Cryostasis Performance Mod

[Xiaopang]

Resolution

If you have a really weak system, then set this to minimum.

If you have an LCD, set the resolution a notch below your maximum resolution, e.g. for 1680x1050 native that would be 1600x1024 if your monitor supports it, else resort to 1280x800. If you set a resolution other than your monitor's native one, then it will perform resizing. The result is very similar to using Antialiasing. Of course the image isn't as sharp as using the native resolution, but this is minimal and your graphics card can focus on more important things.

For CRTs this does not apply. Choose a resolution that you consider detailed enough, or even your monitor's native resolution if your computer can handle it.



Aspect Ratio

Cryostasis allows you to set an aspect ratio for all resolutions. This way you can enjoy widescreen gaming even with low-res 4:3 resolutions. No performance impact.



Vsync

Forces your graphics card to wait until your monitor is ready for the next frame. This not just limits the maximum framerate to your monitor's refresh rate, but it also slows down your graphics card due to the artificial delays. Quite an impact on performance for the more or less often appearance of frame tearing. Deactivate it if possible!



Gamma Correction

Usually no need to meddle with this, unless you find the picture to bright or dark. No impact on performance.



Shader Model

The shader model is a specification that defines the complexity of graphical calculations. It has a massive impact on performance, but also on visual quality. In case of Cryostasis, a lower shading model results in differently looking visuals. However, as with all judgement calls, visual improvements lie in the eye of the beholder. I couldn't really say that the SM 2.0 visuals looked worse than the 4.0 ones, even though they looked different. In fact, the difference was rather minor. Playing the game with SM 2.0 gives you a very nice performance boost of up to 100%.



Hardware Physics

If your hardware supports Physx rendering (Nvidia Geforce 8xxx family and up), then activate this to get a massive performance boost of up to 300%



Advanced Physics

Applies Physx rendering to many of the smaller objects. Huge impact on performance with no gain in visual quality!

The physics in the game seem rather unrealistic, e.g. you walk against a barrel and kick it through half the room. Same goes for many other objects, so deactivating this option saves your comp a great deal of work without much change in gameplay, or how often do you plan on bumping into objects? There aren't that many anyway. Basic physics stay activated, so you will still see icicles break realistically and this is what you will see most times in the game anyway.



Texture resolution

Use this setting carefully. Many people only think about the quality they can achieve with it, but don't forget that high res textures also eat up more VRAM. I Suggest setting it only to high if you have at least 896MB of VRAM.

Even if you set it to low, the game will still use high-res textures in some occasions, for example for enemies. So keep that in mind.



Normal maps

This feature's task is to improve shadow quality without raising the polygon count



Specular Maps

Sets the quality of specular rendering. Reflections on shiny textures change realistically according to player's location and point of view. Performance impact can range from minor to big, depending on your hardware's ability to support this feature natively. Considering a nice balance between visual quality and performance, you can turn set this feature to low. Even though the game makes use of multiple light sources per scene, the effect is not visible enough due to the similar looking lighting in many areas.



Shadows

Enables shadows. Setting it to high can drain up to 25% of your framerate compared to not using it at all, depending on the level and your hardware. Using medium halves the performance drain.

The loss of shadows is manageable in my opinion. The game uses static shadowing for textures, so you will still see shadows on the walls. You'll just lacking dynamic shadows, so deactivate this feature if you need a mighty performance boost for a reasonable trade in visual quality.



Motion Blur

Self-explanatory. Didn't realize any impact on performance with it enabled.



Camera Motion Blur

Same as above.



Water Reflections

A very nice looking, but subtle effect. Disabling it is good for a 15% increase in performance in water-heavy areas. Due to the subtlety of this effect, I suggest deactivating it if you struggle with your framerate. Turning it off will not disable light reflections on the water, but only reflections of the ceiling.



