Hard Reset Gameplay Performance Review @ [H]

FrgMstr

Just Plain Mean
Staff member
Joined
May 18, 1997
Messages
55,532
Hard Reset Gameplay Performance Review - PC exclusive shooter Hard Reset landed a few days ago, and we've got the skinny on performance for you. The mean, lean, DX9 engine creates some dazzling visuals, but you may be too busy shooting to see them. We've taken a quick look at the entire game with six video cards and we're ready to shed some light on this funky little game.
 
Maybe I missed it, but is there an actual review of the game itself?
 
Cool, I am curious though why you guys never did this for Witcher 2? Up to this point I assumed it was because was dx9 and you guys were just doing this to show off dx11. Now that I see your not I would have thought that game fit your Criteria, quality PC game, good graphics for just dx9 that are fairly demanding.
 
Hard Reset really sounds like my kind of game. Some frame rate figures other than just for the HD6970 would have been nice!
 
Cool, I am curious though why you guys never did this for Witcher 2? Up to this point I assumed it was because was dx9 and you guys were just doing this to show off dx11. Now that I see your not I would have thought that game fit your Criteria, quality PC game, good graphics for just dx9 that are fairly demanding.

These types of articles are second in priority to hardware reviews. So if we can fit gameplay analysis in, in a timely manner, we do, but otherwise we defer to hardware reviews first. It is all about resources.
 
Wow, thanks for the heads up on this game. I didn't even realize this game was out and will have to give it a look based on what i've just read.
 
I wanted to say that I played through the demo of this game a few days ago. As you can see on the rig in my sig below I run eyefinity and crossfire.

3240x1920 @ 120hz

This game had me experiencing Negative Crossfire Scaling. I was using 11.8 Catalyst With 11.8 Cap 3 Caps.

1 6970 (6950 unlocked 950mhz/1415mhz) 45 fps avg
2 6970 (6950 unlocked 950mhz/1415mhz) 30-35 fps

The game felt noticeably choppy with crossfire on. I tried with and without the input lag setting, I tried with MLAA and All kinds of AA

*** Also ***

I tried using Radeon Pro to force crossfire support using the 4 available crossfire options to no avail.

If you have a eyefinity/crossfire setup or a crossfire setup in general, you may be best suited to simply disable crossfire until AMD or FWH (flying wild hog) develops a patch or cap for the crossfire profile.

Otherwise guys enjoy and thanks Hardocp for the great performance analysis.
 
This game was a Day 1 purchase. The demo was great, and the fact that it was PC only, an old school style shooter, and made by a small team pretty much convinced me that 25 bucks was worth it. I havent been disappointed.
 
Guys.. thanks for supporting a PC-exclusive product worthy of the readers' attention!
 
For the crossfire profile try this: http://www.rage3d.com/board/showpost.php?p=1336688840&postcount=81

I wanted to say that I played through the demo of this game a few days ago. As you can see on the rig in my sig below I run eyefinity and crossfire.



If you have a eyefinity/crossfire setup or a crossfire setup in general, you may be best suited to simply disable crossfire until AMD or FWH (flying wild hog) develops a patch or cap for the crossfire profile.

Otherwise guys enjoy and thanks Hardocp for the great performance analysis.
 
I wanted to say that I played through the demo of this game a few days ago. As you can see on the rig in my sig below I run eyefinity and crossfire.

3240x1920 @ 120hz

This game had me experiencing Negative Crossfire Scaling. I was using 11.8 Catalyst With 11.8 Cap 3 Caps.

That's infuriating, I didn't realise (with properly configured systems) that this still happened. :(
 
If you have a eyefinity/crossfire setup or a crossfire setup in general, you may be best suited to simply disable crossfire until AMD or FWH (flying wild hog) develops a patch or cap for the crossfire profile.

Otherwise guys enjoy and thanks Hardocp for the great performance analysis.

2x 6950's with 6970 shaders @ 890/1375. I noticed some odd crossfire behavior, but the game runs smooth as silk in-spite on my system.... No eyefinity though.
 
At 1920x1200 even one 6970 runs the game fine though, so you probably wouldn't notice negative scaling.
 
Re that first screenshot of the half-constructed building: maybe it's time for your reviewer to get those reading glasses he's been avoiding... The MLAA does a good job of getting rid of the aliasing, but at a considerable (and to my eye unacceptable) cost to the texture sharpness. The textures on the top floor of the building and on the concrete blocks on the closest wall are very blurry compared to those in the no AA, 2XAA, and 4XAA images.
 
