*Confirmed* Original Crysis Bound for *PS360
- Thread starter fellix
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How do optimize effects that have never been done or seen in a game before?
You think of all the things that are being calculated at any given time and I think it's very optimized, CryEngine 2 is doing and rendering many many more shaders and effects then pretty much any other game there is.
What makes you think the first implementation is going to be optimized? Don't be silly.
I wouldn't call uber shader a particularly great use of resources. There's a reason why they moved away from having that explosion of shader combinations to a deferred setup.
What's "optimized"? Now you'd just simply be getting into semantics, but just the fact that they got the majority of the game up and running on hardware that predates Cryengine 2 should be evidence enough that CE2 was just brute force. What PC hardware with 512MB of RAM total or shader power on the order of Xenos/RSX could run vanilla Crysis ?
That old SSAO wasn't old at the time, And iirc Cryengine 2 is a Deffered/Forward renderer hybrid.
And I've seen the game on consoles so don't even go there with the whole 'Crysis working on consoles shows how un-optimized CryEngine 2 is'
They got HL2 and Doom 3 running on the original X-box.... Infact Valve actually improved the bump maps in the HL2 version on the xbox iirc....Does that make the PC versions any less optimized?
HL2 ran like shit. Doom 3 was a complete redux. Try harder in your comparisons.
And no I'm not saying that just because it's on console that it's automatically more optimized, but just think for a moment about the RAM consumption for the streaming and loading or any of the features I already mentioned.
Yeah, putting words into my mouth. How ingenious.
So how does Crysis run on 2005 hardware? How does it look compared to the Crysis console edition?
Right and now they've got a newer method which both looks better and runs faster. Calling the initial implementation "optimized" is a gross perversion of vocabulary here.
Deferred shadowing, forward lighting with uber shaders. It's horribly inefficient lighting.
If you're calling the capability to render only a few dynamic lights vs the many many more with deferred lighting optimized, then maybe you need to re-evaluate some definitions.
How is Crysis on console loading versus vanilla Crysis? Stop giving me these side-tracked excuses. There are a lot of things in CryEngine 2 that are brute force and inefficient.
Who exactly are you arguing with?
Our point is that at the time it was clearly the best that could be done, at least nobody else was doing anything that came close to it for the level of fidelity at that performance. Nothing else came close to it in looks/sounds/interactivity for a long long long time, and today it performs pretty well and holds up well visually against the best looking games. Of course it's not well optimized when looking at it from years in the future.
Neb said:
almighty said:
bigtabs said:
Our point is that at the time it was clearly the best that could be done, at least nobody else was doing anything that came close to it for the level of fidelity at that performance. Nothing else came close to it in looks/sounds/interactivity for a long long long time, and today it performs pretty well and holds up well visually against the best looking games. Of course it's not well optimized when looking at it from years in the future.
No, it clearly wasn't the best they can do at that time. It wasn't optimized, they just threw whatever tech they could think of without thinking much about how its going to play out. Crytek straight out said it like hundred times. CE2 was unoptimized and thats a fact.
- Xzero (ex modder, now works at Crytek)
Yes I've seen those 2 comments the same as everybody else, where are the other 98? They are written from today's perspective after spending years optimizing for the extremely limited resources on consoles. Show me something that was written from the perspective of the PC release.
There never was a need to fit Crysis into 512mb total VRAM+RAM on PC. The fact is PC Crysis does look better than console Crysis because there is better hardware in the PC. Yes that is brute force. With a combination of 4 years additional optimization PLUS the 3 years that went into the original game PLUS the brute force of course it would do amazing things, but Crytek don't appear to have an interest in doing that as in their words - "there's no point".
If it wasn't the best that could have been done at that time, prove it... who was doing anything better? Sure there are always improvements that can be made. A world record holding gold medallist sprinter could have ran faster if he had trained even harder, but he was still the fastest.
Crysis was the gold standard for a long time, introducing a wealth of never seen before features. You wanted it to be better? Sure, everyone would like that. You want it to be faster? Yeah, lovely, but when do you release it?..... and for god's sake what else was there that competed with it? For years AAA release after AAA release and the response was 'oh well, it's no Crysis beater'.
Only now are you getting games that look/sound/interact as good. It came out 4 years ago. Nobody is arguing that it couln't have been optimized more.
