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Crysis 2 Update a Perfect Case of Wasted Polygons
crookedvulture writes "Crytek made news earlier this summer by releasing a big DirectX 11 update for the PC version of its latest game, Crysis 2. Among other things, the update added extensive tessellation to render in-game elements with a much higher number of polygons. Unfortunately, it looks like most of those extra polygons have been wasted on flat objects that don't require more detail or on invisible layers of water that are rendered even in scenes made up entirely of dry land. Screenshots showing the tessellated polygon meshes for various items make the issue pretty obvious, and developer tools confirm graphics cards are wasting substantial resources rendering these useless or unseen polygons. Interestingly, Nvidia had a hand in getting the DirectX 11 update rolled out, and its GeForce graphic cards just happen to perform better with heavy tessellation than AMD's competing Radeons."
So you're saying that a graphics card company just *might* have tried to get a company writing a largely-used benchmark in their favor.
Not that it's ever happened before... *coughintelnvidiacough*...
This has nothing to do with AMD. Nvidia helped, AMD didn't. So why the AMD tag? You know, other than the obvious reason that a fanboy wants to start a war.
YAY fanboy wars are awesome
warning pointless sig
One thing I learned from writing video drivers is that game developers are probably the very last people who should be developing graphics engines. We were constantly amazed by the insanely performance-sucking tricks they used to play which we then had to detect and work around; often their poorly-designed method of rendering something would be 10-100x slower than a sensible implementation.
Valve and id are the most obvious exceptions; I don't think we ever found them doing anything really retarded unlike certain big name developers I could mention.
Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity
It's entirely possible that the tessellation is per-node. E.g. in the case of the barrier, only the top seems to benefit in that the handles jut out (why those handles aren't polygons to begin with is another question, given that it would take only 8 or so for each.. hardly making a dent in polygon budgets), but it's the entire thing that gets tessellation applied. Similarly, unseen parts get tessellated (why there is water underneath a city that will never be seen is yet again another qestion).
So while it could be explained by stupidity... when you're working on a high performance game, the problems indicated in that article would have quickly been dealt with. So perhaps malice is in play.
I suspect this will be (partially) fixed in an upcoming patch, as I doubt they'd want to be known as the game that was dropped from benchmarks due to apparent bias.
Once more software is steps ahead of hardware. The game is ready for hologram projectors, if you can't see those layers of water is because you are using a 2D display.
I thought this was quite interesting that such a high-profile game would be so optimized. They have to render the realistic water in scenes where it doesn't show up at all, for instance. Seems like a huge waste of resources.
*This picture brought to you by Cuil*
People actually play Crysis? I thought the whole reason it was made was to be a test for your graphics card? One giant benchmark.
Funny may not give karma, but +5 Informative never made anyone snort coffee out their nose.
Perhaps a better phrase would be "Never attribute to stupidity what can be explained with cold hard cash".
A title with the triple-A budget of Crysis 2 wouldn't have developers that never once bothered to view the map in wire frame at some point before release.
Take a look at all the TWIMTBP/Nvidia logos slapped all over the game and you know who is paying the bills.
Crysis's claim to fame was that it gave the GPU a real workout, and it did. They ended up rendering a whole world of extra detail to make a realistic looking environment. Along comes Crysis 2 and frankly I am not at all impressed. On a computer that has no troubles handling any other game I had to drop the quality settings to ultra ugly to make the game playable. I'd prefer less pretty garbage on the screen then having to play a game at a resolution where the pixels are the size of a man's fist.
It just seems to me that Crysis 2 has lost the plot, and it's no longer about making the prettiest game, but rather making the most poorly optimised one.
The one I've noticed the most is sound stuttering. Half-Life 2 had some bad sound stuttering issues back when it came out. Valve swore up and down it was a soundcard issue, not their engine. Well, it still does it today on a completely different (and stupidly powerful) system as does Team Fortress 2. It isn't horrible, but it is noticeable and there's no excuse give that other games don't do it and my system is extremely overpowered compared to what the games need.
and who's views don't represent that of the company in any official capacity, this pisses me off.
I don't believe for a second it was an accident. This is bare knuckles marketing pure and simple and I'm glad it's getting some attention.
Uhhh...because this is another case of Quack.exe? look at the facts: You have a highly intensive programming trick used for no fucking reason on completely stupid shit like concrete dividers. Have you EVER said to yourself 'Boy this game would have totally had me if it had only rendered the concrete dividers in such loving detail I can make out the scuff marks from the boot of the guy who last leaned on it'?
