Nvidia unofficially, officially caught cheating in Crysis 2

[drunkenmaster]

http://techreport.com/articles.x/21404/1

Its not official, but techreport have shown where most of the ridiculous amounts of tesselation power goes, into flat objects, or water models that aren't being shown, or concrete slabs.

As techreport say, these are the most advanced flat concrete slabs in existance.

The game is FULL to the brim of things that have insanely high tesselation usage, yet offer little to no IQ increase, and it just so happens that Nvidia were behind the inclusion of it and their product can better cope with ludicrous wasteful levels of tesselation.

It hurts AMD hardware more, I would have NO issue with this if IQ quality increased due to the level of tesselation used, but it doesn't.

I would suggest that Nvidia users are also getting less performance than they should, just not as big a drop as AMD users. Nvidia is hurting their own users just to hurt AMD more, it really is pathetic.

I do apologise if this has been known for ages in other Crysis 2 threads, but the article was only published today.

 

[Smite]

I wouldn't just say It's NVIDIA's fault.

If Crytek got off their asses, and actually worked on Crysis 2, doing the DX11 tesselation properly and high res textures before launch, so stuff like this wasn't in, then I'd respect them a lot more.

 

[garyfl]

yeah i heard about this, i heard the water is rendered as a flat surface across thw whole map even if you never see it, it runs underneath but still renders and harms your performance.

 

[Mojo]

Crysis 2, unlike it's predecessor, is no torch bearer. It's a console port, and although this article does show that Nvidia's tessellation ability is superior to it's AMD counterparts, it also shows that the only way to really see such an advantage in modern games is to amp up the tessellation to the point that it is providing a performance hit for no tangible increase in IQ (quite a few games do that... look at the DoF effects in shogun 2/Metro 2033).

When Tessellation begins to have enough of a meaningful improvement to Image quality so as to offset the performance hit I will take notice of it. Until then... meh.

 

[Rroff]

Regarding the water this is a troublesome issue... I'm assuming like most engines the terrain is set in such a way that the water can potentially appear at any point within it i.e. lakes, etc. not just coastlines so its incredibly hard to write effective occlusion testing for something that has to sprawl the entire map that doesn't counter the rendering gains due to complex occlusion being run on the CPU or GPU.

Sometimes its designed to use individual water sheets for different areas but its usually better just to implement one water sheet and use a ROAM type algorythm which for some reason doesn't seem to be in play here which is one of the things tessellation can do well...


I suspect the issue here is the game was designed for consoles and adding tessellation with decent opptimisation would have meant massively rewriting parts of the code - instead its just bruteforce applying it to whole objects as its fairly easy to do and works ok on half decent GPUs.

EDIT: Infact looking at the wholesale use of tessellation in general I'm gonna say thats where the problem is the console focus of the game originally means for the developer its far easier to slap tessellation on a whole object instead of spending a lot of time opptimising it at both assest development and engine levels.

 

[Matterez]

It would be really sly if nVidea did have some part in this, however, I have no problems with Crysis 2 and I only have an HD 5770 and an AMD Athlon haha.

 

[drunkenmaster]

lol, sure, AMD have an option in the driver panel to simply limit the level of tesselation, it basically doesn't effect image quality as Nvidia are purposefully adding levels that harm gpu performance for AMD more, but add no visual impact.

ITs pretty simple, draw one triangle, then cut it in two, and keep doing that, they get smaller and smaller, with ever increasing numbers, but at some point you can't even see all the triangles, its literally 100% pointless, the ONLY reason to do it in this situation is to hit AMD hardware more, because they didn't randomly add the ability to use absurd and pointless levels of tesselation.

The really really troubling part of it is, did Nvidia add the excessive tesselation power for the purpose of adding pointless tesselation into games just to hurt AMD, have they planned this for ages. Maybe, maybe not.

Sorry Rroff but, there isn't a single tangible reason to have, firstly tesselation that doesn't taper off in the distance in terms of the water. You can VERY easily turn up and down tesselation anywhere you want. Turning it down in the distance where you can't see it, and anywhere you can't see any water is, nothing, at all.

Likewise, massive massive tesselation, for terrible looking flat sides of a concrete block which has no extra depth or detail visible. Again theres a single reason to do that, one, its not for IQ, its to hurt AMD.

The irksome thing is, could they have put more power into tesselating simply more things without wasting all that power, quite probably.

Raise IQ, kill performance, thats one thing, kill performance, just to kill performance more on AMD, hurting Nvidia owners aswell, just less badly. Its madness.

 

[Rroff]

Yes its a mystery why the tessellation doesn't taper off with distance - thats one of the strong points of tessellation.

Unless you design assets from the ground up and the engine from the ground up for optimal tessellation useage tho - scenarios where you only need to highly tessellate a small part of an object but your forced to tessellate the whole object in a stupidly high level of detail to obtain it are quite common and a typical problem of games essentially ported from the console as no developer is going to want to spend the time needed to redo all the assets - so you end up with objects tessellated all over at the minimum level thats needed to optimally tessellate the highest resolution requiring part of them.

