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Crysis 2 DirectX11 Tessellation Pack/High Res Texture Pack [Update: released]

angular graphics said:
The dx9 version gets the improved textures, contact shadows, and realtime local reflections, so at the very least you'll get these 3 enhancements.

But it's also possible several of the dx11 enhancements (other than tessellation of course) will work on your card.

If im not mistaken dx11 should also speed up some of the standard dx9 stuff the used or more hacked together.
 

mrklaw

MrArseFace
thetrin said:
It is a wonderful gift. This whole thread has been people looking a gift horse in the mouth, and I simply don't understand why.

I can't wait for a free patch that makes the game look even better. I'm ready to play through the game a 3rd time!


its not a gift. Crytek either already had the assets in planning and so this is a natural release, and/or they know that by stretching current PCs they can try and keep Crysis 2 in people's minds much like Crysis 1 did.
 

Luigiv

Member
DerZuhälter said:
Could someone explain to me what's so great about tesselation?

No,no I get it technically. More polys, more details.
But:

I remember times when the industry was constantly trying to minimize the poly-count through tricks, for example using bumb maps for height, using normal maps to save height data of high-poly models into the textures and using low-poly models with near to none visual impact. Or even using Parallax Occlussion Mapping to fake height.

And now suddenly they want to render simple bumps with up to 5k polys?! Look at the comparision pic for Tesselation they posted. With all the movement and motion blur going on at that scene there is no way in hell someone would recognize the difference.

But 10 FPS less would be recognized! I still think that the visual gain/fps loss is just too little, not only in Crysis 2, but also in Stalker:CS, Metro 2033 or, AvP (the ones I played) to consider this technology useful.. at least yet.

Give me the high-res stuff and the better (or correct) lighting. Tesselation? No thank you.

Tesselation has other benefits too. On top of displacement maps you can use subdivision to make edges rounder, something that shaders can't replicate and it can be used as a replacement for traditional LoD scaling methods (model swapping), therefore freeing up memory (Why have five models that range N64 level to super detailed when you can have one medium quality model that procedurally scales up and down, smoother and faster to boot).
 
Luigiv said:
Tesselation has other benefits too. On top of displacement maps you can use subdivision to make edges rounder, something that shaders can't replicate and it can be used as a replacement for traditional LoD scaling methods (model swapping) and therefore freeing up memory (Why have five models that range N64 level to super detailed when you can have one medium quality model that procedurally scales up and down, smoother and faster to boot).

Good point that reminds me of this nvidia multiple displacement map tessellation demo.
could make the suit transfer more interesting.

A bit like that epic good Samaritan demo.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1c_PVtMIz-A
 

Binabik15

Member
HomerSimpson-Man said:
All the hubbub of DX11 and the games that used it thus far, Crysis 2 DX9 looks better than the games that used it as a bullet point and ran a crapton better as well. One of the most notable was Metro 2033 (great looking game too even with DX11 off) and DX11 mode just massacred the performance.


What model did you get? My brother got two 6950s, but they´re not reference designs :/
 

dark10x

Digital Foundry pixel pusher
Luigiv said:
Tesselation has other benefits too. On top of displacement maps you can use subdivision to make edges rounder, something that shaders can't replicate and it can be used as a replacement for traditional LoD scaling methods (model swapping) and therefore freeing up memory (Why have five models that range N64 level to super detailed when you can have one medium quality model that procedurally scales up and down, smoother and faster to boot).
I think tesselation will eventually become quite useful, but I don't think the hardware we have today is really well suited for it. It reminds me of the early days of anti-aliasing. You COULD crank it up and see amazing results, but your performance would take such a dive that you would ultimately disable it while actually playing.
 

EatChildren

Currently polling second in Australia's federal election (first in the Gold Coast), this feral may one day be your Bogan King.
dark10x said:
I think tesselation will eventually become quite useful, but I don't think the hardware we have today is really well suited for it. It reminds me of the early days of anti-aliasing. You COULD crank it up and see amazing results, but your performance would take such a dive that you would ultimately disable it while actually playing.