Then you have this SAME technique used to slam the GPU even when it isn't on the screen or will EVER be seen, such as rendering highly tesselated water being rendered underneath the land. This isn't Minecraft, they can't dig their way down to actually see the fricking water!
Then it turns out that this game, which has often been used as the standard for benchmarks, by loading up the game with worthless crap the user can't even see will surprise surprise...run better only on certain Nvidia GPUs.
I don't think we need to call in Kojack to crack this case folks. Nvidia used their position to make another Quack.exe so that the benches made using this game will score higher on their GPUs, by loading the game up with invisible crap that slams the GPU in a way they designed theirs to take better than the competition. Hell I wouldn't be surprised if they tesselated the manhole covers just to get the count up! The sad part is like the Intel compiler (which is STILL rigged BTW) most gamers won't know they are being had unless someone points out the BS that is going down behind the scenes.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
So let me get this straight... A free update makes the game look better by using new DirectX11 features, but the whole article is criticizing the game for using a hardware technology (that's only just starting to appear in game engines), in a way that isn't as optimized as they would like? Are gamers feeling that entitled these days? If you speculatively purchase a faster hardware, it's not anybody's obligation to write software to push it to the limit you know.
Ultimately, this is why tile-based rendering owns. Unfortunately, the Kryo series is dead. 3dfx's last dying breath was also in enhanced occlusion to improve performance. Pity the big dogs don't do it
So all that hidden geometry is there to make sure anyone with anything less than a top-end GPU basically chokes to death rendering unseen details. Great way to move those premium class GPUs!
You see an advertisement every time you start a game of Crysis 2. Guess whose it is? (Hint: it's not AMD).
Heavy, unnecessary tessellation in Crysis 2 was predicted months before release. Lo and behold, those nasty rumors have now been proven accurate. Nvidia has become a very predictable abuser of its market position.
"The Way It's Meant to Be Paid"
I guess you didn't notice water running under the street, then? Saying "not as optimized as well as they could have been" is like saying the budget deficit is a tad large.
Which is a significant improvement: the invisible water or the single-pixel polygons?
Yes, it looks better, but it would look just as good without the invisible details. This is Crytek throwing a bomb that Nvidia crafted for them, and AMD is left cleaning up the wreckage.
As best I can tell this essentially boils down to retrofitting directX 11 to an already designed engine after the fact and doing so in a limited time frame.
I don't really see it as a big deal as a) the game was originally designed for directX9 hardware so anybody trying to run the game on DirectX11 hardware will probably do just fine anyway and secondly the way that modern graphics cards are designed this extra geometry generated on GPU may not even be the bottleneck.
I think that engines that will really take advantage of these technologies are only really being built now. At work we use one of the engines that has had this feature for the longest (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9F6zSgtRnkE). Other companies we know using the same engine aren't using these features because there are not enough people with the Graphics to support it. I think this will mark the beginning though.
Incidently the way that tesselation is implemented in the engine we are using. Is with two maps - the first is a displacement map and the second specifies the level of tesselation which significantly lowers the level of tesselation on flat surfaces.
Of course there's going to be a lot of flat surfaces... After all the artists have been told to make them with a lot of flat surfaces so that they don't need too many polygons on the non-DX11 platforms.... If you want to see artwork that uses tessellation well, you have to tell artists to make some.
May the source be with you.
its just like html. proper html pretty much works everywhere but shitty html sort of works in some browsers... unfortunately there are a whole lot of game developers writing shitty code that sort of works on some graphics cards, but from the POV of the user this looks like a problem with the graphics card.
Personally I think Crysis is a big wank fest for those "Must have teh benchmarks!" dumbasses with more money than sense myself.
After bumpgate on the Nvidia side and the compiler and bribery scandals on the Intel side I put my money where my mouth was and went full on AMD in my shop and my customers as I couldn't be happier. Lately I've been leaning towards the HD48xx series, which give frankly insane amounts of bang for the buck for around $60 for the HD4830 (which you can flash and turn into an HD4850 if you're brave) and the HD4850 for $75 which is just nuts for a 256bit wide pipeline.
But I can see why Nvidia stooped to this, their way of designing chips is frankly getting too expensive. The AMD way of designing the midrange chips as the main GPU and then simply going X2 for the high end and flipping off some cores in software for the low end if the smarter way to go IMHO, as it costs less which can then be passed on to the consumer. Meh until the next console refresh it won't matter anyway as those $60 chips like I'm selling crank out the purty on all the latest games at 1080p.