Played through the demo myself, was very impressed with the game especially given that its only a DX9 title. Did not notice any slowdowns on my system with x-fire but am only gaming on single monitor at 1920x1080.
Really wish I would've pulled the trigger on the steam pre-sale, now I'll just have to wait until the next sale or price-drop...
 
Really wish I would've pulled the trigger on the steam pre-sale, now I'll just have to wait until the next sale or price-drop...

What is the diff in price, 2-3 bucks? You probably spend more than that on your morning cup of coffee :D
 
I wanted to say that I played through the demo of this game a few days ago. As you can see on the rig in my sig below I run eyefinity and crossfire.

3240x1920 @ 120hz

This game had me experiencing Negative Crossfire Scaling. I was using 11.8 Catalyst With 11.8 Cap 3 Caps.

1 6970 (6950 unlocked 950mhz/1415mhz) 45 fps avg
2 6970 (6950 unlocked 950mhz/1415mhz) 30-35 fps

The game felt noticeably choppy with crossfire on. I tried with and without the input lag setting, I tried with MLAA and All kinds of AA

*** Also ***

I tried using Radeon Pro to force crossfire support using the 4 available crossfire options to no avail.

If you have a eyefinity/crossfire setup or a crossfire setup in general, you may be best suited to simply disable crossfire until AMD or FWH (flying wild hog) develops a patch or cap for the crossfire profile.

Otherwise guys enjoy and thanks Hardocp for the great performance analysis.

http://hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1622346&page=16...... Check this thread for cap4 profile did wonders for my eyefinity crossfire set up
 
Game runs smooth as hell even at 8064x1600 (Bezel corrected 7680x1600) on my system. Some games are barely playable with just two GTX 580's in SLI. In some of them I'm forced to drop down to 5760x1440 or 5760x1200 to play them smoothly. Or turn down some of the eye candy as the case may be. With Hard Reset I can max it out with MLAA and it looks and runs great.
 
Really wish I would've pulled the trigger on the steam pre-sale, now I'll just have to wait until the next sale or price-drop...

What is the diff in price, 2-3 bucks? You probably spend more than that on your morning cup of coffee :D

I really want to support these guys but $30 for 3 hours...can't do it. That, to me, is just as bad as giving your money to console ports.
 
Game runs smooth as hell even at 8064x1600 (Bezel corrected 7680x1600) on my system. Some games are barely playable with just two GTX 580's in SLI. In some of them I'm forced to drop down to 5760x1440 or 5760x1200 to play them smoothly. Or turn down some of the eye candy as the case may be. With Hard Reset I can max it out with MLAA and it looks and runs great.

What do you think of the game?
 
What do you think of the game?

I'm only about 30 minutes into it right now. I haven't had much time to play it. So far I'm enjoying the game but I enjoyed the demo and I'm just a little farther along than what was shown in the demo. Great graphics, although the game isn't the next Crysis or anything. Nice particle effects and environment destructibility. I've seen more destructibility but not quite as well executed as it is here. What's really impressive is the atmosphere, the lighting and the game's performance. The article touched on those topics though I do agree completely.
 
Re that first screenshot of the half-constructed building: maybe it's time for your reviewer to get those reading glasses he's been avoiding... The MLAA does a good job of getting rid of the aliasing, but at a considerable (and to my eye unacceptable) cost to the texture sharpness. The textures on the top floor of the building and on the concrete blocks on the closest wall are very blurry compared to those in the no AA, 2XAA, and 4XAA images.

This.

And considering how much a sharpening step helps with the FXAA hack that's been floating around, it's a shame the developers of Hard Reset did not take this additional step in recovering texture quality.

There's really no excuse for blurry textures with these full-scene shader AA methods now that it's been fixed by the community.
 
The MLAA does a good job of getting rid of the aliasing, but at a considerable (and to my eye unacceptable) cost to the texture sharpness. The textures on the top floor of the building and on the concrete blocks on the closest wall are very blurry compared to those in the no AA, 2XAA, and 4XAA images.

Agreed. I made it a point to compare the image first while mentally blocking out what was what, making a judgment, then reading the results. You can notice it on the gun for ex. and other places as well.
 

Will try and report back

Edit: I wanted to try your suggestion, however I didn't have the profile listed for Stalker Shadows of Chenobyl in my dropdown of RBE. I am on the latest version of RBE.

Edit 2: It worked after I manually added the profile. It took some looking but I found a way to make a profile and name the .exe and I guess radeon pro has a vast amount of game.exe's that it knows. This fix worked too!!
http://hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1622346&page=16...... Check this thread for cap4 profile did wonders for my eyefinity crossfire set up

I'll also try this cap with radeon pro disabled and let you know if it helps with this game. I wouldn't be surprised as it's obvious they worked closely with amd throughout the development process as the game runs very good on amd hardware and implements morphological AA.

