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Nvidia cheating again, this time Crysis

This is funny :D. I don't care who does what. Just as long as my drivers are fine.

Nvidia cheats, ATI cheats. <WOW> :rolleyes:

This is a hardware enthusiasts forum and the general feel for just about every card is covered here so any driver glitches and problems seem no different to me than what's going on here. Or am I just reading this totally wrong?.
 
Goksly said:
Mekrel: Did you see the part where I said I was "waiting to see if its a fudge or a corner cutting cheat"? I think its fairly obvious having "optimisations" for individual games / engines is stupid. It shows poor foundations on either the gfx card or game engine. Imagine if each car needed specialised tyres?

Also in terms of "both" companies doing it - yes I see the release notes, but I don't recall ATI's fps dropping when you change the exe, which means one of a few things:
* Things have changed and I'm mistaken!
* ATI has a better way of working out what game is running.
* ATI finds an "issue" with how the drivers were working and fix it as an optimisation for ALL games that work in a given way, but would advertise the change for a single game (i.e. they say Crysis can become 10% faster, but other games would also gain from the change they have made).

I wouldnt be totally surprised if ATI did something similar, but as I said, sounds like a bodge job if you need to "fix" things for single games.
Click to expand...

It's not stupid to have optimisations for games, it's needed. How many games that have come out over the years where top end hardware even struggles to run it?

F.E.A.R + Soft shaddows? That would be one.
S.T.A.L.K.E.R - Dynamic lighting IIRC caused a lot of slow down would be two
Crysis would be three.

I'm sure others here could list more, as I have missed a lot of gaming due to not having a rig in nearly a year.

ATi do it on different levels, which actually can be controlled by a user, it's called Catalyst A.I, but they also do driver level ones which can't be changed.

Read: http://community.enemyterritory.com/forums/showthread.php?p=203043

When you then add into the mix SLi and Crossfire, games actually need to be added as a compatable game to the driver for dual GPU modes to work. This can be seen on Oblivions official website as a known problem about Crossfire performance as it was dire. The answer was an updated driver from ATi coming out to just make the game compatable.

Even though games are usually (for the desktop PC anyway) in D3D or OpenGL, it doesn't mean they all behave the same.

So what should nVidia/ATi do? Stop developing drivers, and when we have bugs and slide show games, just tell you to go nag the game developers?
 
james.miller said:
do we know that the image problems area direct result of the driver optimisations, or are they two seperate issues?


i would actually like this question to be answered pleased. the usual peopel have just jumped straight in there on the hate train without giving it a thought.
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Well apparently it doesn't exist before 169 family drivers, which means obviously something changed since then. In my opinion it's just nVidia optimising the drivers, but it has had an undesireable side effect. I really don't think nVidia would be silly enough to optimise a game so that someone could actually see a noticeable difference in image quality. As you say, people jumping to conclusion.
 
Mekrel said:
Well apparently it doesn't exist before 169 family drivers, which means obviously something changed since then. In my opinion it's just nVidia optimising the drivers, but it has had an undesireable side effect. I really don't think nVidia would be silly enough to optimise a game so that someone could actually see a noticeable difference in image quality. As you say, people jumping to conclusion.
Click to expand...

that's what im thinking tbh. i wouldnt be so quick as to say they are cheating because of this. whether it was ati or nvidia
 
silversurfer said:
Point out how the graphics are now inferior to previous drivers and maybe they'd be a point
Click to expand...
The article demonstrates this quite clearly, the optimisation for Crysis.exe in the new driver revision causes problems with water reflections and "conveniently" (according to some) increases performance by ~7% with it.

http://www.elitebastards.com/pic.php?picid=hanners/nvidia/crysis-fw/images/bug01.jpg

http://www.elitebastards.com/pic.php?picid=hanners/nvidia/crysis-fw/images/normal01.jpg

Look at the reflection of the mountains on the water and tell me that's not a graphical issue.

Edit: I just realised how confrontational that sounds, my apologies. It's early and I don't mean to sound like a **** or anything. :)
 
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Ulfhedjinn said:
Look at the reflection of the mountains on the water and tell me that's not a graphical issue.
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Yes, it is a graphical issue, but it can also be a optimisation that is causing it, remember these are BETA drivers, I think it is a bit harsh to say it is cheating.

If Nvidia release a WHQL driver with the same issue it might be a different situation.
 
delete please - I was quoting Loadsa but he's deleted his post so no point ;).
 
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http://www.elitebastards.com/pic.php?picid=hanners/nvidia/crysis-fw/images/bug01.jpg

http://www.elitebastards.com/pic.php?picid=hanners/nvidia/crysis-fw/images/normal01.jpg
Click to expand...

Just looking at this it becomes pretty obvious it's not a cheat.

To cheat you would have to decrease quality, in subtle areas, and hope nobody notices. Thats a big blatant graphical distortion on the water reflection, who the hell isn't going to notice that!

The reason it goes away when you change the file name is because it's a crysis specific optimisation, introduced in the affected drivers, that is causing the error.

The 7% performance increase (if there is one) could have nothing to do with the glitch. No doubt other optimisations were also introduced that work fine in addition to the "offending" one. There's the 7%.

And when the next saet of drivers fix the error, it's not because they have been "busted". It's just because they are fixing the error end of.

If it was a nice descreet tweak that decreased quality subtly to increase performance then I would agree it is a cheat. But not a glaringly obvious distortion that everyone affected will notice is not a cheat.
 
Am I the only person that finds complaining about BETA drivers is just stupid?

After all the name BETA gives the game away (so to speak) :P
 
New drivers are out which fix the reflection issue and offer smoother performance in crysis, I have them installed and can verify everything is good :)
 
I installed the newer drivers and image quality did seem to improve, looked like AA was on but I dont think it was/is

I didnt test them really just changed drivers between playing bf2.
FPS is less variable I think, less of the strange dropping to 30fps for no good reason which bugs because it feels like lag if it was 90fps a second ago.

scores in 3dmark05 and 6 dropped by 200pts, no big deal since first impressions are that they feel better in use
 
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