Nice article Steven, enjoyed reading it...
I just did a little Crysis 2 overclocking test with my Xeon X3370 (=Core 2 Quad 12MB L2 cache CPU)
3.0Ghz: 45.85fps
3.6Ghz: 45.92fps
I think I may be a little bit bound by my old trusty 8800GTS 512MB VGA card even when clocked to 850/1080 (core/mem)
As for my thoughts on Crysis 2 itself, when I played the PC demo I was massively disappointed
The multiplayer maps above all where way to small, they did not have any of the original Crysis feel to them IMO.
Now I have not even played multiplayer on my Retail copy of Crysis 2, but after adjusting the Field of View and playing a few levels of the single player mission I must say that I am impressed.
The visuals are impressive, the lightning and shadows cast, even at the "middle" graphic option of the only 3 available looks amazing.
It was only now when I read Stevens article that I realized how much better the highest graphical options looks though, however my old trusty VGA card is unable to get any playable framerates there unfortunately.
However with that said I must highlight that I think Crysis really feels bland without the great Vistas of the original Crysis, there are no such grand views to be seen in Crysis 2 as far as I have played yet, I am now at the mission right after "FDR".
And how the PC version could be released with options like aim assistance enabled but only 3 preset graphical options with no customization abilities is beyond me.
And the fact that the console was locked out in the Retail version before the "day one" v1.1 patch just also goes to show where the priorities where during development.
My biggest gripe is with the default FoV though, I only have a 4:3 monitor but I get headache and feel Nausea only after minutes of gameplay, the Crysis 2 FoV is vertical and the default is 55.
Settings that work for me and look good with my resolution of 1600x1200 is FoV of 74, with this I get a slight performance reduction but it's well worth it, no longer does it feel like I'm running around looking at the game through binoculars!
You can use this calculator to figure our your own FoV;
http://www.rjdown.co.uk/projects/bfbc2/fovcalculator.php
The settings to change are;
cl_fov; this controls the world FoV, you can change it ingame from the console if you have patch v1.1
pl_movement.power_sprint_targetFov; This controls the sprint FoV, it should match cl_fov otherwise it will appear as you are "zooming in" when sprinting (Since you will be going from a wide FoV to a narrow one)
r_DrawNearFoV; This controls the FoV of the weapons you use, it is bugged though, if you set it higher than 60 it will go back to 60 when you use the binoculars in the game.
These are the settings I use in my Crysis 2\system.cfg file, the first two skips the intro movies and multiplayer login screen respectively
Code:
g_skipIntro = 1
g_enableInitialLoginScreen = 0
cl_fov = 74
r_DrawNearFoV = 60
pl_movement.power_sprint_targetFov = 74
Also if you want to run the same benchmark as I did to get the fps numbers above you can download the batch file attached to this post.
If you are viewing this from the news page comments you need to click on the text "subscribe to this thread" (not tick the button) to get to the forum view...
Please note that it requires patch version 1.0 (I.e. the Retail release)
It does not work with v1.1 because Crytek decided to remove almost all CL variables, again a testament to their support for PC gaming, this even made their own included benchmark stop working!
You can get around this by restoring the backup version of Crysis2.exe under the folder "Backup" in the Crysis2 dir to the bin32 folder, please of course first move the v1.1 Crysis2.exe file out of the way and somewhere you can easily identify it as the 1.1 version...