Should depend how heavily its used. Its used pretty lightly in Deus Ex: Human Revolution to smooth out character models. Looks great at very little cost to performance. Even something like Metro manages to use tessellation pretty well without hurting performance too much. Its the advanced DOF that kills Metro's performance.

Crysis 2 should be a great tessellation benchmark for real time game environment tessellation.
 

dark10x

Digital Foundry pixel pusher
Alxjn said:
The disappointment is a combination of a lot of things, but the main issue is that design wise Crysis 2 takes a few steps back from the original (that's not to say there weren't things that C2 did better than C1). Mainly, the sandboxes/action bubbles aren't nearly as big or interactive, cutting down on the freedom the original was loved for.

Personally, I like both games, but I hope with Crysis 3 they return to the larger sandboxes.
The sandboxes were indeed smaller, but that certainly didn't mean they were SMALL by any means. Personally, I was just happy to see Crytek move away from the jungles they have been creating since their inception. This is the first time Crytek has stepped outside of those island environments and I found their rendition of New York to be pretty engaging.

The two issues I have with Crysis 2 are its poor AI response and the poorly told narrative.

The AI isn't terrible while engaging the player, but the way they respond to you is pretty lousy. I'm glad they can't see through your cloaking abilities, but they should be more aware of what is happening to their comrades. They seem to react the same regardless of distance. I dislike the fact that you can't sneak at all without cloaking. Even if you find yourself on the other side of a huge chasm, exposing yourself for just a second is enough to trigger a firefight. In addition, there isn't really a proper series of alert states. If you were to be spotted briefly at a distance, I would expect more of a search state for the AI rather than the trigger happy reaction you end up with. It's all just too black and white for me. They either see you and aggressively attack or completely ignore you. There is no middle ground.
 

M3d10n

Member
DerZuhälter said:
Could someone explain to me what's so great about tesselation?

No,no I get it technically. More polys, more details.
But:

I remember times when the industry was constantly trying to minimize the poly-count through tricks, for example using bumb maps for height, using normal maps to save height data of high-poly models into the textures and using low-poly models with near to none visual impact. Or even using Parallax Occlussion Mapping to fake height.

And now suddenly they want to render simple bumps with up to 5k polys?! Look at the comparision pic for Tesselation they posted. With all the movement and motion blur going on at that scene there is no way in hell someone would recognize the difference.
The geometry generated by tesselation is procedural and transient. It doesn't use disk space, it doesn't use system/GPU RAM. A model with a million triangles can use more than 50MB of RAM, while a model with 10K triangle uses around 600KB. With tesselation you can approximate the geometric detail of a 1M with the memory usage of a 10K model plus a texture map. You can also adjust that detail without the need for multiple pre-generated versions of the model (which would take more RAM).

DX11 also runs a different shader on the vertices pre-tesselation and post-tesselation. Some more expensive processing can be done pre-tesselation (on less vertices) and merely interpolate the result across post-tesselated vertices, while a huge-ass model would need full processing on all vertices (animating skinned models is a good example of this).
 

Mr_Brit

Banned
For anyone doubting the use of tesselation look at this video:
Tesselation Demo by nvidia

The amount of difference between the base mesh and the tesselated gargoyle is astounding. Just by using tesselation you've gone from PS1 quality geometry to next gen geometry.
 
dark10x said:
The AI isn't terrible while engaging the player, but the way they respond to you is pretty lousy. I'm glad they can't see through your cloaking abilities, but they should be more aware of what is happening to their comrades. They seem to react the same regardless of distance. I dislike the fact that you can't sneak at all without cloaking. Even if you find yourself on the other side of a huge chasm, exposing yourself for just a second is enough to trigger a firefight. In addition, there isn't really a proper series of alert states. If you were to be spotted briefly at a distance, I would expect more of a search state for the AI rather than the trigger happy reaction you end up with. It's all just too black and white for me. They either see you and aggressively attack or completely ignore you. There is no middle ground.

