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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*...
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.
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.
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.
This one is just blatant as fuck. Tessellated invisible water running under everything? Really? Nvidia has been touting their better tessellation performance for how long now? And Crysis was the benchmark of choice so they had to go muddying up Crysis 2 to try to get the advantage.
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.