Alright people, even though I have a pretty buff system and could enjoy the game quite well, I grew weary of all the bitching about the game's performance and I took a closer look at the cfg-file. I found a few options that you can't set in-game, but which have a tremendous impact on the workload that the game puts on your comp.
This is what my edited cfg does:
- Deactivation of physics calculations for cloth and fluids.
- Fur rendering, whatever that means, because I haven't seen any fur in the game.
- Postglow. Seems to be one of the visual filters.
- Resolution of 640x480. Ingame you can only set 800x600 as lowest resolution.
- Hitfx_lifetime set to 0 (from 18 ). Not really sure what that is, but it sounds like a decals option. Apparently it deactivates some effects during combat, which is nice, because that's basically when framerates take the biggest hit. I didn't see a difference in visual quality between the old settings and the new ones, though.
You can also deactivate the skybox, which creates an interesting effect. The game looks like it's being played at night (great in the outdoor scenes of the first level) and in parts it looks like it's a negative of the game. However, for some strange reason it seemed to put a little more workload on my machine instead of less, so I left the skybox in. After all, this is how the game was supposed to be enjoyed. Still, give it a try if you want to play the game again
All other features have been set to minimum. After replacing the cfg you can modify the original values in the settings menu within the game. The above mentioned features will remain deactivated. For high-end cards that pour out crappy framerates, I suggest using this cfg and only raising the resolution. The same goes for people who still have some reserves left on weaker cards. Raising texture quality or turning on AA or AF result in little visual improvements, while having a massive impact on your performance. Changing the resolution has little impact, at least on my card.
Despite using shader 2.0 and no AA or AF, the game looks still very nice on higher resolutions. I tested this on my GTX260 @1680x1050. Originally I played the game at 1280x800 with all eye candy turned to
max. I had framerates of 15 (icy areas, especially outside) to 30 (mostly flashbacks and heated rooms). With this config my framerate now ranges between 45 and 100 fps while using a 50% higher resolution.
I also made screenshots to show off the difference in visual quality, which is really not that big. The screenshots were taken with minimum settings of my config.cfg and with everything maxed out. Both use a resolution of 1680x1050 on a Palit GTX260 SP216 Sonic. I also wrote down the average framerate that I had when taking the screenshot, so you have a frame of reference for the speed gain.
Dream Max 30FPS (with patch):
Dream Max 30FPS (without patch):
Dream Min 50FPS (with patch):
Dream Min 50FPS (without patch):
Forest Max 18FPS (without patch):
Forest Min 53FPS (without patch):
Heat Max 23FPS (with patch):
Heat Min 46FPS (with patch):
Heat Max 30FPS (with patch):
Heat Min 46FPS (with patch):
As you can see, the gain lies between 50 and 300%. The screenshots are also included with the patch, so you can examine them further fullscreen with your favorite picture viewer. By the way, the modded cfg works for patched and unpatched versions of the game. Download the mod here:
http://www.megaupload.com/?d=AJO9IGRW
I also uploaded my savegames, created with the patched version, for those who don't want to update because it breaks their old saves. Since the game always autosaves at the same position and doesn't have a difficulty setting, your gaming experience shouldn't differ too much when resuming the game with my saves. I was very stingy with using ammo, because I mostly relied on the water gun, so you will have maxed out clips in most saves. Get the saves here:
http://www.megaupload.com/?d=2U39I9RX
UPDATE: I made a second mod to furtther improve performance!
This time i modded the init.cfg resulting in major changes in graphics, physics and particle rendering:
- All small objects like barrels, cans and debris will be gone. However, they still seem to be rendered by the engine.
Consider this being the trade-off for using this mod. The game looks a lot "cleaner" this way, if not to say barren.
- Shattering icicles will only result in a single particle (originally there were 64!)
- The console has been activated
- The logos will not be played when you start the game
- Lighting has been reduced to a minimum
- The sun has been disabled. You should only recognize that in outdoor sections. Instead of
the sun's presence, you will now have an equally lit screen. This should eliminate another
light source and with it shadow rendering
- The sky detail has been minimized. Only good for outdoor sections.
- Water effects have been disabled. Water will now look like a transparent mass. Should give you
huge performance gains in flashbacks.
- Particle effects have been eliminated. They have been reduced to a single one, to be more correct.
Usually, the game renders thousands of them for each occasion (sparks, water dripping, water shooting,
icicle shattering). Particle usage is mostly the reason why many computers can't deal with the game.
- Several visual effects have been disabled.
The optimizations have one huge advantage for older cards: They almost completely eliminate physics rendering. On my rig, I only gained about 10% better performance constantly, which is not that much, because my gfx-card did all the physx work. I made a short testrun with cpu-rendered physics and could see no difference in performance compared to hardware rendering, so all you owners of mid-range cards will most likely profit tremendously from this mod. Even for owners with strong cards is still more to gain, at least temporarily. In scenes with usually heavy particle usage even strong systems slow down and this will be reduced to a minimum.
On the other hand, the visual quality is a lot worse. The ice melting process will be simplified to ice merely drying out. Also, you won't see any dripping water any more. The frost on the walls will look rather simple and will not show the beautifully bumpmapped structures it shows with the original init.cfg. However, many weaker systems have the most problems in icy areas, so this should help loads. Seemingly endless foggy areas might not look so endless anymore, because fog has been reduced to a minimum too.