That's because Crysis is an FPS game so be definition it's focused on the player shooting things. The standard convention that exist in stealth games like Splinter Cell of yore and Metal Gear are simply not present in shooters.
 

Corky

Nine out of ten orphans can't tell the difference.
Lostconfused said:
That's because Crysis is an FPS game so be definition it's focused on the player shooting things. The standard convention that exist in stealth games like Splinter Cell of yore and Metal Gear are simply not present in shooters.

Did you ever play F.E.A.R or HL 1 when they were new?
 
Corky said:
Did you ever play F.E.A.R or HL 1 when they were new?
Probably but I don't remember them now and I played games rather differently back then than I do now. But I certainly didn't see any real stealth elements in FEAR when I did play it for a couple of hours a few months ago.
 

Corky

Nine out of ten orphans can't tell the difference.
Lostconfused said:
Probably but I don't remember them now and I played games rather differently back then than I do now. But I certainly didn't see any real stealth elements in FEAR when I did play it for a couple of hours a few months ago.

Nah not really stealth elements but rather the way the enemies reacted to different situations ,good ol A.I that was amazing at the time but now it's nothing more than another addition to my " I wish these things were in modern games " list.
 

Luigiv

Member
Mr_Brit said:
For anyone doubting the use of tesselation look at this video:
Tesselation Demo by nvidia

The amount of difference between the base mesh and the tesselated gargoyle is astounding. Just by using tesselation you've gone from PS1 quality geometry to next gen geometry.
:O Wow. I didn't know it could work so well with such a low quality base model.

Also, if I'm not mistake, but doesn't geometry rendered the traditional way have to pass through the CPU first whilst all the extra polygons provided by tessellation are processed completely by the GPU? If so, then imagine the saving on CPU usage you'd get by populating a game completely with low quality base meshes and tessellating up to a current gen level.
 

mrklaw

MrArseFace
Mr_Brit said:
For anyone doubting the use of tesselation look at this video:
Tesselation Demo by nvidia

The amount of difference between the base mesh and the tesselated gargoyle is astounding. Just by using tesselation you've gone from PS1 quality geometry to next gen geometry.


surely its a balancing act.

The only obvious saving from basic LOD use is memory. Store lots of meshes and it takes lots of memory. And if you're processing the vertices on the CPU and sending them over to the GPU that'll take bandwidth (do they still do that, or is it all on the GPU these days?)

Its presumably fairly simple for the GPU to take the mesh and just draw it.

tesselation requires computation to calculate how many polys to divide it into, then how to extrapolate those from the detail texture or whatever they use to describe how the polys should be drawn, and then process them.

So if you have tons of spare capacity on the GPU, but are bandwidth limited or memory constrained, then it makes sense. But if you have a decent amount of memory then why not just store meshes in the first place? You don't even have to store them on the disc, you can generate them from detail textures while you're loading the level or whenever.

I'm just not sure why tesselation is such an amazing idea. Smooth LOD and much more detail close up is obviously good, but there is more than one way to skin a cat.
 
Corky said:
Nah not really stealth elements but rather the way the enemies reacted to different situations ,good ol A.I that was amazing at the time but now it's nothing more than another addition to my " I wish these things were in modern games " list.
It's been a while since I played a game with good AI so I am not even sure what that's like anymore. I am comfortable with settling for the Gears of war model where you have different enemy types with specific and predicatble behaviour or the Halo sandbox shooter aproach.

I am just saying stuff like alert states and alarms and using line of sight for stealth is limited to either stealth games or games that try to incorporate stealth like Deus Ex.

In games like Stalker and Crysis it's more of an avoidance mechanic where you try to stay as far away from an enemy to not trigger an encounter.
 