I can't say that nVidia is or isn't doing something dirty here - but I can say that people's lack of understanding of the nature of tessellation is leading them to jump to conclusions that may not actually be what they think they are - my initial impression is the developer is being lazy and just slapping tessellation carelessly over the top of assets ported from the console to the PC.

From the casual digging I've done I can't see any solid evidence nVidia even had anything to do with it beyond "well its bad for ATI so nVidia must be behind it"... and a lot more evidence pointing to developer laziness.

 

[Final8y]

Yes its a mystery why the tessellation doesn't taper off with distance - thats one of the strong points of tessellation.

Unless you design assets from the ground up and the engine from the ground up for optimal tessellation useage tho - scenarios where you only need to highly tessellate a small part of an object but your forced to tessellate the whole object in a stupidly high level of detail to obtain it are quite common and a typical problem of games essentially ported from the console as no developer is going to want to spend the time needed to redo all the assets - so you end up with objects tessellated all over at the minimum level thats needed to optimally tessellate the highest resolution requiring part of them.

I can't say that nVidia is or isn't doing something dirty here - but I can say that people's lack of understanding of the nature of tessellation is leading them to jump to conclusions that may not actually be what they think they are - my initial impression is the developer is being lazy and just slapping tessellation carelessly over the top of assets ported from the console to the PC.

From the casual digging I've done I can't see any solid evidence nVidia even had anything to do with it beyond "well its bad for ATI so nVidia must be behind it"... and a lot more evidence pointing to developer lazyness.

Lets put it simple.

NV always seems to be there when things like this happen.

 

[tommybhoy]

scenarios where you only need to highly tessellate a small part of an object but your forced to tessellate the whole object in a stupidly high level of detail to obtain it

For a slab of flat concrete? Which is about the last thing that needs tessellation!

PM me your address and I'll send you a green bulletproof jacket, your going to need it this time mate.

 

[Rroff]

From a guess theres a small crack or something that they've depth mapped and been super lazy and just tessellated the whole object at that level - atleast until I see proof or atleast some real substance to claims otherwise I think lazy console port laziness is a far more likely candidate to point the finger at.

Gotta be honest not even sure why they tessellated the concrete barriers (they aren't simple slabs) would have been far, far more efficient to simply create 1x high LOD model with adaptive/progressive mesh opptimisation techniques to cut down polycount on areas not requiring high detail and 1x lower detail for distant placement - not like anyone would even notice the transition and far more performance effective especially if your not gonna bother reducing tessellation level with distance.

 

[Final8y]

From a guess theres a small crack or something that they've depth mapped and been super lazy and just tessellated the whole object at that level - atleast until I see proof or atleast some real substance to claims otherwise I think lazy console port laziness is a far more likely candidate to point the finger at.

The only small crack that anyone one would want to look up close to inspect its depth would be

 

[LeJosh]

From a guess theres a small crack or something that they've depth mapped and been super lazy and just tessellated the whole object at that level - atleast until I see proof or atleast some real substance to claims otherwise I think lazy console port laziness is a far more likely candidate to point the finger at.

Gotta be honest not even sure why they tessellated the concrete barriers (they aren't simple slabs) would have been far, far more effeicent to simply create 1x high LOD model with adaptive/progressive mesh opptimisation techniques to cut down polycount on areas not requiring high detail and 1x lower detail for distant placement - not like anyone would even notice the transition and far more performance effective especially if your not gonna bother reducing tessellation level with distance.

Did you actually read the full article?

 

[Rroff]

What did I miss?

 

[LeJosh]

What did I miss?

I can't see any mention about nv but wouldn't surprise me.

However, the devs have managed to tesselate water which covers the entire screen (in wireframe, only visible using a tool) when there is only a puddle. If the scene is a city, you look at a puddle the whole screen is filled with needless polygons that just should not be there. It puts needless strain on a GPU and the article is saying don't use Crysis 2 if you want a balanced benchmark for cards.

NV? Maybe. Crytek? More likely.

 

[Rroff]

Not quite sure the relevance to what I said?

 

[LeJosh]

Well that was what the article was about and explains in detail.

You didn't have to do any digging.

 

[tommybhoy]

What did I miss?

Crytek: Where can we put crazy amounts of tessellation to keep Nvidia happy?

Nvidia: Oh, I know what about these, they are everywhere:

You can't dismiss/excuse it as a lazy console port either as the consoles don't have any tessellation code.

These guys are professional coders who get 'help' from Nvidia techs, they knew exactly what they were doing.

 

[LeJosh]

The 360 has a module for tesselation but isn't used at all I believe.

That amount of "tesselated" detail is just ridiculous quite frankly and the same people who made Crysis came up with that? I don't think so.

 

[tommybhoy]

The more I think about it, the angrier I get!
Folks spend hundreds and hundreds of pounds of their hard earned cash for getting performance crippled, not just AMD cards but Nvidia's less powerfull cards too!
Absolutely shocking, BF3 developed for PC is one step forward, Nvidia crippling performance, 2 steps back, yeah TWIMTBP, no problem.