Nebula and everyone else. I've got a "strange" situation here with Crysis 1.2.
I'm running a gtx 285 SSC with i7 920 @ 3.8ghz, 6gigs of ddr3 so I am not "resource" limited outside of maybe my videocard not being as fast as the 5870.
Anyhow I'm doing Crysis in DX9 64bit mode, 1920x1200, no AA 16xAF. I've done as much tweaking as possible with the commands, I have Rygel texture pack as well as Nebula's particle mod dated July XX, 2009.
Here's what's weird. I turn on the budget monitoring, and on the very first level, "island", there is a radio tower on the peak of a tall hill. If I look outwards from that area onto the dense jungle and the ocean, my draw calls are ABOVE 10,000, up to 12k. Is this "normal"?
Then I went ahead and played with the r_geominstancing command. Now you may think that I would already have r=geominstancing=1 instead of =0. But here is the weirdest part. When I have geometry instancing on my draw calls are almost halved (now only 6k instead of 12k) HOWEVER, my fps DECREASES once I have instancing on. Instead of 26 fps up on that hill with what was 12k draw calls, now with only 6k draw calls, I'm getting 22 - 23 fps (even 3 to 4 fps can make Crysis a lot more playable). How can that be? How can a less "intensive" situation provide me with LESS fps?
Isn't that just weird? Maybe I'm missing out on some other command or trigger here??
r_geominstancing should be set to 1 to reduce load on CPU however strange it results in a perfomance decrease!
Say have you changed this value to "1" in your autoexec.cfg and then relaunched Crysis to test?
Also these could improve perfomance a bit depeding on e_terrain_lod_ratio value.
e_occlusion_culling_view_dist_ratio=1
e_terrain_occlusion_culling_max_dist=800
Play with these commands to up perfomance.
e_view_dist_ratio_vegetation= 80-200 (global draw dsitance for vegetation, sprites/3D)
e_view_dist_ratio= 80-200 (draw distance for AI, obejcts, rocks, procedural vegetation)
e_vegetation_sprites_distance_custom_ratio_min=1-2 (threshold distance between 3D vegetation and sprite vegetation)
e_vegetation_sprites_distance_ratio=1-2 (threshold distance between 3D vegetation and sprite vegetation)
The other general Crysis question relates to shadowing in the distance. On the second stage, "Recovery", I notice a lot of shadow "flickering" in the distance. It's almost as if the shadow movement/update interval is too slow and artifical to look real. The only way I have found to make it better is by upp'ing the r_shadowjittering from 1 to 2.5 (default for very high). Of course if I go any higher, the shadows closer to me will look too blurred out. Does anyone know of a command or a set of commands that can tweak these distanced shadows so they update more often rather than wave back and forth at a very slow rate?
To have full updaterate for all shadow LODs then this command (potential big perfomance reduction depedning on shadowmap resolution and shadow amount),
e_gsm_cache = 0
Or customise which shadow LOD gets lower framerate than main framerate by changing,
e_gsm_cache = 1
e_gsm_cache_lod_offset=0-5 (where 0 is all shadows have low updaterate, 1 shadow LOD 1 and forward etc)
To make vegetation not move,
e_vegetation_bending=0 (0 is disabled and 2 is full bending)
e_time_of_day_speed=0 (some elvels have fast time transition and might make shadows "crack up")
Also I recommend a shadow jittering value of 1.5!