Tweak Crysis

Phil Hartup explains which settings you need to tweak in Crysis to achieve a good balance between frame rates and fancy graphics.

In our tests, we found that running the game at High settings, but with Shadows Quality set to Low, resulted in a frame rate increase of around 25 per cent over setting the Shadows Quality to High. However, the appearance of the game suffers as a result. A good compromise is the Medium setting, which offers some shadows. Even if they aren't very high-quality, the results are decent-looking.

After that, we move on to Water Quality, which is one of the more important settings from an eye-candy point of view, as there's so much water in Crysis. At the Low setting, there's no noticeable impact on the frame rate but the water looks terrible. We found that Medium is the best setting for achieving a suitable balance between performance and appearance - besides which, you won't appreciate the subtle improvements offered by the higher settings unless you plan on spending a lot of time around the sea.

The next option to tackle is Post Processing, which governs the depth of field and motion blur. This is a frustrating combination of features to control using one setting, as the motion blur can be annoying while the depth of field effect looks great. Dropping this setting to Low yielded a substantial boost of around 40 per cent to the frame rate, showing that this is really a shock to a system. At the Low setting, you'll lose a lot of the awesome depth of field effects, but you also lose the motion blur. On Medium, however, you obtain a little of both, which is a much better result.

After that comes the Texture Quality setting, which you need to set according to your graphics card's amount of RAM and its memory bandwidth. With 512MB of GDDR3 RAM or better, your system should be able to handle High or Very High texture quality.

However, with 256MB of RAM, your best bet is the Medium setting; any less than that and you'll want to set it to Low. If your GPU lacks enough RAM to handle all the textures, your frame rate will be in the toilet, regardless of other settings.

We found that the Physics Quality and the Particles Quality settings didn't have much effect on the frame rate when lowered, and the frame rate increased by around 10 per cent with both set to Low. This is good news, as the particle effects look great with Particles Quality turned up, and really add to the action. However, it's hard to spot the change in the game when you alter the Physics Quality setting.

At first glance, lowering the Volumetric Effects Quality doesn't do much either, but you'll notice it when you get into the mistier missions, where your frame rate will be hit hard by the fog if you have this setting up high.

Finally, we have the Shaders Quality setting, which has a much more profound effect on the graphics and should be afforded careful consideration - it not only enhances the appearance of the game, but it also kicks your frame rate in the arse. Turning this setting to Low doubled the frame rate with all the other settings on High, but it made the graphics look noticeably poorer.