of match starts, and after a few minutes they are gone. I would rate the fun factor with this setup a 9/10.

System 2
-----------
C2D 6600 @ stock
4 Gigs of Cas 5 gskill stuff
8800 GTS 640
windows vista 64 ult.
Results: Overall, the game looks very, very nice. When going to vista 64 from windows xp on this rig we gained about 20% in fps, but for some reason more got more stair stepping on distant objects. AA cost too much fps. All settings on high.
- The kid reports he noticed a large increase in performance after going from 2 gig to 4 gig ram.

Conclusion: Its all about post beta optimizations and drivers. This game already scales well in beta.
Counter thought - Sure its "only" beta but with a release date so soon I am wondering how it is going to turn magically deliciouses overnight.

I am upgrading the 1st setup to

Quad 6600(g0) @ ~3400 target overclock $270
asus p5ke mobo $150
Thermal Right 120 ultra ex. (cooling) $65
4 Gigs ram, DDR2 2x2 setup $150
geforce 8800 gtx $500 -GTS here if you want more $ savings
windows vista 64 $
-also replacing all case fans and optimizing air flow
-quads and 8800 gtx's run hot hot hot

- if your going to run SLI 8800 instead of upgrading your cpu,mobo,ram your either an idiot, or are in a totally different class of machine power then the mainstream price area.

If your not going to overclock, the E6850 will probably give you more performance then the q6600 on crysis....

Myth busting - Crysis Beta is does *not* take advantage of the following YET

1) 64 bit OS (other then maxium allowable ram increase from 32 bit) - we need the 64 bit version of crysis to see the performance gains here, I expect them to be sweet sweet sweet.

2) Direct X 10 - crysis beta is DX9 only.

3)Dual/Quad cores - beta doesn't take direct advantage of these. You will see some gains from background tasks being shuffled off to the other cores though. This area is really something everyone is waiting for with baited breath! As the E6850 and Q6600 cost about the same, everyone wants to see them duke it out on a level playing field.

If you get one thing out of my post, let it be this:

Crysis plays and looks fantastic even on Low settings with a decent resolution. The game scales great with hardware.

i want to see what my x38, 2900xt xfire system buys me.

I have an Opteron 170 - no one at THG put this CPU on benchmarks even if before C2D it was the best overclocked CPU in the world.
Also latest games install the AGEIA software (even if i don`t have a card). I would like to see some benchmarks of

Opteron CPU`s
Nvidia 7900GTX (non-sli)
Ageia card

...both in Windows XP/Vista at 64 bit and 32 bit.
Also no one here speaks about LINUX. I`ve played Far Cry in Cedega and modify the ini file to use OPENGL instead of DIRECTX. The new Crysis will have same option?

this will be a perfect time for them to see how much good overclocking your videocard really does.

I'm the kind of person who buys a new videocard and overclocks it as soon as I get it running.

(who knows, they might even hit 27FPS with that system if they overclock the videocard)

but for best, I recommend quad core (overclocked)
SLI 8800GTX (overclocked) at least
i would also wait for a patch to come out because for many games, some performance problems are usually fixed from patches

tomshardware needs to just build the best pc money can buy

get the highest end parts then overclock them as far as they will go, the post the min max and average framerates,

it that pc has any framerate problems then we know something is wrong with the game

also test it out on a low end pc, low end dual core, geforce 6 series and other low end things

and probably just for fun, install windows xp on a 266MHz pc and install crysis

This just can't seem to come soon enough. I hope it runs well on lower hardware...If it doesn't then that leaves alot of people p'd off and not playing the game online. So what am i to do? Play agianst the total of like 100 people out there with a gtx or better? Anyway, im exaggerating but i still do hope that my buddies with lesser systems will be able to get good enough gameplay so that they are still willing to lan to crysis.

it just seems like something is wrong with the game, on areas where you expect it to struggle, it runs smooth, and areas where you expect it to run smooth, it gets lag like it is trying to render everything in back of a object even though it is not in your view or it is rendering things that it doesn't need to render at the time

did a few tests using the hardware monitor in rivatuner

if trying to make it mainstream, i'd think either the 8800 640mb or 2900HD XT(or whatever ati's new card is called). The 640 version is far more mainstream than the gtx which only super games and editors/designers

Crysis (the beta) is play able on a system with

IP 4 HT 3,2 Ghz
1 Gig of DDR Ram 400 Mhz
a Radeon X700 Pro 128 GDDR3Ram (driver 7.10)
Windows XP Home

then you have to set the settings on low and play in a resolution at 640*480 pixels (allso at 1024*768 but lower for more smoothly gameplay)

I have this system above, And I could play it with some settings on medium, with not so much more lag.

so I will recommend a pc with a least (for minimum reg.)

3 Ghz Intel CPU (single core) (XP)
1 GB DDRRam (XP)
256 Video Ram (Xp)

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If you have have hard to understand what I am meaning, then it's because of my English.

@Rob. When will we get an update on what you plan on doing for the system and are you planning a bench / review come Monday? (after the release of the demo)

I've been running the beta pretty well on my rig.

Mobo: ASUS M2N32-SLI Delux wireless edition
PROC: AMD X2 5000+ at 2.73
Ram: 4GB DDR-667 PQI Turbo
GPU: EVGA 8800 GTS 320
Monitor: Hanns-G 19" widescreen
Sound: SB X-FI Extreme Gamer W/ Logitec X540 5.1 and Kinyo 5.1 headphones
Physc: BFG Physx card
Controls: Razer Copperhead w/ eXactMat mouse pad
Belkin Nostromo N52 game pad

I haven't chimed in on this thread in a while, sorry (though in my defense, I'm technically on vacation right now).

We'll be examing the demo after it's released on Friday and have some benchmarks next week. Then we'll have another Crysis PC update probably next week as well, once we have a better idea of how the demo runs, and we'll also highlight some of the suggestions and ideas posting here on the forum.

I just set up the following system for about 1400 (after mail in discounts, and using a few existing things I already had like a monitor and hard drive):

Intel Q6600 core2quad 2.4GHz
4 gigs of DDR2-800 dual channel
Nvidia 8800gtx 768 megs
850 watt PS
Windows XP SP2

I'll give the demo a run on Friday on that build an post about it. Rob, hope you're having a good vacation, I sure as hell need one.

@ Rob, when you start doing your bench's they have a built in benchmark,

@ - Crysis SP Demo/Bin32/Benchmark_GPU (or cpu)


A gpu + cpu bench!!!!!! Now everyone can be on the same page for what they get.