Crysis patch clamps water tessellation (finally!)

by Ludwig Kietzmann on Jan 10th 2008 7:30AM

We can't tell you how many sessions of Crysis were ruined for us by the rampantly unclamped water tessellation. Of course, the primary reason for that may be that we actually... don't know what water tessellation is. It has been thoroughly clamped though!

So say the notes released alongside the 139MB Crysis 1.1 patch, now available for download. Other issues dealt with (listed after the break) include improper water droplets, motion blur, FSAA optimization, animation bugs and memory leaks. If you've been having a blast with Crytek's visually stunning first-person nanosuiter, be sure to grab the first patch for tomorrow's game today.

Fixes

Fixed: Potential crash in D3D10
Fixed: Orange boxes apearing when hispec savegame loaded into lowspec game.
Fixed: Inconsistent damage dealt to vehicles when shot by LAW.
Fixed: Reflection resolution on D3D10, MultiGPU reflection update fix
Fixed: Memory leak with FSAA modes
Fixed: Infinite ammo hacks.
Fixed: Memory leak in D3D10 when switching screen modes
Fixed: Muti optimizations
Fixed: When player melees during gun raise animation, their gun will be in a permanantly raised position.
Fixed: Crash when loading savegame with level exported recently by editor
Fixed: Virtual keyboard does not function properly when a game pad is connected
Fixed: Users can lose the ability to look around with the Right Stick
Fixed: Setting screen resolution to "default" stops user from selecting last resolution
Fixed: Bug when changing resolution in D3D10
Fixed: Issues with Depth of field and water droplets in D3D10
Fixed: Crash on NaN warning

Updates

Added: Motion Blur UI and V.SYNC UI options
Optimized: Motion blur
Optimized: FSAA (Full Scene Anti-Aliasing)
Optimized sound id implementation
Enabled VSync functionality in D3D10
New benchmarking files for ice CPU benchmark.
http/xmlrpc password protected remote control session
Marked debug cvars as cheat
F12 (screenshot) now works in restricted mode as well

Tweaks

Reduced LAW splash damage vs. infantry in PowerStruggle mode
Slowed Rocket projectile speed down in MP slightly
Disabled automatic turret bounding boxes on vehicles to prevent issues with LAW hit detection
Reduced grenade explosion radius in multiplayer
Clamped water tesselation to avoid cheating in MP
MultiGPU improvements with depth map updates

Source

Tags: Crysis, Crytek, EA, Electronic-Arts, FPS, Patch, PC

Reader Comments (51)

Does the patch make the game playable on computers not imported from the future?

This is getting old very quickly, my PC is decidedly low spec (you can get my GFX card for under £90) and I've been enjoying Crysis LOADS.

better yet: does this game add "teh fun™"?

Well, it sure doesn't make ignorant consumers any smarter. That AlienWare PC that costs 8000$ is not the only way to play Crysis you know?

Well it sure as hell doesn't make ignorant consumers any smarter.

disregard all my comments about smartness, I'm no longer qualified to talk about that kind of thing.

According to Wikipedia: "A tessellation or tiling of the plane is a collection of plane figures that fills the plane with no overlaps and no gaps."

Sounds like they fixed a pretty basic flaw in the tiling of water objects.

What I get out of what Wikipedia says about tessellation in computer graphics is that it brakes down a big section into triangles. These triangles are probably either the reflection on the water (instead of making every pixel on the surface of the water actually reflective, each little triangle is a flat surface made up of multiple pixels to save on processing power) or to generate any disturbances on the surface of the water, like waves or ripples. Anyway you look at it, it definitely means the water is made up of tiny triangles...

How would the fix relate to cheating in multiplayer?

Wonder if it's like many other games where you go 'halfway' into the water and you can basically see underwater with the same clarity as above-water..?

Oh, and .. water, water, water. (Just because I didn't write it enough above)

Water tessellation affects how many little ripples and stuff the water has. This affects how realistic it is... but also how clear it is. With very low tes you could see someone through water from very far away. A relatively useless cheat, but a cheat nonetheless.

Post your specs

Core2 Duo @ 2.13GHz
2GB DDR at...667?
GeForce 7600GT, 256MB DDR2
Onboard sound, no physics card
Vista Ultimate

This game was made for monster PCs. But I'm playing with EVERYTHING set to the lowest setting (resolution too) and it still looks gorgeous, runnning around at 50-60fps.

