HEXUS.afterburner - food for thought
In the main review I mentioned that I’d had issues with Crysis under Windows Vista and DX 10, now’s the time to expand on that a bit.Now I’m not claiming to be some uber-PC guru but at the same time I know my way around a PC and I know that the easiest route to avoiding driver nightmares is to uninstall drivers yourself. I even have software specifically for the job… but aside from the difficulties I experienced running Crysis, the issues I’ve had with NVIDIA drivers and Vista in trying to get Crysis to run go beyond anything I’ve experienced before.
Now I think that the blame for this can be squarely laid at the feet of both NVIDIA and Microsoft for not working on a solution quickly enough. I’m sure I won’t be alone in experiencing poor framerates and eventually black screens, hang-ups and drops to desktop to name but a few of the problems. Surprisingly, in writing this review and checking some of the issues, I found that the latest NVIDIA beta drivers are actually written for the Patch 1 version of the game, not due for release until around the 25th November… but these are the very drivers we’re supposed to use now.
What is most annoying is that no-one seems to know why these problems are occurring. It’s not a question of mainboard drivers, those are up to date. I’m running the latest WHQL drivers from NVIDIA and Vista is fully up to date (except for all those language pack updates). I’ve even been through the hotfix list on NVIDIA’s site but still had terrible problems getting Crysis running under DX10.
And the real kicker is I’m fairly technically adept with a PC but imagine the problems Mr Average is going to have. And this raises the issue of tech support for Mr Average because as soon as he installs beta drivers, he loses his tech support until he removes them and drops back to WHQL drivers… which Crysis won’t run under.
So, after reinstalling Vista, and then immediately updating to Forceware 169.04 betas, I finally got Crysis running. But why oh why, on a game sponsored by NVIDIA under its ‘The Way It’s Meant To Be Played’ program, am I subjected to all this hassle? Especially as NVIDIA apparently have members of its software development relations team embedded in the Crytek studios... You can bet that there’s going to be a lot of gamers asking the same question come Friday unless something is done by either NVIDIA or Microsoft very soon.
Oh and for the record, the XP install was seamless and, apart from having to update to the 169.04 betas drivers, everything worked perfectly first time out.
So what of these issues? Before publishing this review, we did some digging… Our intelligence is that several weeks ago Crytek substantially made some significant changes to the Crysis code which had profound implications for graphics technology providers. indeed the word used to describe these eleventh hour changes to HEXUS was "irresponsible".
This and the fact that it was EA who apparently decided which build/variant of the Crytek code would be released to manufacturing, seems likely to initially leave early purchasers of Crysis with a less than optimal game playing experience; no matter whether they're running ATI or NVIDIA graphics accelerators. Until that is, Crytek release its Crysis Patch 1 in a few weeks time. Patch 1 apparently provides game tweaks, such as the ability to turn motion blur on or off but in the main is about general performance optimisations which didn’t make it to the gold version before it went to the replicators.
But the state of play (pardon the pun) right now is that the NVIDIA 169.04 BETA Vista drivers which people may be encouraged to run on the first shipping version of Crysis, are the drivers that are apparently optimised for Crysis Patch 1, and that it seems there are people in the know who think that these NVIDIA drivers are too early for the version of the game shipping and, until patch 1 ships, people could have problems. Quite what these problems may be, whether it be performance issues all the way up to random hangs, we can’t say.
We'd let you know, definitively, whether you’d experience a better, similar or worse experience with an AMD based rig with ATI graphics, but I don’t yet have one.
So, if you’re running NVIDIA graphics and want play Crysis, what are our recommendations for now and before Patch 1 is released ?
Firstly, if you’re running Windows XP then, er, seriously consider sticking with it for present. And if you do then we suggest running the NVIDIA ForceWare Release 163 device drivers which are WHQL Certified.
Since staring this review, NVIDIA released the 169.09 beta drivers, which the test system was duly upgraded to and, whilst there appeared to be an overall improvement in framerates, volumetric smoke effects are still causing problems and the new drivers fix none of the other graphics issues mentioned in the review.
If you’ve already made the brave jump to Windows Vista then, from everything we’ve seen so far in terms of stability with Crysis (and a whole raft of other DX10 games) is that, whilst not ideal, you should probably try running the NVIDIA ForceWare Release 169.09 BETA. But as we’ve said above, there seems to be a lot of work yet to do to before you’ll have an optimal gaming experience. Indeed whilst writing this sentence, and having paused Crysis by pressing the ESC key, (Vista DX10/NVIDIA 169.09 Beta) and then resuming my monitor from stand-by, Crysis reappeared in windowed as opposed to full screen mode... *sigh*
