Crysis 3 Video Card Performance and IQ Review @ [H]

mavere said:
I'm not gonna lie, I prefer the pseudo-cinematic blur of TXAA.

Not many will agree with me, but after switching back and forth many times to make sure my brain wasn't playing tricks, I think the TXAA shots definitely have more of a CGI look to them than the "THIS IS VIDEOGAME!" hyper-sharpness of the other AA modes.
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So you think it looks good enough in Crysis 3 to justify the performance hit? I really like the looks of this game at 60fps and will lower settings to keep it at that frame rate. I'll give TXAA a try, but if it tanks my framerate, it's a no go for me.
 
I too would like to see the Titan results. Beyond that, for all platforms, I would like to see the 99%, 99.9%, and 99.99% framecount solutions for 40 fps and 60fps.
 
Mike89 said:
A couple of things I would have liked to see expanded on in this review were screenshots of differences between shadows at high vs medium since the review talked about a performance increase at medium. The other is the review mentions no performance difference between the low and very high texture setting, states it could be a bug but then shows no screenshots between low and very high to see what the deal is. Kind of left one hanging on those two things.
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On the topic of shadows, what I discovered was best seen in motion. I actually had taken a series of shadow quality setting screenshots, however, it was very hard to tell the differences in screenshots. The shadow differences in quality are shown off in movement. What I found was that on Low Shadows the edges of the shadows were very blocky in movement, you could tell the shadow was low quality. The higher up you went, the more the edges smoothed in movement to where at Very High it was a seamless movement, and the edges were perfect. It just didn't show off at all in static screenshots. Overall, it wasn't a huge difference in quality until you hit Low, Medium is an acceptable level if you are having performance issues.

I also didn't notice much or any difference in texture quality when I changed the settings, visually, again lending to the fact it could be a bug. It needs further investigation, I was using the inside of the base in the first level Post-Human because those textures looked very high quality and very detailed to me, but for me, I didn't visually or performance wise, see a difference between Low and Very High textures on them. I don't think the option is working properly as stated, a bug most likely. It was a bug in the Beta as a fact, and I think it might have carried over.
 
mavere said:
I'm not gonna lie, I prefer the pseudo-cinematic blur of TXAA.

Not many will agree with me, but after switching back and forth many times to make sure my brain wasn't playing tricks, I think the TXAA shots definitely have more of a CGI look to them than the "THIS IS VIDEOGAME!" hyper-sharpness of the other AA modes.
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You will be fighting an uphill battle with that one. What I experience is TXAA removing detail from the game. For example, let's take one of the buildings in the game, the buildings have shaders applied to them to make them pop out and give a 3D look with the brick. Stone walls have the small pitted holes that look 3D. There is parallax mapping and displacement mapping which make textures pop out and look 3D. TXAA washes these effects out, and takes away that 3D feel. It removes fine granular detail put into the textures. It reduces the quality of the textures, and objects, and makes them appear blurry.

To me, it is not acceptable, and is a reduction in the gameplay visual quality implemented by default from the developers. It reduces their artwork quality from what the base, raw image quality is. I don't think an artist would appreciate their work being lowered in image quality. They want you to experience it with all the image quality they put into it.
 
Brent_Justice said:
You will be fighting an uphill battle with that one. What I experience is TXAA removing detail from the game. For example, let's take one of the buildings in the game, the buildings have shaders applied to them to make them pop out and give a 3D look with the brick. Stone walls have the small pitted holes that look 3D. There is parallax mapping and displacement mapping which make textures pop out and look 3D. TXAA washes these effects out, and takes away that 3D feel. It removes fine granular detail put into the textures. It reduces the quality of the textures, and objects, and makes them appear blurry.

To me, it is not acceptable, and is a reduction in the gameplay visual quality implemented by default from the developers. It reduces their artwork quality from what the base, raw image quality is. I don't think an artist would appreciate their work being lowered in image quality. They want you to experience it with all the image quality they put into it.
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Any reason why 4xSMAA doesn't work with multi-GPUs?
 
ShePearl said:
It's my understanding that SMAA MGPU is 4xSMAA.
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It is not. The menu says: SMAA MGPU 2X under SLI and CF. When I have the option selected, it looks just like SMAA Medium 2X. MGPU refers to the fact that its using both GPUs to accelerate.
 
Lot of work in this. Good information with the AA and shadow comparisons.

Brent, can you comment at all on OC 7950 performance? Is there any plans to update this? I think if the 7950 continues to suffer when OC'd it might be a reason to pay the Nvidia price premium. As it is, the 7950 is the same price as the 660Ti, not the 670.
 