Cranking the tesselation on dividers and under the ground where it can't be seen is just lame though, and you'd think they would have more pride than to do a quack.exe in this day and age. Guess not.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
makes the shading on them look different, so it's not all wasted vertices(well, depending on how they calculate the shading). but you can easily test that on some modeller, make a cube that has each side made of two triangles, observe how it's shaded with basic opengl shading - now, turn on some tessalation(while keeping the shape as it is) on it, and you can see the difference, you can see highlights on flat surfaces even without applying some fake phong technique.
this or any graphics upgrade doesn't help with crysis lacking in complexity due to launch on consoles though so who cares - the memory and cpu available for the game logic was dictated by that.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Games use too many polygons, so what? They also use too much RAM, too much disk space, and too much processing power in general.
The important thing in video games is making them work, not making them optimal.
Why is tessellation done everywhere even on relatively flat stuff? Because the development team did not waste time studying each object one by one, the tessellation aspect was computer-generated for everything.
Subdividing triangles constituting planes gives you more triangles, without any geometric accuracy improvement. And geometries in games mainly consist in planes.
and come back when you learned what does "INVISIBLE UNDERWATER POLYGONS" means.
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Yeah. READ the article before talking like you did above and make yourself stand out as a moron.
the problem here is, nvidia used some programming gimmicks to make their cards perform better by creating extra load in polygons that are rendered UNDER WATER UNDER LAND, and therefore INVISIBLE.
no benefit to gamers here. no benefit to anyone. NOONE WILL BE ABLE TO SEE WHAT IS BEING RENDERED.
however, this will create extra unnecessary load in a way that some nvidia chips can handle better, and show competitors bad.
let me summarize - nvidia is incompetent, unable to beat ati in REAL game of rendering 3d, and is trying underhand tactics like a son of whore and DECEIVING GAMERS AND COSTING THEM CASH in the process.
this is basically an assault against my wallet. your wallet. gamers' wallets.
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if a graphics card company and a gaming company conspire together to deceive benchmarks and rip me out of my cash by deceiving me, i feel entitled to many, many things.
if you do not feel the same when someone attempts to deceive and fraud you, you are a moron of the first order and i have a bridge to sell you.
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tell that to the great performing cheap ati cards i bought since last 8 years while morons had been shelling out cash to this son of a whore company which doesnt refrain from deceiving and frauding them off their money.
but maybe you like getting frauded. thats your preference and i respect it.
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the issue here is that, the process is done in water that is UNDER LAND and will not be seen by any son of god on this planet in any way.
basically its a hidden object that favors some nvidia chips, and makes the competitor cards get choked.
its fraud.
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ATI is the one trying to trick you.
Their cards have less computing power, but they make up for it with nifty tricks that only work in certain cases. As soon as you get out of these idealized cases, performance drops dramatically.
That's what happens when you put priority on console smoothness, and not on high-tech development.
... for no fucking reason ...
... see the fricking water!
I find your inconsistent application of profanity appalling...
WARNING! This girl exceeds the MAXIMUM SAFE standards established by the FDA for BRATTINESS
You can get a GDDR5 5770 for a little bit more. More ram, big newer, less power consumption. Runs well in CrossFireX as well. I've been very happy with mine
Actually, I thought it showed a remarkable gradation of emotion. Of course, I had a great-uncle who could curse for 2 1/2 minutes straight without repeating himself. It gave me an appreciation for the art. ;-)
It took the game's consolified low-poly meshes and prorgammatically inflated the poly count, barely enhancing the image quality at all, while driving processing requirements way up. It looks more like one of those "repeat N 1000 times" benchmarks, the kind I write when trying to find bottlenecks in a web page, than any sort of effort to make Crysis 2 not look like the steaming EA-published turd it is.
Crysis 1 still looks better than this half-assed sequel, DX11 be damned.
If this is some bizarre partnership between EA and NVidia to push GPUs, shame on them both. I've come to expect this from EA, by far the greediest chop-shop in the industry, but NVidia... come on, have some self-respect. Treating your customers like blind idiots is NOT going to help move $1500 quad-SLI setups. Between these stunts, and ATI's stagnant driver performance, they are just creating a giant opening for a new contender to come hoover up their marketshare.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
Heard of Arma2?Crysis is a toy
Techreport seems to be slashdotted. Am I being too harsh, or is that horribly embarrassing for a site that focuses on performance testing and overclocking ?
Just sayin...
-Billco, Fnarg.com
Esp. ones involving Emacs.