Water Caustics

Calculates spots of light on objects near water by calculating the reflective abilities of water. Might cause up to 25% of performance loss in water-heavy areas with complex lighting. Deactivating it does not mean that you can't see reflections of light sources in the water any more, but only that the reflection of these reflections on other objects are not calculated any more.


Anisotropic Filt.

Applies filters to textures to further improve their quality. The effect is hardly visible. In fact, I could only see a difference by taking screenshots and comparing them to each other. Strangely enough, at low resolutions the effect seems to be the strongest while having no real impact on performance, while performance went down a good 10% on high resolutions without any noticable difference. Results on your hardware might vary.

Make sure to check out whether you can see a difference with this option. If not, then turn it off. It eats VRAM like a fat lady eats candy and might very well be a reason for crashes if you run out of RAM.



Antialiasing

Smooths out jaggies. This option is tricky. On my system I only recognized a 5% impact on performance, but the result might vary greatly for other setups.

Keep the following in mind: Antialiasing gets rid of jaggies by going mainly through two procedures, raising the pixel count for edges and blurring them. Especially the latter can be seen very clearly in Cryostasis. You can have that for free by using the resizing algorithms of your LCD-screen. Also, the pixel count is usually sufficient on high resolutions. On 1680x1050 the jaggies are so fine that they are not noticable unless you're looking for them. Even turning on AA doesn't have any effect on them any more. Consider this when using this option. I've seen people complaining about not being able to play this game at 1920x1200 with max AA. The idea itself is asinine, as a higher pixel count doesn't do anything than put extra stress on the graphics card without any noticable change in smoothness. Also, don't forget that AA means smoothing by blurring. Apart from the fact that your picture loses sharpness along the edges, Cryostasis already uses motion blurring, which also covers up the aliasing effect.

People who can only run the game in low resolutions will profit noticably from antialiasing. Those, who can run the game in high resolutions should rather turn it off for the sake of quality, or rather use the LCD-trick. Check out my above screenies. The min shots had no AA applied, while the others had it activated. Can you see a difference?

[shaq]

Thanks for the info. I only meant that they should have used lower settings in the init.cfg so high-end hardware could run it today. If the physx fluid settings were left at 10-20,000 it would be 5 years before high-end hardware could run it, maybe longer. I just set mine at 200 and icicles at 400 with a count of 4 and it runs really nice. That way I get all the advanced effects and the framerate stays above 30 and most of the time above 45. I do leave off AA, AF and set shadows to medium and everything else maxed at 1080p.

This game also supports 3D Vision. Can you imagine having all settings maxed with 20,000 particles on the screen and in 3D? lol This game will be great for benchmarking for at least 5-6 years unless another game comes along that uses this much physx, since the physx can be turned up to such high levels in the config.

A lot of the time all 4 cores ARE loaded in this game, but it could be because of Windows 7 balancing the loads and not the game. It does have that d.threading variable in the init.cfg so that might make it use more cores. When I played it a few months ago I don't think it loaded all 4. The patch may have added that variable. It would take a reinstall to find out.

And Supersampling requires a HIGHER resolution than your monitor's native resolution. It will downscale the higher resolution that your video card is outputting. Think of it as stuffing more pixels into less area which reduces aliasing. I used to use a 720P TV for gaming and I set the games res at 1600x900 and most of the jaggies were gone. It was much much better than setting it to 1280x720.

EDIT: For some reason the water cannon doesn't work. I hear the water running but when I push the button nothing happens. Did you experience this when you were messing around with the config?