Radeons are performing little bit to low for game with AMD logo. Probably driver thing.

This game makes me wanna buy second gtx 670 for SLI.

Thanks for nice review. Very interesting read. I agree about original Crysis and what it was than and what is this one now. At least game is performing much better than Crysis was. I remember 30fps on 2900xt, 1280x1024 without aa or with 2xmsaa, not sure.
 
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7950 performance? Yes, part of that is probably due to the limited boost speed. Many of those card don't have a problem with doing 1025-1050MHz. I've seen 1100-1150MHz fairly regularly with a slight voltage bump as well. I can bench mine fine @ 1150|1630 and I use 1090|1630 24/7 for actual gaming. My 7950 gets too loud for my tastes @ 1150MHz.
 
Brent_Justice said:
You will be fighting an uphill battle with that one. What I experience is TXAA removing detail from the game. For example, let's take one of the buildings in the game, the buildings have shaders applied to them to make them pop out and give a 3D look with the brick. Stone walls have the small pitted holes that look 3D. There is parallax mapping and displacement mapping which make textures pop out and look 3D. TXAA washes these effects out, and takes away that 3D feel. It removes fine granular detail put into the textures. It reduces the quality of the textures, and objects, and makes them appear blurry.

To me, it is not acceptable, and is a reduction in the gameplay visual quality implemented by default from the developers. It reduces their artwork quality from what the base, raw image quality is. I don't think an artist would appreciate their work being lowered in image quality. They want you to experience it with all the image quality they put into it.
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To be quite frank, if someone were so concerned about visual quality, they would play the game in stereoscopic 3D, where texture mapping doesn't very well and tessellation is required for an actual 3D feel.
Personally, as I'm through with 2D, based on what mavere said I will certainly be looking at txaa when I play crysis 3 if it really does makes the game more CGI like.
 
Nice info, I'm pretty convinced that this game is pretty CPU reliant. My SLI 680's don't provide the same results as what has been reported here, in fact my single 680 machine with an OC'd 3570K actually seems to fair better in some sections which I can only put down to the ageing 920 in the SLI machine.
 
Some may not like the softening effect of TXAA and using this helps:

http://www.gamerconfig.eu/command/crysis-3/r_Sharpening

r_Sharpening - Crysis 3

Controls the level of the post-processing image sharpening filter. Higher values give more sharpening, but too high values will create artifacts. A value of 0.0 is off
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Also, there is the SweetFX mod, that also has an image sharpening feature called lumasharpen, has a lot of flexibility -- great for SGSSAA and TXAA.

http://sweetfx.thelazy.net/
 
SirPauly said:
Some may not like the softening effect of TXAA and using this helps:

http://www.gamerconfig.eu/command/crysis-3/r_Sharpening



Also, there is the SweetFX mod, that also has an image sharpening feature called lumasharpen, has a lot of flexibility -- great for SGSSAA and TXAA.

http://sweetfx.thelazy.net/
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Adding sharpening post processing to fix excessive blurring sounds terrible and quite detrimental to image quality.

BTW Thank you Brent for finally putting a little more emphasis on FXAA drawbacks.
 
Good review. I will say though, that saying, "We won't comment on the storyline or the incredibly repetitive gameplay" is, in fact, commenting on it. ;)
 
I must be the only one that actually thinks TXAA looks good in C3. I don't know why, but to me, it just works. I see the blurriness as extra "ozone and haze" or "typical east coast humid day" in the C3 setting. Too bad it's too much a performance hit.

Edit : Wait, no I'm not. I agree with the one other person.
 
Excellent review Brent. I was looking forward to it. I really appreciate the image quality performance info.
 
Pity the game sucks so bad, but nice review :p

Slightly lower GFX settings.........Take 5 hours and complete the short linear SP campaign .............delete off HDD and forget. Go back to playing Path of Exile :)
 
mavere said:
I'm not gonna lie, I prefer the pseudo-cinematic blur of TXAA.

Not many will agree with me, but after switching back and forth many times to make sure my brain wasn't playing tricks, I think the TXAA shots definitely have more of a CGI look to them than the "THIS IS VIDEOGAME!" hyper-sharpness of the other AA modes.
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I actually played the whole game through with TXAA and I didn't mind it... definitely makes the grassy areas look better I reckon. I know its blurry but I just didnt notice it that much at 2x.

Gonna have another run through with SMAA 2x and hardest difficulty soon.
 