The concept of "Low quality" has improved dramatically over the past 3 years.

Xbox 360 Premium
20 Gig HD
Wireless Rumbling controller
50" Samsung 720p Plasma
1000watt 5.1 Samsung Surround Sound

Playstation 3
40 Gig HD
Bluray Drive
Sixaxis Wireless controller
52" Sharp Aquos 1080p LCD
1000watt Pioneer 5.1 Surround Sound

Crappy PC
Cannot play Crysis FTL =(

Core 2 Duo E6600 @ 3.6 GHz
EVGA 8800 GTS 320
2 GB DDR2 800 upclocked to 840
EVGA 680i board (going to be 780i very soon Thanks EVGA)
1.2 TB dual Raid-0 array with dedicated Page file drive
Vista 64 Buisness (it was free)
19" widescreen and 22" widescreen dual monitor

All custom watercooled, and tuned properly.
I also have a 360, and any game that is ported to PC, I buy the PC version since I can run it far better on my PC. My 360 is very very lonely for games, which is why I like my PS3. Games there you can't play anywhere else.

E6750 @ 4GHz
Gigabyte GA-P35-DS3R
Crucial Ballistix 2GB DDR2 PC-8500
ATI HD 3870
Windows XP

orange boxes?

Yes. Apparently there's a half life of that guys flung through a portal featured in that picture of a team fortress, too. ;]

Every time I see that Crysis screenshot, all I can think of is a Nerf football.

A64 3000+, 2GB RAM, 7800GS 256MB AGP, 120GB HD, 400W PSU, Antec knockoff case, and pretty lights on my case fans.

I run Crysis in medium to medium-high settings at 1680x1050 resolution on my 22" widescreen monitor.

No AA or AF of course, those settings don't have much visual effect for a huge performance decrease.

I can see not being able to tell the difference between low levels of anisotropic filtering... but anti-aliasing sure as hell DOES have a huge effect on picture quality.

Not in Crysis. If your shaders are set to high or you have it tweaked, Crysis uses a form of antialiasing where the engine blurs edges to reduce aliasing/shimmering. Obviously doesn't look as good as real AA... but it looks damn good, and for an extremely minimal performance hit.

any word on the broken ass scripting in the game?

sorry, DDR3 on the GPU.

Is it jus me or is crysis not all that it is cracked up too be?

+

Farcry sucked ass aswel! am i the only one who think this?

Yeah.... I got bored with the Crysis demo (after about 5 minutes). Seemed a bit gimmicky I guess. Farcry took a bit longer, maybe an hour or two. Something about the tropical setting just doesn't seem interesting to me.
Farcry 2 on the other hand looks like it could be worth a purchase.

But, if Surfer Girl is to believed, Far Cry 2 is going to be several times more hungry (read: unoptimised) than Crysis was/is and also several more shades of broken (go Ubi QA!!!)

I thought farcry was tons of fun. I know my buddies and I played the heck out of it on the Xbox.

AMD ATHLON 64 X2 6000+ 3.0Ghz
ABIT KN9 SLI
4 GB DDR2 @ 667 Mhz
EVGA GEFORCE 8800GTS
PSU 550 WATT
RAID MAX NINJA CASE
SEAGATE 120 GB HDD
WD 250 GB HDD
SOUND BLASTER LIVE 24 BIT
LOGITECH 5.1 CH

I get around 40 to 45 fps on high settings with no AA. This game pushes the limit on hardware.

Why do people always forget to list their resolution? Without that, all your specs and fps are meaningless.

You mention that, but fail to call him on the case, hdd, and soundcard/speakers ? :P

I bet the case really affects how well Crysis runs.

The water surface tesselation refers to the amount of polygons being used to render the surface (not the shading) of the water in the game.

They probably rendered it very highres previously which was probably unnecessary since most of the appearance of the water surface is due to the normal-maps used on it, thanks to per-pixel lighting.

Don't know if that's making it any clearer for a non-game developer though. ;)

Nope, it has to do with people using hacks so the water is transparent, so they are able to see people sneaking around underwater.

I'm just gonna hop in and say I don't understand what the big deal with Crysis is..