Alexios

Cores, shaders and BIOS oh my!
Luigiv said:
:O Wow. I didn't know it could work so well with such a low quality base model
The artist created the high poly base as well, tessellation just seamlessly switches back and forth based on the distance. An automatic process like early attempts at this technology wouldn't look nearly as good, you'd barely recognise what it's supposed to be. It would just be the low quality base but smoothed and rounded all over. These are just extreme examples of course, it's not like games had to look like the low poly base up until tessellation was introduced or something, obviously we've had far more detailed looking games already. It's essentially a better, less demanding, more seamless way to use LOD levels (I think it also only changes what is actually visible, so the back of that model isn't actually rendered in high quality, but don't quote me on that) which allows you to have much greater polycounts for things that are up close and in view.
 

randomwab

Member
I've seen a lot of people compare Crysis 2's gameplay to Call of Duty, but it feels more like Halo to me. You're given a fair variety of weapons and the arenas are usually open enough to give you several ways to confront a level, and the AI is to a decent enough level to make each replay of a scenario interesting. However, I still feel that Halo does this type of combat much better, in my opinion. I'm not sure if it's because of Halo's enemy AI being better or some other fact.

I'm still surprised that it's been five years since FEAR and no one has been able to replicate or top it. Not even Monolith themselves can.
 

Luigiv

Member
Alextended said:
The artist created the high poly base as well, tessellation just seamlessly switches back and forth based on the distance.
Yeah, I'm aware of that, but I didn't think you could reduce that much detail into a displacement map.
 
randomwab said:
I've seen a lot of people compare Crysis 2's gameplay to Call of Duty, but it feels more like Halo to me. You're given a fair variety of weapons and the arenas are usually open enough to give you several ways to confront a level, and the AI is to a decent enough level to make each replay of a scenario interesting. However, I still feel that Halo does this type of combat much better, in my opinion. I'm not sure if it's because of Halo's enemy AI being better or some other fact.

I'm still surprised that it's been five years since FEAR and no one has been able to replicate or top it. Not even Monolith themselves can.
actually, i still think NOLF 2 had much more impressive AI over all. they didn't fight as well as the AI in FEAR did, but they did so much more. it's one of the only games that has real AI that just responds to what it can 'see' and 'hear' in the environment, rather than being fed other things like player location and nonsense like that.
 
plagiarize said:
actually, i still think NOLF 2 had much more impressive AI over all. they didn't fight as well as the AI in FEAR did, but they did so much more. it's one of the only games that has real AI that just responds to what it can 'see' and 'hear' in the environment, rather than being fed other things like player location and nonsense like that.

I have very good memories of the FEAR AI.
 

Metal-Geo

Member
dark10x said:
All I can remember is enemies diving under tables.
All I remember is enemies throwing closets and other objects for cover, unscripted;
enemies flanking my fire and actually managing to sneak up behind me;
enemies dragging their wounded leg and firing blindly at the me, while they're 'dragging away' for cover;
enemies talking about my position (they knew when I was in a cubicle, for instance);
And enemies shooting at explosives near me.

They may not have been the 'most' advanced AI ever, but they were certainly great fun to fight.
 

SapientWolf

Trucker Sexologist
Metal-Geo said:
All I remember is enemies throwing closets and other objects for cover, unscripted;
enemies flanking my fire and actually managing to sneak up behind me;
enemies dragging their wounded leg and firing blindly at the me, while they're 'dragging away' for cover;
enemies talking about my position (they knew when I was in a cubicle, for instance);
And enemies shooting at explosives near me.

They may not have been the 'most' advanced AI ever, but they were certainly great fun to fight.
"Look, there's his flashlight!"
"Shit!"
 