I suppose some people would have preferred medium settings to be called maximum and stripped out some of the forward looking stuff.
There never was a need to fit Crysis into 512mb total VRAM+RAM on PC. The fact is PC Crysis does look better than console Crysis because there is better hardware in the PC. Yes that is brute force. With a combination of 4 years additional optimization PLUS the 3 years that went into the original game PLUS the brute force of course it would do amazing things, but Crytek don't appear to have an interest in doing that as in their words - "there's no point".
If it wasn't the best that could have been done at that time, prove it... who was doing anything better? Sure there are always improvements that can be made. A world record holding gold medallist sprinter could have ran faster if he had trained even harder, but he was still the fastest.
Crysis was the gold standard for a long time, introducing a wealth of never seen before features. You wanted it to be better? Sure, everyone would like that. You want it to be faster? Yeah, lovely, but when do you release it?..... and for god's sake what else was there that competed with it? For years AAA release after AAA release and the response was 'oh well, it's no Crysis beater'.
Only now are you getting games that look/sound/interact as good. It came out 4 years ago. Nobody is arguing that it couln't have been optimized more.
I suppose some people would have preferred medium settings to be called maximum and stripped out some of the forward looking stuff.
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Exactly... Optimization is about iterating and finding better ways of utilizing the hardware. If there weren't any improvement possible in the first iteration, then yes, maybe you do have a case for calling CryEngine 2 "optimized", but as it stands you're just getting all defensive without any logic whatsoever applied to the definition of the word.
Anything can be the best they could do at the time, and yet they found better ways of streaming/loading, better ways of doing multiple dynamic lights, better ways of rendering shadows (cascade), better ways of rendering SSAO. That's a process that can fall under the label "optimizing".
This whole argument on your end seems to be semantics and your apparent definition of "optimizing". There's nothing more I have to say on the matter then because you just seem to get defensive.
Again, irrelevent to the definition of "optimized". Calling CryEngine 2 optimized against a future iteration is just silly.
Oh don't be so bloody melodramatic. Grow up.
Excuse me? Don't take my comments so personally in future. Less of the 'grow up' thanks.
The 'drama' was to illustrate a point that Crytek couldn't win. If they'd left the stuff out it would've been another above average FPS. If they put the stuff in, it's not going to perform so great on most peoples rigs.
The 'drama' was to illustrate a point that Crytek couldn't win. If they'd left the stuff out it would've been another above average FPS. If they put the stuff in, it's not going to perform so great on most peoples rigs.
Quake 1 was doing things noone ever did before, and yet the rendering engine was one of the most optimized software renderers ever on a PC. Clearly it's not a question of what you do, if its revolutionary or not (which CE2 wasn't, actually), and your attitude towards the question suggests that you aren't that well informed about programming...
There are two main kinds of optimizations. One is to come up with better algorithms and ideas to imlpement features, like how the new post-process AA solutions work and keep getting more and more improved. This needs serious research, experimenting, and so on, and it depends on time and experience.
The other way is to take your existing algorithm and make the best possible use of existing hw resources, checking if the data structures could be more efficient, if the engine isn't going anything stupid, and so on.
This takes far less time and works with completely general coding skills.
Cryengine 2 apparently didn't do anything about even the second kind of optimization, they've conscoiusly ignored these practices and decided to rely on the continous speed improvements of PC hardware development. They were somehwat lazy or incompetent and did a lot of mistakes with the engine, most of which were redeemed with the next iteration.
There are two main kinds of optimizations. One is to come up with better algorithms and ideas to imlpement features, like how the new post-process AA solutions work and keep getting more and more improved. This needs serious research, experimenting, and so on, and it depends on time and experience.
The other way is to take your existing algorithm and make the best possible use of existing hw resources, checking if the data structures could be more efficient, if the engine isn't going anything stupid, and so on.
This takes far less time and works with completely general coding skills.
Cryengine 2 apparently didn't do anything about even the second kind of optimization, they've conscoiusly ignored these practices and decided to rely on the continous speed improvements of PC hardware development. They were somehwat lazy or incompetent and did a lot of mistakes with the engine, most of which were redeemed with the next iteration.
