Is crysis a lot better than the demo? Someone only needs to say it's as good as Farcry or STALKER and I'm a buyer. (Now that I've got a system that can drive it)
It's a lot better than the demo, that's for sure. It's the difference between Crysis and i.e. COD4. With COD4 you play the demo and that's everything you are going to see in the game, except a pair of boring gimmicks. IMO it's a lot better than what Farcry was at the time. I can't really say (objetively) it's better than STALKER since they are very different, each one excelent in its own way, and I liked both very much. It all depends on the type of gameplay you like more. For me Crysis is better. Crysis has been my fafourite game of last year, over Bioshock, TF2 (even though I play this one a lot and I'm in love), STALKER, UT3, Gears Of War, and definately better than COD4. Those are the games that I think were best FPS games of 2007 (in order). IMO Crysis was way better than those except Bioshock and STALKER.
In the end it doesn't pay to be loyal to companies like that. From what I've seen they sold no less then any other PC game would sell so I don't see the problem here. There were many people who didn't buy the game because they didn't like the demo so I wouldn't say it's all piracy per say...I would say that a lot of people have different tastes in FPS games. Having said that, I can't wait for Far Cry II to come out
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Side Note:
Aren't they creating a "supposedly" better engine called Crytek II Engine or something of the kind? This would imply that the original engined needs work (as many complained about). So why would they expect more sales when they knew they needed to work on the engine?
A lot of people have different tastes, that's right. But you can't blame them for thinking that many people are pirating their game, since it's true. More than any other game, because Crysis is a game and a "benchmarking tool". Many people has pirated the game only to see how the game played on their machine, because the demo doesn't reflect the graphics of the entire game. I mean only 1 million copies were sold, but you can see way more people talking about how the game played in that level or the other. You don't hear the same about other games. You know what I mean...
Answer to the side note: CryEngine 2 is the engine used in Crysis, there isn't any other engine AFAIK. They are tweaking it to make it run on consoles. Even though the game is not very well optimized*, the engine is a wonder. Once you start tweaking it you can make it run faster (for the graphics level it is displaying) than most other engines. As I have said it lots of times, the problem in Crysis is that everything in the engine is done per-pixel (lighting has some kind of local ray-tracing, shadows are calculated similarly, you have global ilumination, ambient occlusion, parallax occlusion mapping...) and so it doesn't scale very well at higher resolutions. To this you have to add that it does some kind of tesselation on the water (software tesselation, I guess), insane physics and the total lack of any static lighting/shadowing (yes every other games use some). It does many more things than any other engine and it does it on the same kind of hardware.
*I wouldn't say it's bad optimized, but bad aimed at the level of hardware there would be at launch. What we now know as GT200 was going to launch around that date, but the lack of competition moved that launch to a later date, we know that. Most people think that Nvidia released 8800 GT before schedule, because they wanted to release before HD3000 series. My impression has always been that they released them so that Crytek (a really good partner) had a cheap card able to play Crysis, since GT200/R700 won't release until months later.
A consecuence of the above is that some higher settings in Crysis are not possible in current gen hardware. If you look at CVars most Very High settings are a big jump from High, a lot bigger than the jump from Medium to High or Low to Medium. Usual ratios between settings are:
Medium = 2x Low
High = 1,5x-2x Medium
Very High = 3x-4x High
Of course hardware requirements to use them scale accordingly. 8800 GT can play High easily if you don't attempt very high resolutions, but Very High is not possible (it's possible at 1280x for the most part, but not in many levels that are much more demanding). You can tweak the Cvars until you have "cheap" Very High that looks indentical to the true one and runs almost as fast as High. And that's because Very High settings are overkill for the resolutions you can play the game with today, they are 3-4x more demanding than High!!!
Now that I have talked so much, I will try to help and say two of the indispensable tweaks you should do to the autoexec.cfg. There are many tweak guides out there, so it's better to follow them (
http://www.tweakguides.com/Crysis_1.html) but this 2 alone improved my performance more than 25%:
e_precache_level = 1
r_TexturesStreaming = 0
Both make all textures and data to load before you start the level. Even though I have 2GB of ram it would always use less than 800 MB, which is stupid. With this setting it sometimes reaches 1,4 GB, but I see a 25% improvement in average framerate and way more in lowest frames. Indeed higher frames are not improved so 25% imrpovement comes from the low ones.
Also I recommend using "r_UseEdgeAA = 2" instead of real Anti-Aliasing, because it's almost free and it does smooth some edges, mostly on vegetation where the aliasing is more evident. It's a good free alternative to AA.
With those and some extra tweaking (for instance, enabling all Very High Cvars and give them a value between High and Very high) you can have "Very-High-like" graphics on an OCed 8800GT and above cards that works for every levels except the final boss.
What a joke. My pc won't even think about about VH unless I tweak the hell out of the cvars. My 8800gt cries like a baby on high. My 3870 whimps out even worse. There's a reason for mid-range cards, most ppl who game will buy them. Mid-range cards suppose to play games @ mid-range settings. This crapper game eats the 8800gt & 3870 alive @ med-high. Sure you can get some reasonable frames out of it on some levels but otherwise its a slideshow. Blame your low sales on most ppl knowing it will run their systems through fits & fix it for later releases.
Just like the lagger farcry, this game is about 2yrs ahead of its time - thats when we'll have mid-range cards that can handle this monster @ proper settings. They should have learned from farcry. They just tried to allow the game to run smoother @ lower frame rates
Bogus, you can make a game look nice w/o making it a lagger. Plenty of designers did it before & after this mess came out.
Yeah but they cry like a baby because you try to run it on your display. Sometimes lower resolution and higher settings is a lot better, that's why I love so much my monitor. Crytek knew this and I am enjoying it so much. Funny how I probably played the game with so much better graphics than you with my weaker system.
BTW FarCry sold really well over the time, even though not so much at first. Probably Crysis will do the same.
I mean my friend runs it on a dell 5150 and the only thing added was a 7300le and he can play crysis on low with a low res but c'mon a 7300 LE 
He picked it up for £30 when he got the pc. So tbh they must be complaining that they can't run it at very high spec at 2560 x whatever (1600 i think)