Kor said:
Nice info, I'm pretty convinced that this game is pretty CPU reliant. My SLI 680's don't provide the same results as what has been reported here, in fact my single 680 machine with an OC'd 3570K actually seems to fair better in some sections which I can only put down to the ageing 920 in the SLI machine.
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I'm running SLI 680's and i72600k @ 4.6ghz @ 1080p
Very High settings except shadows, shaders, objects on high
Full motion blur/lens flare
Tried every single AA mode and still had fps drops into the high 30's in this game, mainly in the first, second and dam levels...thought I would get a solid 60fps for sure. Unlikely but it felt as if the cpu was letting me down.
I was using the titan drivers 314.09 with modded inf, gonna try today with latest drivers see how it goes.
 
Definitely sounds like the 7950 was throttling, but again it is only speculation. Bumping the power slider to +20 would help eliminate it if indeed that was the case. As much as I would like to see the 7950 tested with an OC, I don't agree that those results are relevant for this article. This is obviously comparing out-of-box gameplay experiences, though bumping the power slider up I believe would still honor the context of the review.
 
Game runs flawlessly at 2560x1440 with very high settings, x2 SMAA for multi GPU's.

Ran the same level HardOCP analyzed and i was getting mostly 60 FPS with dips into the 40's. Final boss battle dipped into the 20's during the cinematic where Psycho flew in with his VTOL. I am OK with that since it wasnt during game play.

I7 3770k at 4.7ghz
GTX680 SLI @ 1270/1568
running if off of a Kingston HyperX SSD.
32 gigs of ram
Dell U2711
Windows 7

I really enjoyed reading this because i had no idea which form of AA was the best to use. I knew TXAA was crap, but i mostly ran with x4 MSAA and never touched SMAA.

I noticed SMAA made the game feel a lot more realistic. Everything looked a lot smoother.

Great game to look at.

Pretty average first person shooter. Story makes no sense and is almost incomprehensible I beat it three times and the 2nd/3rd play through's made me realize just how dumb the story was.

It's tough to make an open world/sandboxish shooter in a city. Crysis didn't have that problem so it felt more organic and allowed the player to tackle an encounter more freely.

The first level with all the rain effects are absolutely gorgeous. The textures are untouchable.
 
with my 7970 BE i can run this game on average 25-30 frames at 1080p with 8xaa, runs alot smoother when i put the aa on x4
 
YIKES!

I bought this last night and just fired it up with my sig rig. Max settings Im at 15-20 at the opening scene! Have to turn AA completely off and play on Medium settings to get into the 40-50 range on the opening scene.

I aint playing on Medium so I turned it off until I get a proper video card.

I think this game has finally nudged me over the edge and Ill finally retire my trustworthy 5870. Jesus! 15-20 fps!
 
Took the advice from this article and changed to SMAA 2x and reduced motion blur (not a fan of it) and I'm able to get mid 40s with triple screens at 1080p using 6804gb sli.

Great review!
 
Just got me a EVGA GTX670 FTW today from Frys for $380 and first thing I did when I got home was fire this game up. WOW! This is the most beautiful game Ive ever played. Crytek really outdid themselves this time.

Just like in this review, I set everything to max and set AA to FXAA and Im getting 35-55 fps, nice and smooth.

Ive been playing about an hour now and not really sure whats going on. I keep stopping to look around and admire these graphics and not paying attention to the story.
 
MacLeod said:
Just got me a EVGA GTX670 FTW today from Frys for $380 and first thing I did when I got home was fire this game up. WOW! This is the most beautiful game Ive ever played. Crytek really outdid themselves this time.

Just like in this review, I set everything to max and set AA to FXAA and Im getting 35-55 fps, nice and smooth.

Ive been playing about an hour now and not really sure whats going on. I keep stopping to look around and admire these graphics and not paying attention to the story.
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It's definitely a time waster!
 
This game is absolutely georgous.
My GTX 680 SLI is able to pull very high + SMAA 2X at 2560*1600.

Dishonored looks like a SNES game in comparison!
 
^ Both spammers.

With my Titan running at 2560x1440 resolution, I am getting about 60fps+ with almost everything on max, with SMAA Low for multiplayer. Shadows are on high (or medium I don't remember), water etc are on very high.
 
Nvidia Experience software provides very nice optimisation profile for this game.

I plays fine in 2560x1440 @ 50-60fps average.

I found that this game is very CPU bound. When I my remove my CPU OC, the game runs like a dog. It's high thread performance and low latency this game needs, as with my 5GHz over-clock it uses only 50-60% CPU.
 
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