Corky

Nine out of ten orphans can't tell the difference.

thetrin

Hail, peons, for I have come as ambassador from the great and bountiful Blueberry Butt Explosion
EatChildren said:
Should depend how heavily its used. Its used pretty lightly in Deus Ex: Human Revolution to smooth out character models. Looks great at very little cost to performance. Even something like Metro manages to use tessellation pretty well without hurting performance too much. Its the advanced DOF that kills Metro's performance.
The fact that it can be used efficiently and to possibly great effect does not stop crytek using it on a wall being dumb as rocks.

And again, the environments in crysis2 feel mostly flat and lacking in geometry detail compared to those in the first game.
Having 800k polys rendered in your scene in one frame and adding another 200k by tesselating bricks in the walls n stuff does not make the scene any more complex.

vs crysis 1 maps being designed so they are showing 1-3 million polys onscreen in many scenes, the majority of the time.

That was what made the first game look so darn impressive.
 

scitek

Member
SneakyStephan said:
The fact that it can be used efficiently and to possibly great effect does not stop crytek using it on a wall being dumb as rocks.

And again, the environments in crysis2 feel mostly flat and lacking in geometry detail compared to those in the first game.
Having 800k polys rendered in your scene in one frame and adding another 200k by tesselating bricks in the walls n stuff does not make the scene any more complex.

vs crysis 1 map showing 1-3 million polys onscreen in many scenes, the majority of the time.

That was what made the first game look so darn impressive.

Glad you've played the Crysis 2 update already.
 
scitek said:
Glad you've played the Crysis 2 update already.

Read and understand my post before you reply.


Stallion Free said:
Fuck, I knew I should have kept my polycounters on for C2 so I could properly shit on it.

Are you suggesting that these smaller, confined / blocked off environments almost entirely made up out of large flat surfaces have a larger polycount than the large open detailed vistas in crysis 1?

I had r_displayinfo 1 open during most of my playthrough and noticed that the triangle count was always much lower than it was on average in the first game.

Seriously, everything in the environments and the way the environments were set up looked designed to be of as low a poly count as possible
 
Norml said:
I agree. Nobody would want to see that on a brick building,needs toned down a lot!

obviously the effect was cranked to the max so people will notice it. I understand why they did this, but it would be much more realistic if it were toned down.

OTOH, it still looks more realistic than the plain flat polygons
 

Stallion Free

Cock Encumbered
SneakyStephan said:
Seriously, everything in the environments and the way the environments were set up looked designed to be of as low a poly count as possible
No shit, it was a console port. But graphics quality isn't reliant on polycount so it's weird that you are using that as a metric to compare the games.

And the fact that you relied on r_displayinfo 1 says everything.
 
SneakyStephan said:
Read and understand my post before you reply.




Are you suggesting that these smaller, confined / blocked off environments almost entirely made up out of large flat surfaces have a larger polycount than the large open detailed vistas in crysis 1?

I had r_displayinfo 1 open during most of my playthrough and noticed that the triangle count was always much lower than it was on average in the first game.

Seriously, everything in the environments and the way the environments were set up looked designed to be of as low a poly count as possible
how many of those polygons were instanced? how much texture memory was being used by a Crysis 2 scene vs a Crysis 1 scene? how much memory was being used for the geometry?

most of the details in those vistas (by polycount) were hundreds of copies of the same three or so trees.

each game has it's own tricks. Crysis 1 had instancing to save memory. there's a lot less that can be instanced in Crysis 2 because there is more unique geometry and textures in any one scene in Crysis 2, even if there are less polys being used.
 
1) Crysis 2 looks amazing for a console game. Top of the tops.
2) Crysis 2 would look way better if made exclusively for the PC.
3) Then, it would run just as bad as Crysis ran when it was released.

There, thread can be closed.
 
plagiarize said:
how many of those polygons were instanced? how much texture memory was being used by a Crysis 2 scene vs a Crysis 1 scene? how much memory was being used for the geometry?

most of the details in those vistas (by polycount) were hundreds of copies of the same three or so trees.

each game has it's own tricks. Crysis 1 had instancing to save memory. there's a lot less that can be instanced in Crysis 2 because there is more unique geometry and textures in any one scene in Crysis 2, even if there are less polys being used.

