Yes, we know we’re horribly behind most of the rest of the internet in this (and in fact didn’t bother to mention it previously for just that reason), but hell, if we ever want to be the biggest PC gaming website in the world we should probably make the effort. I’ve compensated for our tardiness by adding several hundred words of bonus ranting to it.
Skip to the end if you can’t be bothered with me waffling on about Microsoft conspiracy theories and just want to find out how to make the Crysis demo look way better under hoary old Windows XP. Otherwise, don your finest head-fitting tinfoil and read on.
DirectX 10, then. A colossal balls-up, what? The idiocy began when Microsoft announced that the next iteration of the software that defines the graphical capabilities of Windows games would be available in Vista only. XP may have been over half a decade behind it, but that doesn’t mean there’s any concrete justification why it can’t do the most pertinent parts of DX10 (plenty of non-concrete ones were given). It smacked of artificially creating reasons to make people who otherwise wouldn’t bother upgrade to Vista, and hopefully the megabrains working on hacking it out to work in XP will soon accomplish their grand goals, thus throwing egg on the requisite stern corporate faces.
The slim catalogue of DX 10 games thus far has only made the people who did splash out on Vista and a DX10 graphics card feel more ashamed of themselves. Lost Planet? a) A bit shitty b) Didn’t look or perform any better in DX10. Bioshock? a) A bit shitty. Awesome, if more traditional than hoped b) The water looks a bit better and the shadowing a little sharper in DX10. Or does it? Oh, my failing eyes. World in Conflict? Nice lighting, actually. Company of Heroes (thanks to a recent patch)? Again, no really significant difference.
At the very least, performance in DX10 vs DX9 for supported games should have been better. It wasn’t. Early graphics card drivers have been blamed for that and for the overall slight framerate toll Vista takes on most games, but as NVIDIA and ATI’s software becomes more mature as the months go by, it’s increasingly hard to claim that Vista’s resource hunger and general inefficiency doesn’t play a part. It’s offensive enough that Microsoft is squeezing the hand that’s had a chokehold around PC gaming’s neck for so long even harder; it’s more offensive still that it hasn’t done anyone any good.
Through all this, Crysis remained the light at the end of this sluggish train’s tunnel. The first true DX10 game. And lordy-lord did the screenshots look good. £250-£300 on a new graphics card and a new operating system didn’t seem too stinging a price to pay for such eyeball-fondling wonder.
Alarm bells really started ringing for me a couple of months ago, with the revelation that physics and day/night cycles wouldn’t be available in Crysis multiplayer in DirectX 9 (and thus in XP), meaning DX10 players would have to play on seperate servers to DX9 players if they wanted the full woo-yeah experience.
I could possibly stomach a claim that Crysis’ hot tree dismemberment wouldn’t be available at all in DX 9, but just the multiplayer? I’m flailing around in the dark to a certain extent on the tech reasoning, but it seems to me that such effects are handled by the client, not the server. Players’ hardware shouldn’t affect what the server’s capable of to that extent, especially when we now know the effects in question are available in DX9 Crysis singleplayer. There’s every chance there really is a genuine technical explanation why this has to be the case, but if there is it hasn’t been well-expressed. [Taps tinfoil hat knowingly]. I call shenanigans. If anything, it sounds like a cynical excuse for DX9/DX10 segregation online, those who haven’t paid the Vista tithe contrivedly rendered desperate to ascend to tree-shattering, sunset-swathed DX10 valhalla.
And now this. While Crysis in Vista and with a DirectX 10 graphics card is indeed rendered in the supposedly faster-performing DX10, its maximum visual wow is not unavailable to XP. DX9 can do most of what DX10 can, just (theoretically) not as efficiently. It’s just that Crytek, or EA, or Microsoft, or some jiffy-bag-full-of-money agreement betwixt all three, have artificially locked out the ‘Very High’ graphical detail setting in XP. A simple config file tweak reactivates it, and Crysis can then look as beautiful as it does in DX10 with maximum detail in DX9.
Here’s how, courtesy of a clever Actiontrip forumite.
