Crysis performance experiment.

eyetrip · 21 Sep 2008 at 00:34

Can some of you give the following a try - start up Crysis (original or warhead) and once it is loaded minimise it.

Now go to task manager and click the processes tab. Find the process for Crysis, right click and set priority to high.

Go back into game and play.

Do the game feels a lot smoother to you? At this point I am not sure if it is just that I am tired, or its wishful thinking, but the games (tried both) seem to run a hell of a lot better for me. not necessarily much higher frame rates, but much smoother at higher settings.

Am off to bed now. Will check on your feedback in morning

helmutcheese · 21 Sep 2008 at 00:43

Yes it is a old trick, before any patches it was even less CPU use so peeps used a CMD added onto the game shortcut to make it HIGH CPU

muon · 21 Sep 2008 at 00:55

Shouldnt really improve things for you ffallic as it only uses 2 cores and you have a quad core machine. Enough spare processing capacity for other processes.

edit:

Look at minimum rates here

helmutcheese · 21 Sep 2008 at 00:56

ghost101 said:
Shouldnt really improve things for you ffallic as it only uses 2 cores and you have a quad core machine. Enough spare processing capacity for other processes.

But it does work as the game by default used hardly any CPU % for many inc myself.

I used the CMD so the game always ran in HIGH.

http://forums.overclockers.co.uk/sh...ghlight=crysis+priority+username_helmutcheese

muon · 21 Sep 2008 at 00:58

helmutcheese said:
But it does work as the game by default used hardly any CPU % for many inc myself.

I used the CMD so the game always ran in HIGH.

http://forums.overclockers.co.uk/sh...ghlight=crysis+priority+username_helmutcheese

Oh ok. I'm getting a total of 200% load across all for cores i.e. roughly 50% each.

edit: I'm talking about Warhead.

dbmzk1 · 21 Sep 2008 at 01:02

ghost101 said:
Oh ok. I'm getting a total of 200% load across all for cores i.e. roughly 50% each.

edit: I'm talking about Warhead.

That would be 50% load then, not 200%

muon · 21 Sep 2008 at 01:04

dbmzk1 said:
That would be 50% load then, not 200%

Yep of course, if you look at CPU overall. I'm looking at the core graphs themselves, so its 50% each. It puts the point of 2 cores being used better by saying 200%.

helmutcheese · 21 Sep 2008 at 02:07

ghost101 said:
Oh ok. I'm getting a total of 200% load across all for cores i.e. roughly 50% each.

edit: I'm talking about Warhead.

Don't know or care what Warhead is doing, I'm pointing to a thread that was when Crysis launched and that CMD to get High CPU % improved playability.

The reason I went to that topic is because the OP asked about CPU Priority in game.

thegoonden · 21 Sep 2008 at 08:24

Changing the priority should do only that.
If Crysis is the only thing running, it should not make a terrible difference. If other tasks are running then it will certainly help, but on a quad there should always be free cycles lying around for any process to pick up.

Of course it does seem from some of what is discussed above, that it has had, at some point, a marked effect. This would presumably imply (an implication somewhat backed up by the notion that patches subsequently negated this "hack"), that the original version had a bug that made a mess of CPU command priority, perhaps sending instructions set to lowest priority which were getting queued behind system background tasks. Given the intricate nature of timing in games, this could easily accound for lower CPU usage, as new instructions to the cpu could not be issued prior to getting answers to the previous batch.

In general though, low CPU in Crysis just means it's using all it can and your video card or some other component is the limiting factor. Certainly when fiddling with my overclock I found Crysis almost entirely GPU dependent. Changing priority should not really allow it to use more CPU overall (in fact it COULD cause less by taking CPU power away from the video drivers (depends on whether they are considered a child process of Crysis), making it more of a bottleneck). The increased smoothness you experienced is likely to be the result of clobbering some background or system task that was previously interfering, and if it's an AMD box, it may also have reduced any lag caused by loading from disc to RAM (the AMD's having their memory controller inboard).