I'm saying it's a bit redundant to use tesselation on a brick wall when your environments are comparitively poly starved.
It's like spending an hour shining an apple when it's all you have to eat for a week, instead of finding more food.

@ stallion, I'm not comparing a polycount value to a tri one as both games show tri counts with the r_display info that you seem to despise so much.
Are you saying triangle count isn't a good way to measure geometry complexity in a scene?

Anyhow, my whole argument I've been making is in the underlined sentence, I wouldn't have had to even mention anything else if you didn't derail it.
Your 'no shit it's a console port' statement only reinforces my argument.

@plagiarise, much more texture memory, and much more memory in general.
But isn't that the whole point, making use of what you have.

I'm not denying they designed it efficiently (well semi if you count all the pop in) for consoles.
Hey good fort hem for fitting the game design into 256MB vram and 256MB ram, but again it's pointless to then boast tesselation on walls when the 'damage' to level design and open-ness of the game has already been done.


edit : edited out passive agressive retort that should 've been aimed at the poster below you anyhow.
 

Stallion Free

Cock Encumbered
I don't recall ever telling you that you were full of shit.

Try reading this again: "Fuck, I knew I should have kept my polycounters on for C2 so I could properly shit on it."

No where in that sentence does it say that you are full of shit.
 
SneakyStephan said:
@plagiarise, much more texture memory, and much more memory in general.
But isn't that the whole point, making use of what you have.

I'm not denying they designed it efficiently (well semi if you count all the pop in) for consoles, but again it's pointless to then boast tesselation on walls.
i don't see the difference in boasting about the instancing in Crysis 1 (where it had environments well suited for it) to max out the polycount, and in boasting about tesselation in Crysis 2 to max out the polycount, that's all i'm getting at.

Crysis 2 has way more unique geometry and textures than the first did. it couldn't max out its poly count in the same way the original did, because it doesn't have environments that suit copy and pasting the same trees and rocks and bushes all over the place. instancing is great in organic environments because it's really hard to see that it's being done... but you couldn't get away with it in 2.

so yeah, i don't see why they can't show off a different way of maxing out the polycount while keeping the memory requirements of the geometry low that suits the environments in Crysis 2.

it's a different solution to the same problem instancing solves, and it works for the situations presented in Crysis 2.

one of the benefits of tesselation is that you can keep the meshes relatively low poly (and thus they don't take up a bunch of memory) and then fill in that extra detail with tesselation based on the normal maps (created from the original high poly versions).

the high poly version used to generate the normal map, and the high poly tesselated version of the low poly model will be almost indistuinguishable.
 
plagiarize said:
i don't see the difference in boasting about the instancing in Crysis 1 (where it had environments well suited for it) to max out the polycount, and in boasting about tesselation in Crysis 2 to max out the polycount, that's all i'm getting at.

.
Fair enough.

I'd like them to find a median though, mix some forests and repeating geometry with tesselation where it actually matters (curves) and use pom for the bricks along with way better textures for the bricks/mortar.
 
SneakyStephan said:
Fair enough.

I'd like them to find a median though, mix some forests and repeating geometry with tesselation where it actually matters (curves) and use pom for the bricks along with way better textures for the bricks/mortar.
personally i think POM should stick to stuff on the ground, where you can't see its weaknesses compared to tesselation.

i think tesselation works great on walls though where edges are really apparent, and which give away the 'trick' for POM. tesselation lets you keep things like buildings REALLY low poly.

tesselation is as good for smoothing out curves, as it is for adding detail to something flat (like the battle damage on those metal tentacles and the bricks and mortar on those walls). it's good for anything which would otherwise have a straight edge, which you really don't want to have a straight edge.

all statements of opinion mind.
 
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