Not sure if comparing it to the quake engine is fair, but I can agree with what you say in principle, though I have no way of knowing what their policies were when they were writing the game all those years ago. I'm sure they did make mistakes that in hindsight came to light.
I think a fairer comparison would be against other engines of it's day. Did anyone else do what Crytek accomplished with Crysis and perform any better? Did anyone else even try until years later?
Crysis was a bit of an anomoly. Way ahead of it's time in features (as evidenced by the lack of competition in that regard for several years). That means the only games we can compare it to performance wise are games that came out a long time afterwards. If it had have been optimally made it with the same release date it would've been a miracle. BF3 for all it's glory will have techniques that will be out-dated in a few years. Still doesn't make it any less of a stellar accomplishment.
I think a fairer comparison would be against other engines of it's day. Did anyone else do what Crytek accomplished with Crysis and perform any better? Did anyone else even try until years later?
Crysis was a bit of an anomoly. Way ahead of it's time in features (as evidenced by the lack of competition in that regard for several years). That means the only games we can compare it to performance wise are games that came out a long time afterwards. If it had have been optimally made it with the same release date it would've been a miracle. BF3 for all it's glory will have techniques that will be out-dated in a few years. Still doesn't make it any less of a stellar accomplishment.
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That is not the point. Stop trying to avoid the issue that even completely new software technologies can and should be optimized because efficient resource utilization is not a question of what the algorithm does.
Also, there aren't many "big" things in Crysis and most of them are actually superficial technologies. Like SSAO, basically a post processing effect that can be added to nearly any engine in just a few days (if you don't want to optimize it). It was mostly a fairly standard engine with some extra on top. Most of the game's visuals relied on the quality of the art content, and on it's complete disregard of running efficiently on available hardware. It's easy to make something look radically better looking if you don't care how it performs.
Also, there aren't many "big" things in Crysis and most of them are actually superficial technologies. Like SSAO, basically a post processing effect that can be added to nearly any engine in just a few days (if you don't want to optimize it). It was mostly a fairly standard engine with some extra on top. Most of the game's visuals relied on the quality of the art content, and on it's complete disregard of running efficiently on available hardware. It's easy to make something look radically better looking if you don't care how it performs.
Perhaps we're both just trying to make different points? The original question that sparked this off was:
"???? How could you think CE2 was optimized? It's been proven the engine is way too draw call heavy, amongst other things... "
I took this to mean: "How could you ever have thought it was optimized". My concise answer in two parts being "Because it performs well enough now against current competition on todays hardware", and "we didn't have anything else to compare it to for years".
The big things in Crysis don't seem as big now, but at the time I seem to remember we were all pretty amazed at sub surface scattering, SSAO, godrays, soft shadows et al. Just slap it on and get it right you say. Fair enough. Who else was doing that in 2007, 2008, 2009 to the same degree with better performance? But that's not the point you are trying to make is it.
"???? How could you think CE2 was optimized? It's been proven the engine is way too draw call heavy, amongst other things... "
I took this to mean: "How could you ever have thought it was optimized". My concise answer in two parts being "Because it performs well enough now against current competition on todays hardware", and "we didn't have anything else to compare it to for years".
The big things in Crysis don't seem as big now, but at the time I seem to remember we were all pretty amazed at sub surface scattering, SSAO, godrays, soft shadows et al. Just slap it on and get it right you say. Fair enough. Who else was doing that in 2007, 2008, 2009 to the same degree with better performance? But that's not the point you are trying to make is it.
I think you're misunderstanding what optimsiation is. Optimisation is making the best use of your resources, and not necessarily doing most new-and-exciting things. A well optimised PS1 game can't do any of the modern technqiues, but it's still well optimsied because it's making great use of what the hardware is capable of. Crysis wasn't well optimised because the harwdare was underutilised relative to what it was possible of achieving. By all means make the claim that CryTek were focussing more on techniques and pushing game tech forwards than they were concerned with getting the best use of the hardware, but don't confuse the two. the fact that CryTek have been able to revisit their code and tune it much better to run on less capable hardware proves that it was not well optimised. If it had have been well optimised, the hardware running the game would have been maxxed out and lesser hardware wouldn't have been able to achieve the same results!
Your point was that Crytek should get a free pass to release sloppy code because they were doing stuff that hasn't been done before.
