280.26 WHQL NVIDIA Drivers

[Blackdog_kt]

Comparisons are valid, as long as the scale is similar.

Sure, if CoD was properly optimized they wouldn't be redoing their graphics engine (and it's a good thing they are), but don't expect a game that tracks 300-500 parameters for your aircraft alone (damageable components and the CEM module) over a huge map (map is loaded in segments, but object positional data is tracked for all segments and not just the one the player is in) to run at the same visual quality and maintain similar frame rates to a shooter that uses a few square kms of terrain at best.

I think it was Bliss who said that the mission running on the Syndicate server has about 15000 objects and 5000 of those are AA guns (which come with extra processing load, they have to take aim, fire and can cause extra effects on aircraft). The map is loaded in grids of 10x10km or so according to Luthier, but the state and position of all those objects is tracked all the time regardless of grid.

And before someone says that a lot of it is just the server crunching the numbers and passing the data on to the clients, it's completely doable to have missions with a similar load run in single player mode as well. There's a guy over on the simHQ forums who was building a map template. He has populated both sides of the channel except for London with anything you can think of (road blocks, static convoys, flak, pubs, the whole lot).

His stated aim is to have it so that wherever you fly you'll either find something of interest to look at in terms of immersion, something to shoot at or something that shoots at you (in other words, there's flak guns of all calibers covering almost the entire coast on both sides of the channel).

When asked about how it performs, he said that apart from the increased loading times, once in the mission he can fly with identical performance to someone who flies on an empty map. That's not a small feat to achieve and i think i don't even have to point out how important it is for the future when we'll be having online wars and dynamic campaigns.


On the other hand, if Crysis2 is anything like the first one it probably has less than a couple thousand items to track at any one time and i'm being way generous here, most probably it uses either a "bubble around the player" method, a set of predetermined spawn points for hostiles or a combination of the two to populate its map.

I'm not dissing it, i'm just stating the obvious: the scales are different, so the load on the PC increases appropriately.