Specs:

Core 2 Duo 2.20 Ghz
2GB DDR2 800Mhz Dual-Channel RAM
XFX 8800GT 512MB DDR3
XFX n680i MOBO
Antec 650w SLI-Ready Power supply.
(I have about $900-$1000 in the comp total after everything)

I run Crysis in 1280x1024 (best my crappy ol monitor can support), with the settings all the way up and it runs absolutely fine. I've never bothered looking at the actual FPS because I dont really care... it runs perfectly smooth and doesn't have any problems.

Get rid of your freaking K6, buy a half ass decent computer, and quit acting like its impossible to play the game...

You own an 8800GT and you claim you only need a 'half decent' computer to run the game? I think an 8800GT makes your PC 'fully decent', considering it alone will cost you at least as much as an entire Wii system. Quit acting like it's cheap to be a PC gamer. Not everybody can hunt down the best prices, find OEM deals, and assemble the PC themselves, and that's the only way PC gaming even approaches affordable.

It's not rocket science, and I'm not being an elitist bastard here. Ok, maybe building your own PC is a little frightening for some, but there are plenty of webshops that will assemble the computer for you for a nominal fee. All you have to do is pick out the parts (hell, some webshops even have a step-by-step choosing of components a la Dell).

And yes, an 8800GT costs as much as a Wii, but you get graphics that are so far beyond the Wii's that it's not even funny. If you cheap out on the rest of the components, you can get a Crysis at High running PC for 800$, okay it's not the cheapest thing ever but if you were in need of a new computer anyway, it's not bad at all. If you already own a computer (most likely), you can just get a mobo, RAM, CPU, and GPU (assuming your computer is old), which would all come down to the price of not even 500$ (250$ for the GT, 100$ for a C2D, 50$ for 2GB of RAM, which leaves you with 100$ to get a mobo). 500$ was the price for the PS3 not too long ago, so I don't see what the big deal is, except people find the whole assembling thing too hard, and don't want to take some time to learn it (it's not hard at all, it's the same thing as assembling a toy plane or whatever), which is understandable, but those people should shut the hell up about how expensive PC gaming is.

I can play Crysis with everything on Very High at 720p which I output to my TV and it runs at 30fps on my machine: 2.2Ghz Core2Duo and an 8800GTS. That's the early levels at least. The framerate drops significantly when the "ice" levels start where I have to drop it to high.

Anyway, its easily playable and very enjoyable. And to whoever asked if the patch added "teh fun" obviously hasn't played it at all since its one of the most fun "sandbox" fps's I've played in a while. The nanosuit really mixes things up and lets you play it how you want.

Also, when applying the patch, during the "validating install" part my hard drive made the weirdest and scariest noises I have ever heard coming out of a computer. I don't know what the hell it was doing but it made my Raptor hdd sound like a techno sound synthesizer.

is this game better than Half Life 2....?? i know in graphics it is, but what about gameplay sound and story...

no way!!!

i would recommend you play cod4 over crysis!
there is little gameplay, its all about the graphics

It's not as good as Half Life 2 but that's some pretty stiff competition! It is tremendous fun in multiplayer and I don't usually play my games online.

As for this patch:

I received an extremely noticeable and appreciated performance boost. For the quality of the graphics, I was already perfectly content with my FPS... the engine was definitely already very well optimized.

I can play at 1680 x 1050 with highest quality textures and a mix of medium and high for everything else. At these settings, it is still easily the best looking game released to date. I get from like 28-35 FPS in singleplayer and around 60 in multiplayer.

Seems to be a 15-20% boost in fps depending on what resolution and dx9 or 10.

I can play all the levels now on 1900x1080 on high without having to tune the game down in the later levels.

Also fixed the holes in the last level, so I can't fall into the ocean anymore:P

Intel Pentium4 HT 3.45 GHz
2GB Dual Channel DDR400
ATi Radeon X1950 Pro AGP OC'ed to 625/700
Seagate Barracuda 16MB 7200RPM UATA

Runs Crysis at all settings on medium, textures on high, at 1280x960 at 40-45 FPS. When getting in fights, it drops down to 20-25.

Not bad at all, speaking before the patch it had to be all low.

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Crysis patch clamps water tessellation (finally!)

Reader Comments (51)

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