My points are the following:
- only high level optimizations depend on what the code actually does, but that's irrelevant for low level optimization
- most of the new things in Cryengine2 weren't really radically new anyway
To better illustrate how it works, let's compare three games.
Crysis wasn't really doing anything drastically new or different, and it was quite inefficient in how it utilized hardware. Mind you, there's a LOT of various technologies in the engine so feature lists are quite long of course. Well, that can be considered a relatively new approach though
Battlefield 3 isn't doing anything completely new either, but it does it extremely well, there's a lot of both high and low level optimization in everything (and again it's a very long feature list).
Rage is completely revolutionary in its data management (unique virtual texturing and realtime streaming and transcoding) and it's also very, very efficient (but it's still a bit too taxing for the consoles). Also, it doesn't really do anything special anywhere else, so the feature list would be quite short.
Oh, and all three games have very high production values and that plays a very important role in how good the final products look.
My points are the following:
- only high level optimizations depend on what the code actually does, but that's irrelevant for low level optimization
- most of the new things in Cryengine2 weren't really radically new anyway
To better illustrate how it works, let's compare three games.
Crysis wasn't really doing anything drastically new or different, and it was quite inefficient in how it utilized hardware. Mind you, there's a LOT of various technologies in the engine so feature lists are quite long of course. Well, that can be considered a relatively new approach though
Battlefield 3 isn't doing anything completely new either, but it does it extremely well, there's a lot of both high and low level optimization in everything (and again it's a very long feature list).
Rage is completely revolutionary in its data management (unique virtual texturing and realtime streaming and transcoding) and it's also very, very efficient (but it's still a bit too taxing for the consoles). Also, it doesn't really do anything special anywhere else, so the feature list would be quite short.
Oh, and all three games have very high production values and that plays a very important role in how good the final products look.
SG Thanks for putting it in a non-combative way. I'm here to discuss something that at the end of the day is of no importance with a bunch of people who have a common interest to me. I don't want to piss people off, just get to the bottom of things.
I understand what you are saying.
If it was possible to be better optimized with the knowledge that AAA devs had at that time, where were all the other games with the same features yet performing better? I can't remember any - not even a single one. I think it was Metro2033 that finally knocked Crysis off the indoor scene throne, but still didn't outdo the outdoors. Metro is another game that suffered from lack of optimization in areas, or at least problems with allowing the user to configure the effects - I think it was the volumetric stuff that was the worst culprit IIRC.
Again, I'm not trying to confuse optimization with features. I'm simply asking why if these features were so un-optimized was nobody else doing it better? Isn't the fact that there wasn't anyone showing a comparable feature set perhaps an indication that the inclusion of the features themselves was the problem. In which case... the question is: "Would you have been happier with medium settings being labelled maximum?"
I mean no offence with that question, I hope you follow my logic even if you don't agree with it.
I understand what you are saying.
If it was possible to be better optimized with the knowledge that AAA devs had at that time, where were all the other games with the same features yet performing better? I can't remember any - not even a single one. I think it was Metro2033 that finally knocked Crysis off the indoor scene throne, but still didn't outdo the outdoors. Metro is another game that suffered from lack of optimization in areas, or at least problems with allowing the user to configure the effects - I think it was the volumetric stuff that was the worst culprit IIRC.
Again, I'm not trying to confuse optimization with features. I'm simply asking why if these features were so un-optimized was nobody else doing it better? Isn't the fact that there wasn't anyone showing a comparable feature set perhaps an indication that the inclusion of the features themselves was the problem. In which case... the question is: "Would you have been happier with medium settings being labelled maximum?"
I mean no offence with that question, I hope you follow my logic even if you don't agree with it.
Good grief no, where did I say that?
I'm trying to say that while the code is indeed unoptimal by todays standards, at the time it wasn't so bad. As evidenced by the fact that for a few years nobody else made games with similar features that performed any better.
It's not really that hard to understand my point.
You call the devs lazy and/or incompetent. Really? You surely know that game devs are some of the hardest working people in any job (in the first world) and are terrifically underpaid for their skill-set. Do you really think they weren't working their arses off to get Crysis done?
I do take issue with that statement you make, naturally. It is hard to be believed, and pretty offensive to a group of people (I think you belong to, dont you?) who make my life more enjoyable.