There is one major drawback though: The init.cfg-settings seem to be stored in the savegames. This means that you will have to start the game over to profit from this mod. Some settings might be read dynamically from this file when you load a save, others like the number of icicle particles doesn't seem to get updated. You can give it a try anyway. Else, just start over. The game offers only 5 hours of playing time anyway, so you don't lose much time.
Refer to the included readme for more information! Download the mod here:
http://www.megaupload.com/?d=YHWHDQV6
If you used the mods, then it would be great if you could post your system specs and the performance gains that you had by using the mods. Just one last word of caution. This mod has not been fully tested. I would have had to completely play through the game with it. Since I can play the game fine on high settings I don't see a reason for that, especially not in such a butchered way. So just be warned that you might get stuck in the game because of this mod. It's not likely, but it's possible. Depending on how quick I get feedback, I might fine tune the settings before moving on.
A few personal words regarding some of the stuff that pisses me off about what is going on in this and other forums regarding this game (and also others):
First of all, Nike-it, why do you suggest NOT installing the patch on systems that don't boast higher end cards?? Just because they can't make use of the new features due to lack of hardware-support for physx?? The patch fixes a myriad of critical and annoying bugs. Suggesting that lower spec comps should put up with that is just ridiculous. In fact, the patch has no negative impact performance-wise, because all the new physx-features get a new option in the settings dialog. Hence they can be deactivated and therefore weaker systems won't experience any more strain than they already do! So update people! This suggestion coming from a 1C official is rather disappointing. Same goes for the devs that don't seem to care about the idiotic rumors that are being passed around instead of clearing them up with a simple statement.
That brings me to the idiotic assumption that the game doesn't support multi-threading. An asinine claim that even made it into wikipedia until I took care of it! The game splits the load among the different cores. It even utilizes quad-core systems, which is quite nice. Just because the load doesn't go up to a hundred per cent doesn't mean that the game is badly optimized. It just means that your card is already busy doing other stuff and can't take more workload from your CPU! Try it with my config. Your workload will be much higher! The sole fact that people spilled out such an unproven bullshit is bad enough. It's even worse that they post screenshots that prove the exact opposite, misinterprete them and other - even less knowledgeable people - jump on the bandwagon and bash the game just so they have a scapegoat to blame for their lack of proper hardware. It also doesn't matter that your comp might handle Crysis, Fallout 3 or any other modern game with higher framerates. Those games all use different engines, shaders, physics, A.I., texture quality, renderers...the list goes on and on! If you are not capable of seeing which parts in Cryostasis are eating up your system's performance then just shut up instead of making a clown out of yourself!
A game that has no multithread-support only utilizes a single core. That's not the case with the game, neither patched nor unpatched! If you claim the opposite you're most likely having issues that are limited to your system, or you just measured it incorrectly...
A word to the noobs that spam forums across the internet asking, whether or not their hardware can run the game: It's called a playable demo! Download and test the performance on your system yourself! You're not buying a graphics card here! You can actually test the game without buying it! It even has a techdemo, so make use of that instead of looking like a fool!
New games have always been pushing the boundaries of hardware, always! It was this way ever since Doom came out and people realized that they had to invest a couple of thousand dollars for a 486, because the game just couldn't run on their crappy 386 anymore with all its visual glory. It was the same when Doom 3 came out and it was just the same when Crysis came out! People bitched massively back then, but do they still bitch now? No! Because recent mid-range hardware is capable of running the game quite well and that's because the systems got faster and not because the game was sped up with patches! Same with Cryostasis. Go get yourself a proper rig instead of whining! Most of you have an overprized console at home, or even two or more and if you can afford to buy games for 50 bucks or consoles for even hundreds of dollars, then you should be able to buy yourself a proper 3D-card. Got a high-end card and still got crappy framerates? Great! Learn how to set up a computer properly! Any monkey can assemble a computer today, but apparently only a few actually know how to set it up correctly, or even how to choose components that get the most out of the graphics card. But those are never the ones, who complain about stuff like: "Uh, I only get 30 frames in 1900x1200 with everything at max. This sucks!"
And if you're still having only a sub-par performance despite having the strongest card on the market, then get a sli, or crossfire system... After all, not all games limit themselves to the physical boundaries of modern hardware and you should all be thankful for that, because this is the milestone software that pushes graphics card development along. If games never raised the bar for graphics power, then we would still be stuck with Quake 1 graphics...
In the end, you have to ask yourself why you play the game. Is it because of the graphics, or the gameplay or because of the story? It should be the latter, because everything else is just superficial and meaningless anyway. Games like Quake or Half-Life 1 don't get played nowadays because their graphics look so "great". If you're in for the story then there's nothing to bitch about. Just to prove a point I actually beat the last four levels on my Radeon x1600 Pro, which is well below the specified minimum of an x1800. I didn't even use the above config for that extra boost. I just played the game at minimum settings at 640x480 and always had at least 25fps. So the game is well playable on 4 year old mid-range hardware (and didn't look too shabby on it by the way), so any bickering about the game's performance on your system is moot. It's not the game's features that should be tuned down just so that you can drool over some pointless framerates in this month, only to forget about it two days later, but rather your exaggerated expectations from your hardware should be lowered and with them your graphics settings... In a year, no one will care about you whiny folks any more, because all new cards will run the game with ease...in fact, they do already...
Personally, I think that all those bitchy haters only downloaded the game illegally anyway. As a real buyer, you're usually aware of what your system can run and you usually use the demos to get a clear picture first. If you're a pirate, you don't care about demos and just download the stuff, just to find out that your cheapass rig doesn't cut it any more...