[Xiaopang]

Originally Posted by shaq

You don't think they could have at least allowed a low, medium, high settings for the advanced PhysX? We can configure resolutions, textures, effects etc but nothing for the advanced stuff just on or off.

yeah, actually i'm quite disappointed about the few features you can configure, while the configs allow you to personalize your gaming experience so well. i also thought about using profiles for the physics settings, so yes, i absolutely agree they should have built in a controlling option. at least they could have included seperated control over cloth and fluid rendering. that already has a great impact on the performance

Originally Posted by shaq

Crysis is still too slow for my liking even with SLI. I think GT300 SLI will be enough to run it right. And right after that Crysis 2 will be out with DX11 effects and then we will be waiting for GT400. lol

lol is that already in the making? on second thought it must be. how could they stop with such a successful franchise... so far i only played crysis for a few minutes and i had 30+ fps on max res with everything maxed out, but i heard that performance goes way down when the game shows its icy side. according to what i read, the gtx300 are supposed to have twice as many stream processors, so the performance boost must be tremendous. those should be capable of competing against sli-setups...imagine a sli, or even tripple sli system with those...but i guess you're right. once crysis 2 comes out, it will dwarf that processing power lol

Originally Posted by shaq

There is a benchmark built in that I haven't tried yet, but you should be able to up the particle values and run it. I assume it is the same benchmark that came out last year.

yeah, i have seen the benchmark folder too, but i haven't meddled with it yet. also kind of weak that the devs didn't include direct access to it. far cry 2 does it and that's certainly no disadvantage

Originally Posted by shaq

3D vision basically cuts your FPS in half because it renders everything twice. That's why I said it would be awhile before we could run that with all the effects turned on.

so it is like the shutter effect. guess nvidia just re-labeled it with a fancy name. i wouldn't mind trying it. with my first mod i get 40-70 fps, which would be enough even if cut in half

Originally Posted by shaq

And I mentioned Windows 7 rebalancing because if you have DCS:Blackshark it only uses one core if you run it under XP. But if you use Vista/7 and set the affinity to use all 4 cores it will increase FPS by 50% even though it is not multithreaded. Setting the affinity to all 4 cores in XP doesn't help at all.

i don't know this game, but it certainly is multithreaded, or else it wouldn't be able to utilize more than a single core. xp has a massive limitation in form of a missing descriptor variable that was introduced with vista and that defines how many cpu-cores the system has. there have been quite a few software titles reported that suffered from not being able to recognize more than one core due to this shortcoming. after all, just one more reason not to use an 8 year old operating system on modern hardware. but just to get back to the supposed multithreading-capabilities of windows 7. it is impossible to cut a single thread into small enough portions to spread them among cpu-cores. windows 7 has improved multithreading support. apparently the multithreading performance is much higher than in vista due to optimized thread handling, so may be this also played a role when running blackshark on it.

Originally Posted by shaq

And for some reason I can not turn SLI off for this game in the drivers. I turned it off in Nhancer too and even deleted the profile but SLI stays on. lol If I totally disable SLI it will run on one card but the other one goes into low power 3D and stays there. So if it were calculating PhysX it would slow it down because the memory is at 100MhZ. In the Batman demo you can disable SLI in the profile and it does give a 10FPS boost using 1 card for graphics and 1 for PhysX over using SLI. I guess the drivers are still not mature enough for SLI and PhysX. It must not distribute the load efficiently.

very interesting! thanks for the info on that one. btw, batman demo? i have seen batman files and wondered already, but i haven't looked into it. guess, i was too busy playing the real game lol

Originally Posted by shaq

Any idea why the water cannon will not work? Does it work for you when you lowered the fluidwater number? I will try starting a new game or something. I have played about half way through and only 1 flashback scene ran very badly..14 FPS with the lowered values. Everything else is good so far and you get to see all the bursted pipes and steam they added in the patch.

oh i gotta try it with your lowered values first. i only experienced two states so far: either it worked nicely with advanced physics enabled, or it only pumped out a measly stream of pixel-thin water when i deactivated it.

btw, great video. i missed quite some of those effects, like the water gushing through the open door (no wonder if you try not to drown), or the water coming out of the pipes. the video also showed impressively that the effects still not look very believable on a strong system, i mean, the way the water flooded the room, or the way water fountains are created when something falls into water. also, i never realized that shards of ice fall down when you shoot an enemy. why does that happen anyway? are they frozen? if so, why don't they shatter into a million pieces? (or rather 20000 lol). THAT would have been a cool effect worth having, but no... considering all this, i could have done without all these unrealistically looking effects. shading, caustic, normal and specular mapping were already impressive enough for me.