[Xiaopang]

well, i don't agree with you that the particle count was set too high. as said already, i ran the game on an x1600 and also had no prob on my gtx 260 despite those settings. you just have to balance the workload for the card by lowering other settings. i have no doubt that the programmers knew exactly which values they needed to make effects like using the water gun and splattering water look good. i also don't agree that the game will max out cards for 5 years to come, considering that the 3d-market is only 13 years old and how far cards have come along in the last 5 years, the increase in processing power we will experience will be massive. if rumors are true, then with the release of the gtx 300 series this game will just be one among many again. check out crysis. it can be run smoothly on today's hardware, e.g. gtx 260, 280 etc. but these are already a year old, so crysis' hunger for massive 3D-power could be satisfied after only a year. also, let's not forget that you can go up to quad-sli, which would make any game playable at 5 Megapixel resolutions, but why do we have the technology if there is no game that would profit from it, because all can be maxed out with single cards already?

i do agree that modding the physx value holds much potential for future benchmarking, but i doubt it will improve the visuals much. at certain levels, the particles would overlay so much, so that you wouldn't see a difference to a value were overlay is minimized. hmmm, you kind of gave me an idea right now. let's see what happens if i crank those values up to a million lol

i also think that it's great if developers do not limit their games to the cards that are available at release. this gives some headroom for the future, to experience even better visuals in a year or two. if i have the option between playing a toned down game, or a game that i can tone down myself with the chance of cranking it up for future hardware, then i'll always route for the latter. one example i'm thinking of right now is silent hill 3. even though the game came out in 2003, it supports texture rendering up to 4096x4096, something that no computer back then could have handled, but thanks to that ability, people could pump out better visuals over the years. compare that to highly anticipated titles like half-life 2. it only used texture sizes of 256x256 because cards back then couldn't handle more. so even if you play the game at high resolutions it doesn't look much better.

i don't really know much about 3D vision, but if it is comparable to the old shutter technology then there shouldn't be a problem.

if all your 4 cores are maxed out then this is a good thing, because you can get the maximum out of your cards. i don't know what version of the game you have, but as i already said, the european one is multicore capable right out of the box and the american is even newer, so it must be too. if there's a version that's not multi-threaded, then it might be the russian one, but i doubt it. the fact that they released the first patch so quickly with SO many bugfixes makes me doubt that they also implemented multithreading, because that would have required a rewrite of most parts of the code. no way that they pulled that off within only a couple of months.

as for windows balancing the load, that only applies to threads. if an application is not multi-core compatible as it is described in lay terms, it only uses a single thread and these can never be split among cores. windows will assign apps to different cores according to their workload and it will limit them to that core if they only support a single thread, but it can't split that thread among several cores. you can't drive on 2 streets with the same car at the same time.

the threading option in the cfg seems to be a remnant of the early days of the game. to me it looks like they needed a flag to force the game into a single thread mode for single-core cpus that didn't support hyperthreading. playing with that option did nothing for me, so i think it's inactive

i might have been not accurate enough with my usage of supersampling. what i tried to say was, that the result is similar to it, while a different technique is applied, that of course is not comparable to supersampling. thanks for the correction. i'll straighten it out.

btw, are you running the game on xp or vista? x86 or x64? could you do me a favor and upload a 1080p screenshot? i'd like to examine the jaggies. some games, like stalker, don't show any improvements at certain resolutions any more. i'd like to know if this is the case with cryostasis too.

i have no experience with sli, but can't you define a card as physx-exclusive so that it will do all the physics rendering, while the other one just handles the graphics? if that's the case, did you try it with and without that setting? i'm interested in knowing which would be more efficient.

[shaq]

I definitely agree that a game should be scalable for future hardware. I didn't try to put all the settings way down to run the physx since I set games at the native resolution of my monitor. Plus I think PhysX effects are better as icing on the cake and not the cake itself. 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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Check this out:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kufpPwho9Ec&NR=1

[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.

[shaq]

I reinstalled the game and lowered the res to 1600x900, dropped the water reflections and caustic and left the default physx values and it actually runs pretty well. Reflections and caustic while running at 1080p cut my FPS in half. Re: the values I had before are good for icicles, bullets and the sparks. I didn't notice much of an increase in visual quality with them at default. Water definitely needs to be higher than 200 though. There is so much water at 20,000. It's like a waterfall in a few places. lol I would leave the icicle count at 16 and particles at 300 as well as bullets and sparks with water up as high as you can. I am tempted to put all the settings down and run 1,000,000 water. lol I bet that would be awesome. I imagine there is a limit to the game engine at some point though. I haven't gotten to the water cannon yet but I imagine it won't work when the water count is below a certain number. It wouldn't work at 2000 either.

