Tweaking Crisis

[Ducimus]

For the last week, my new hobby has been trying to shoehorn Crysis into my existing machine.

2Gigs ram
AMD 64 3500
Nvidia 7800 GS / 256 MB RAM

Not the greatest system, not the worst, but its all this boy can afford. So, in continuing an age old tradition of "making do with what you have", ive been going over crysis as best i can. Up until this point, ive been able to run any FPS i want, and not have a problem. Crysis however, is pretty much a next gen game as FPS go, so where i normally didnt get into tweaking, ive now had to.

So heres an autoexec ive been working on. Ive been applying this to all game settings at Medium, with the exception of texture quality at low. Anything with a "//" in front of it, is remakred out and will not be loaded by the game.

con_restricted=0
//d3d9_TextureFilter bilinear
//r_displayinfo=1
//sys_enable_budgetmonitoring=1

sys_budget_sysmem=1024
sys_budget_videomem=256
r_CustomVisions=0

//object quality
e_terrain_lod_ratio=1.5
e_lod_min=3
e_lod_max=7
e_lod_ratio=3
e_view_dist_ratio=40
e_view_dist_ratio_vegetation=15
e_proc_vegetation=0
e_vegetation_bending=0
e_vegetation_min_size=2.0
e_cull_veg_activation=15
e_vegetation_sprites_distance_ratio=0.75
e_vegetation_sprites_distance_custom_ratio_min=0.5
e_detail_materials_view_dist_xy=64
e_detail_materials_view_dist_z=64

//shadow
//e_shadows = 0
e_shadows_max_texture_size=1024
e_gsm_lods_num=3
e_gsm_range=4
e_shadows_cast_view_dist_ratio=0.25

//physics
e_phys_foliage=1
e_cull_veg_activation=20
e_foliage_wind_activation_dist=0
es_MaxPhysDist=50

//game effects
g_ragdollMinTime = 5.0

//shaders
q_ShaderSky=0

//volumetric effects
e_Clouds=0

//particles
e_particles_lod=0.75

So far, it feels like ive gotten a pretty good FPS boost while being able to keep most of the bells and whistles of the game on. That said, i think the bottleneck in performance now, is geometry, and crysis has ALOT of it. It would be awesome if i could somehow reduce all the geometry.

Whats maddening, is that Far cry looks alot like crysis, and runs infinatly better. I can max most everything out on Far cry, and it looks better then crysis to me. So not being one to give up, im still trying to get Crysis to look like farcry, with similar performance. I think ill try a bottom up approach (setting game to low, and then tweak updwards), instead of a bottom down approach (setting game to medium and then tweak downwards)., and see if i cant find a happy medium. However, ive noticed that even at low, the game still kind chugs in urban areas - again, it's the geometry i think. One thing i havent done yet is reduce the screen resolution, but im not a far cry (pun not intended) from that.