Browse to C:\Program Files\Electronic Arts\Crytek\Crysis SP Demo\Game\Config\CVarGroups, and open one of the .cfg files therein in notepad or whatever (make backups first). The first paragraph is the Vista-exclusive Very High settings; the last paragraph is High. So, copy the contents of the first paragraph over the contents of the last paragraph. Repeat this for all the cfg files, and then load up the demo. Selecting High settings will in fact activate Very High. If you’re confused, there’s more help in this thread.
Of course, you’ll still need a monster rig to reach anything like a playable framerate, though some folk are reporting maxed-out Crysis actually runs faster in XP than Vista.
More importantly, it reveals that there’s certain skullduggery at play in terms of Crysis and DirectX10. It may be pretty, but it’s not the major technological sea-change we’ve been led to believe it might be. Now we know for sure that DX10-level visuals do not require DX10 and Vista. Can anything ever convince us that’s the case again? I patiently await the full version of Crysis being hacked to allow physics and day/night cycles in DX9 multiplayer.
(For the record, I run Vista as my main operating system and play the vast majority of my games on it. Some of my best friends are Vistas. Sure, it often annoys me, but that’s been true of any version of Windows. I have no great problem with the OS, though I do with some of the marketing decisions behind it).
Related Stories:
My production editor on PC Format would angrily thump the desk and bellow “COMPANIES ARE SINGULAR!” whenever I said they instead of it, while PC Gamer on the other hand quietly change any its to theys.
Short answer: there is no answer.
direct-X anyversion will blow it is not open standards!!!
OpenGL rules
:)
“I still don’t buy the “DX10 could have come to XP” thing. Of course it’s possible, but it’s just unreasonable to expect so much to be backported. There’s a whole new driver model! That kind of thing doesn’t just appear. If the guys trying to backport DX10 to XP ever do manage it, and that would surprise me, it’ll be by duplicating a hell of a lot of Vista’s internal workings.”
Not necessarily. Sure, there’s a new driver model in Vista, but sooner or later OpenGL will get the same DirectX 10 functionality implemented through extensions. Then all you’ll have to do is write a wrapper around OGL. This isn’t rocket science.
The problem is that until these extensions are released by ATI and Nvidia, nobody’s going to have any success with a port of DirectX 10 to XP. Geometry shaders, for instance, would have to be completely implemented in software and it’s never going to have the same speed as it would in hardware.
This whole Direct X 10 thing, regardless of how useless the software seems to have proven itself, still makes me sad. For me, it all boils down to pure greed – there’s *no* other reason to market Vista as ‘absolutely required’ for future games when, obviously, it *isn’t* required except for the fact that MS and game companies are deliberately locking us XPer’s away from stuff that our computers can play just fine.
The thing that really miffs me is that, even though I shell out hundreds of dollars for an 8800 GeForce card, the DX 10 capability that I paid for is going to be locked out because I’m not in the cool crowd.
First, not enough people who make comments regarding this DX9 vs DX10 issue, have even a faint idea of how the engine’s are designed. And until they study the differences, anything they say is pretty much a moot point. DX10 will never work on XP 100%, and emulations will be short-changed.
There is no MS conspiracy. Even MS would have a horrendous time, going back and trying to rebuild DX10 to work with XP, and it would be entirely fruitless. If anything, it would just create more bugs, broken applications and pissed off customers who would go around whining “hey, you said DX10 would work on XP, well it doesn’t! WTFOMGBBQSAUCEWTF?”
Now, with that out of the way. In regards to Crysis and this matter:
The DX10 ‘hack’ for XP, is not using full DX10 features. The DX10 here, is more to do with physics, things that screenshots aren’t necessarily going to catch. Though visuals is related too. As mentioned above, DX9 and 10 are different engines. The way one engine renders images is different from the other. Therefor, comparison is almost pointless, as the amount of effort needed for DX9 to render a visual isn’t the same as with DX10.
The ultimate problem is that Crysis may have been written to support DX9 and DX10 fully in itself, but, the resources that went into the game were spread across the two engines. Had the game been built JUST for DX10, things may be different, we don’t know.
The bottom line is to pick your OS based on what you want. Do you want the full Crysis experience? Play it on Vista. If you need a performance boost, or you think the XP ‘looks good enough,’ then play it on XP. Stop trying to compare things that aren’t comparable.
