Clear Sky; horrible performance, buggy

vurt on 16/9/2008 at 11:43

The buggy part is, of course, obvious, but i was expecting at least a little better performance than this.

Opteron @ 2,9GHz
8800GT 512MB
OCZ 2048MB DDR RAM

Medium: 28 FPS
High: 15 FPS
Max: 12 FPS

Tried it with 2 different recent Nvidia drivers.. Crysis (on very high settings runs much better than this!), Bioshock, World in Conflict, Company of Heroes, CoD4, STALKER SoC, they all run great for me in 50+ FPS..

It's really hard to get it to play in fullscreen, with much fiddling around (turning full screen on/off, alt+tabbing etc) i can eventually get fullscreen.

I really hate Nvidia and their drivers so i might get the ATI 4870 X2.. But will the CPU still make it sluggish though, that's the question... anyone tried the game with a ATI 4870 x2?

chis on 16/9/2008 at 13:12

Consult this thread:
(http://forums.tweakguides.com/showthread.php?t=7327)

Patch to 1.5.04, many bugs have been fixed, and the game is - certainly not perfect - much more reliable and playable.

However the "Extended full lighting mode" or DirectX 10 mode is a known performance hog and is poorly optimised. Shame, it looks gorgeous.

Use "full lighting mode" and/or edit your user.ltx file. Set R2_AA to off, R2_SUN to off, R3_MSAA to off, and R_Supersample to off. This should bring Clear Sky to parity with the graphics of SoC, and performance was basically the same for me on an 8800GTS (320MB UGH!) at 1440x900, i.e. at full settings, 30+ fps easily.

vurt on 16/9/2008 at 13:15

I have the latest patch of course. But i will check out the tweak, thanks. Too bad you have to turn off the lightning :(

242 on 16/9/2008 at 13:22

Quote Posted by vurt

I wouldn't say that Crysis is more demanding than this game, I think scenes are more complex/detailed in CS.

Anyway, CS is really sluggish in advanced dynamic lighting mode with max settings during sunrise (and perhaps sundown) even on high-end videocards (because of godrays, they're really beautiful though). After about 9am the game becomes MUCH more fluid on my HD3870. Did you try to turn off or reduce quality of godrays, or just to wait some time until sun is up enough?

If that doesn't help, play with various other graphics setting, there is plenty of them, as well as a set of predetermined graphics quality settings. If nothing helps, switch to Full Dynamic Lighting Mode (from CS exclusive Advanced Dynamic Lighting Mode, you should get performance of SoC in that case)

chis on 16/9/2008 at 13:25

In fact I found that simply switching to "full dynamic lighting" mode wasn't enough, performance was still shoddy. I THINK CS is still using MSAA even in this mode, so disabling it in the USER.LTX file (the R3_MSAA tweak) will help a lot.

Jashin on 16/9/2008 at 15:45

Jesus, thank god I just got a new rig or I would not even bother after hearing all that.

vurt on 16/9/2008 at 15:47

I've made up my mind, i want to play this game with higher settings, so i'm going to order a 4870 x2..

Also, it helps being drunk making these descisions! lol

TBE on 16/9/2008 at 16:50

What resolution are you playing at? I found when I went down in resolution I could up the full dynamic lighting and other effects. Still looked great. I've got a huge screen though, so any reduction in resolution is bound to help out the graphics processor.

vurt on 16/9/2008 at 17:17

native 1680x1050, any other res will look like crap, unfortunately i'm on a TFT.

...and meh, the 4870 x2 is out of stock everywhere.

Briareos H on 16/9/2008 at 19:14

Strange, I have a 8800GT 512MB as well, and it runs very well in 1280x1024 on Windows XP, DX9 and most settings maxed out (view distance, grass, objects and texture quality), no AA and god rays on Medium. Athlon 64 4000+, 2GB RAM.

In my gaming terms, "very well" means ~30 FPS smoothly with a few hardly noticeable slowdowns. Roughly the same performance as Crysis with "High" settings.