As everyone knows VI kicks its sorry little arse.
they dont at all make up for anything. first, cards do not have 'less computing power'. the world's fastest gpu is an ati for the last 200 days or so as of this moment. nvidia hasnt still caught up.
ati is giving people what they need - medium power, low energy consumption, efficient chips, and you can put as many as you want. the machine i am on has 2 x 5670 cards as of this moment. they are cheap middle-middle segment cards, despite being decent. however, when crossfired, they perform like a 5770 card, which is mid segment. and that card is able to play all new games comfortably.
what happened was that, i had bought a sapphire 5670 a year or so ago because it had silent arctic cooler on it and was performing very well despite its cheap ($80) price. and now a year later, when i feel that i need more power, i just bought another $80 sapphire 5670, and just crossfired them instead of shelling out $160 or so on an 5770.
and my case is still silent, and despite i am running a new 990fx chipset motherboard with a 4 core phenom, 4 20 cm fans, a fan controller, a sound card, i am still pulling only 150 watts of power under full load. and it is STILL silent.
this is the level of energy efficiency, silence and ease of use ati cards provide.
ati is selling people discrete gpus that you can use as building blocks. with those discrete gpus, you can match exactly the wattage, processing power, and silence level you desire with your budget. and nothing will stay underutilized. it is a modular approach.
it is of course possible to get new monster 6870x2s and crossfire them to leave best nvidia offering behind. however i wonder who would need such processing power which will leave some 50 fps extra over 100 fps already present. and an 6870x2 would still cope up well 2 years later, just like how 4870x2, an 2 year old card, still ranks above mid-upper segment as of now. basically people who bought those cards 2 years ago, do not need to buy new cards as of this moment.
thats modular approach. every concept in i.t. world uses it, and graphics card should not have been an exception.
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Two things...1.-Are they 256bit? Because while being 256bit doesn't make much of a diff in gaming I've found it makes a pretty BIG diff when it comes to transcoding, which with most of my customers going HTPC is really nice. Between the AMD drag and drop and some of the newer converters coming with Streams support it is easier than ever to use the GPU for video conversion.
Second thing, I have to work within a customers budget and we are talking 256bit pipes for $60! Most folks around here simply aren't gonna blow $110 of their budget on a GPU, not when they aren't hardcore gamers and frankly I don't blame them. the diff between prices can mean another 4Gb of RAM or another Tb HDD without having any noticeable effect on gaming quality since most games are still directX 9. Hell the only game that is Dx10 I've seen that didn't use it for wanking off like TFA is Just Cause II, and that runs just fine on the HD48xx series.
So while I'm sure the HD5770 is a nice card for me and my customers frankly it is just too expensive for what you get. And Crossfire? I haven't met but a single guy that has ever used that stuff and he was one of those "must have teh benchmarks!" types with more money than brains. I seriously doubt an HD5770 in Crossfire is gonna use less juice or crank out less heat than an HD48xx which frankly if the customer decides they don't like the heat (haven't had any complaints myself, but then again I always use quality fans and make sure the boxes had good venting) I've seen guys online drop the temp on an HD4870 by a good 30 degrees F by just replacing the stock cooler with a $20 aftermarket.
So you are looking at $50-$70 for the HD4850 (I lucked out and got mine for $50 on sale) and another $20 for the cooler, that is still less than the single HD5770 which last I checked was around $120. Considering my biggest seller ATM is a $450 triple core setup tacking on another $50 just for the GPU when the client won't see any difference in picture quality? Would be a VERY hard sale and would price it right out of many folks budgets.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Have you EVER said to yourself 'Boy this game would have totally had me if it had only rendered the concrete dividers in such loving detail I can make out the scuff marks from the boot of the guy who last leaned on it'?
It certainly would make "concrete divider cleaner 2000" more realistic.
How many languages did he curse in?
The only time I heard him do it, I was probably 6 or 7, just before he died. Two languages that I'm sure of; Canadian French (from his mother) and American English. Since he grew up in a logging town in Northern Minnesota in the early 1900s, my guess is he must've picked up some Norwegian, Swedish, Italian, and who knows what all else. I sure didn't. :)
You have a highly intensive programming trick used for no fucking reason on completely stupid shit like concrete dividers.
Seems especially pointless as in the screenshots the divider is right next to some poorly rendered leaves that look flat and unrealistic.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Sorry, have to agree, ATI is SHIT.
Won't even bother reading. My opinion is clearly the better one.
hehe.
Have you heard about SoylentNews?
you missed quite easy to understand and useful technical information that would help not only your wallet, but the visual experience you get from your monitor/tv/flat panel.
enjoy. you deserve spending more money, for less.
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Simple fix. Pre-compute curvature, tessellate based on curvature. I.e. anisotropically remesh.