Just getting back to the article, my problem is the fact that higher graphical settings for Crysis exist in XP than are being (officially) made available to the user, and at a higher framerate than Vista. Are the hacked very high DX9 graphics settings as good as DX10? I don’t know and I really don’t care. What I do care about is that the Crysis on XP has been clubbed in the kneecap to make Crysis on Vista look like the only way to get the best possible graphical effects. No-one can dispute that. I can’t believe that Crytek were responsible, surely it is in their best interest to having the game look as good as possible on XP, considering the large established base of users. More XP sales means more dollars for them. And like someone above already said, they didn’t exactly make it overly hard to hack. Just cut and paste. I actually feel kinda sorry for Microsoft. Crysis was the only reason many people were going to take the Vista/DX10 plunge. Like me. Actually, I don’t feel sorry for them at all. Wankers…
Sorry, forgot to add comment on the post by Homunculus…
From what I can make out through all the marketing b.s is that my nVidia 8800gtx will not be DX10.1 compliant, even though it supports all or most 10.1 criteria. But it’s ok, cos the Microsoft man said even though it’s a marked improvement on 10.0 that I shouldn’t worry cos no-one will probably develop specifically for it anyway. But they should. But probably won’t. But if they do I should just accept the fact that the card I paid over a grand for five months ago is, well, shite. And remember kiddies, you just ain’t seen a handlebar moustache untill you seen it until DX10.1…
LOL I could care less about MS and their OS’s I run XP on all my machines and have no inclination to change at the moment.
I don’t buy the conspiracy theory’s or bull about Vista and DX10 it’s all about progress eventually we progress, the first machine i used had basic windows 3.1 and i thought it was the dog balls but now Xp does the job. When they release the first service pack i’ll move up to vista and i might get a 8800 graphics card after christmas but i’m happy to use a 6800 which i find to be sufficient to play CSS.
Technophobe’s tend to buy the latest crap and run the latest programmes which is ok if they want to but like playstation 3 and the iphone what the hell would you queue up to buy overpriced rubbish for when what we’ve got does the job for now, upgrades are fine but the companies generally throw them out with bugs and errors, that the shirts bean counting don’t care about all they want is a return on their investment.
Don’t you mean ‘technophile’?
no i mean people who have a phobia, and have to have the latest technology even if it’s bug ridden first releases sensible people tend to wait 6 or 12 months until all the major glitches are sorted then purchase and by that time the price has also reduced slightly.
peace and love to all PC, Xbox360 and ps3 and wii users, ok also some mac users ;)
Sucks that Vista and DX10 is going to be the death of PC gaming. PC game developers have been flocking to the 360 and PS2/PS3/Wii now a couple of years. Maybe we have all been playing World of Warcraft and missed what happened. Pretty damn much every good gaming company packed up shop and started doing dev on consoles. And M$ has the whole “games for windows” bullshit going right? Well maybe they should get Rainbow studios to make Motocross Madness 3 for the PC since its been 7 years since M$ and Rainbow produced the last one. Pretty sad. BTW, who wants to shell 250 for a nice dual core cpu and another 250 for a video card so you can get 20-30 fps in a DX10 game for Vista? I will stick to my notebook for my PC needs, and my Xbox 360 for my gaming needs. The things PC gaming had going for it was games that had add-ons, patches, multiplayer capabilities. Hmm, sounds a lot like Xbox Live to me… If that doesn’t prove Microsoft is stabbing PC gamers in the juggular I don’t know what does. I guess the $500 a year I used to spend on Pc hardware can buy me 8-10 games a year. I’ll take that tradeoff!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phobia
Technophobia: fear of technology.
Not [i]exactly[/i] what you’re describing, I think.
You really can’t be posting a serious Death of PC Gaming rant and not know how funny that is.
You’d have to be either swimming in money or completely dense to spend $500 a year on PC gaming hardware. I want to know where the trolls get these outrageous figures. Personally, I spent about as much over the span of 3 years and still run Crysis on medium. Still too much? Well, I’d like to see you download your homework on your xbox, let alone download your pr0n.