Edit: The unofficially released 11.8 Cap 4 DOES fix the crossfire scaling in this game.

I am now averaging 75-80fps @ 3240x1920 @ 120 hz with maxed settings using MLAA!!!

This game is much more fun when not running sluggish too. The Havok Physics Engine never looked better.
 
Last edited:
Bump, so anyone with crossfire knows the problem will be fixed once AMD updates their drivers OR releases the 11.8 Cap 4. Downloading the unofficial release of 11.8 cap 4 will fix crossfire scaling.

I haven't been able to try the Radeon pro fix as I have no profile available for Stalker SOC

Edit: I have manually added the stalker SOC profile and removed the Cap 4 and tried and I can confirm that this too can work. Although, I'd recommend the Cap 4 as who knows what other applications the cap is meant to fix whereas the radeon pro route only fixes hard reset.

So the community has suggested 2 fixes both of which work!!!

Thanks Guys
 
Last edited:
Last edited:
I'm enjoying the game. I found the start somewhat annoying, but then I got the hang of how you are supposed to kill stuffs...
 
It is officially released now http://sites.amd.com/us/game/downloads/Pages/crossfirex-app-profiles.aspx and mentions Hard Reset as the only change.

Edit: Just loaded it, frame rate more than doubled.

that's funny because I looked earlier today when I was linked the thread to look for the cap. They just put it up today, it looks like this is specifically for hard reset. AMD seems to be on it. Only a few days after the release and we are good to go. I have a feeling the performance can improve more and this is just a slight fix.
 
This game like many others suffers from supremely bad stuttering in crossfire/eyefinity, AMD users are better off running turning off crossfire or running in single screen.

I'm really sick of this shit, AMD have had eyefinity kicking around for what.... 2 years now? Yet they still can't provide a smooth experience for mutli GPU configuration. I can't wait for the next card lineup from nvidia, i'll be first inline to jump ship.
 
This game like many others suffers from supremely bad stuttering in crossfire/eyefinity, AMD users are better off running turning off crossfire or running in single screen.

I'm really sick of this shit, AMD have had eyefinity kicking around for what.... 2 years now? Yet they still can't provide a smooth experience for mutli GPU configuration. I can't wait for the next card lineup from nvidia, i'll be first inline to jump ship.

Are you trolling or did you not read the thread. You do know it's only 2 pages right?

BTW anyone know how SLi is working in this game. From what I remember hearing SLi was also broken in this game, and today I learned there is a fix for crossfire. I haven't heard anything about SLi yet.
 
Are you trolling or did you not read the thread. You do know it's only 2 pages right?

BTW anyone know how SLi is working in this game. From what I remember hearing SLi was also broken in this game, and today I learned there is a fix for crossfire. I haven't heard anything about SLi yet.

I'm afraid I don't follow. The thread is about game play and performance in this title, I'm simply... ranting about how in crossfire/eyefinity the game play experience is poor. Crossfire is technically working with CAP4 however the stuttering in cross-finity means the game experience is still miserable.
 
I'm afraid I don't follow. The thread is about game play and performance in this title, I'm simply... ranting about how in crossfire/eyefinity the game play experience is poor. Crossfire is technically working with CAP4 however the stuttering in cross-finity means the game experience is still miserable.

The game works fine now with crossfire and eyefinity. That's why your comment felt so poorly placed. This is the second thread where it seems everyone now confirms that it works with the cap 4. I was oblivious to cap 4 that's why I posted that the crossfire/eyefinity was giving me negative scaling. That's also why I worked so hard to retract my statement once I found it was fixed. I even made stuff big, bold, green etc..

It works fine now and only a few days after the game came out. All good to go on crossfire at least. I'm not sure about SLi and surround.
 
The game works fine now with crossfire and eyefinity. That's why your comment felt so poorly placed. This is the second thread where it seems everyone now confirms that it works with the cap 4. I was oblivious to cap 4 that's why I posted that the crossfire/eyefinity was giving me negative scaling. That's also why I worked so hard to retract my statement once I found it was fixed. I even made stuff big, bold, green etc..

It works fine now and only a few days after the game came out. All good to go on crossfire at least. I'm not sure about SLi and surround.

I have no trouble holding around 60fps at 5760x1200 so the performance is now scaling correctly however the game stutters worse than King George The 6th. That being said this behaviour isn't really isolated to just Hard Reset and is more a general problem with 2 or more card crossfire triple head setups. I have seen no similar issues on SLI/Surround setups.

I'd be curious to see a follow up editorial from the staff on the performance of multi monitor + multi gpu setups.
 
Back
Top