Have you looked to see if the AI can be adjusted? A lot of places in the game are really easy and I wanted to make it harder. Some of them won't chase you they just keep doing somersaults. lol

Crysis 2 is supposed to be out next year with their new engine: Cryengine 3. It will be for consoles too so hopefully it won't be cut down to the console level. At 1920 res Crysis really starts to slow down...1680 isn't too bad. 1 GT300 might be enough for it...I hope so anyway...but with AA it will slow it down a lot. Especially since it needs a 2GB card for high resolutions and AA.

The new batman demo arkham asylum has breakable objects, steam and cloth physx but no water yet at least. Here it is:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vINH6...eature=related

[Xiaopang]

Originally Posted by shaq

I reinstalled the game and lowered the res to 1600x900, dropped the water reflections and caustic and left the default physx values and it actually runs pretty well. Reflections and caustic while running at 1080p cut my FPS in half.

interesting. i wonder how the performance cuts on your sli-system compare to mine with those settings. it seems that water reflections and caustics seemed to have a bigger impact on your setup, but this might have also been due to the resolution.

as far as your particle values go, i'm just re-installing the game and will check them out. they seem reasonable to me. 1 icicle count is a little bit too few lol, but 16 sounds alright

Originally Posted by shaq

I am tempted to put all the settings down and run 1,000,000 water. lol I bet that would be awesome. I imagine there is a limit to the game engine at some point though.

lol i'll beat you to it and will post a screenshot. i also think that there will be a limit, but it will most likely only be set by the the datatype.

Originally Posted by shaq

Have you looked to see if the AI can be adjusted? A lot of places in the game are really easy and I wanted to make it harder. Some of them won't chase you they just keep doing somersaults. lol

indeed i have, but not very thoroughly, so i wasn't able to dig something up. an AI tweak would certainly be nice. imagine a hundred monsters charging at you and all you have would be your mosin, or even worse, your lock with the chain lol...it would be necrovision all over again

Originally Posted by shaq

Crysis 2 is supposed to be out next year with their new engine: Cryengine 3. It will be for consoles too so hopefully it won't be cut down to the console level.

yeah, i also hope they won't use the console as a reference, but knowing crytech, they certainly won't limit themselves to that. the console versions of crysis were cut down compared to the pc-versions, so i think there is little reason to fear that for crysis 2 suddenly consoles would be the reference hardware.

Originally Posted by shaq

Especially since it needs a 2GB card for high resolutions and AA.

ah damn, i should have opted for that 1792MB card then... too bad that using sli doesn't add to your memory count.

that batman demo looked awesome! THOSE physics look nice and well implemented and not so cheap and unrealistic as in cryostasis. tearable cloth, dynamic paper, destroyable objects...sweet... now why do all icicles in cryostasis shatter the same way? last time i checked, real ones break off in one piece and only break into a few pieces when hitting the ground...if at all...let alone shattering... if the physics in cryostasis looked as believable as those as in batman then most people wouldn't have so many issues, because those physics use a whole less processing power while looking more realistic

[homes513]

I think your mod affected my game more than it should. It works great of course it boosted my fps by 50. The problem is that i think it took out an item needed to pass a certain part. The part of the game im talking about is when the character is in a mental echo. Its where you in a scuba suit and some mutant drags the character out of the water and cuts it open with an axe. I cant get passed this part because the point where you have to take the axe to kill the guy the axe just disappears. Im not able to pass the game now

[coolestbaby]

Thanks Xiaopang very much! dont want to roll over the game for another 4hs

[chungpe84s]

i'll appreciate it.