Tuesday, November 6th 2007
NVIDIA Drivers Sacrificing Crysis Quality for Performance
An interesting article over at Elite Bastards has revealed that NVIDIA's latest 169.04 driver for its GeForce series of graphics cards may in fact be sacrificing image quality in the new Crysis game in order to gain better performance. If you look at the first two images below, you will see quite clearly that the reflections in the water have been unrealistically stretched and look quite odd. The obvious explanation for this would be that NVIDIA's new driver is having issues rendering the shadows and you'd expect the company to fix it. However, this issue may run a little deeper than that. When the Crysis executable has its name changed from crysis.exe to driverbug.exe, these strange shadows mysteriously look normal all of a sudden, as shown in the second two images. Further tests revealed that the renamed executable was actually performing around 7% worse on a number of tests using both an 8800 GTS and an 8800 GT compared to the default name. So it seems that NVIDIA has tried to subtly increase the framerate when playing Crysis using its cards at the cost of image quality, without giving customers any choice in the matter. Some sites are claiming that NVIDIA is using driver tweaks to 'cheat' and gain better performance, and whilst that may be an extreme way of looking at it, this certainly seems like more than just an accidental driver issue.
Source:
Elite Bastards
81 Comments on NVIDIA Drivers Sacrificing Crysis Quality for Performance
It appears they have already updated their drivers to a certified WHQL 163.75
As you said, that is the new WHQL driver, which means that it is not a beta, as the poster describes on the first line. Secondly, it is not the recommended driver for Crysis as the poster writes on the second line, as the beta driver (169.04) is newer than the 163.75 driver (albeit without WHQL status of course) and has been optimised for Crysis. The 163.75 driver was written pre-Crysis, and I doubt it's any different from the 163.75 beta driver other than that it has been certified by Microsoft.
Edit: and the 8800 GT isn't listed as being supported by those drivers.
If you notice on those pics there is exactly a 10 FPS diffrence between the "Bug" and "the way it was meant to be played" lol
Anyway, this is off topic so I'm not going to talk about it anymore.
:shadedshu.
Ok you can thank me :D:slap:
Time for the marketing guys at nVidia (who forced the driver developers to do the "benchmark" cheating) to start falling on swords. Time to boycott (or at least bad-mouth) nVidia for their attempted cheating.
I really dont care WHO does it, the fact that they did it to boost FPS benchmarks, for some cheap benchmark ranking glory, is very sleazy and deserves a slap :slap:
nvidia sux44rz for trying to fool us with drivers optimizations that give worse image quality
ati ftw :)
this is 163.44 is the splotches caused by the driver issue?
If I notice anything like that while fiddling with Crysis later, I'll screenshot it.
:laugh: in the second screenie you posted, the AI on the dock looks like he's taking a leak! :laugh:
Making all these games Nvidia 'the way it's meant to be played' had me thinking a bit
This is just like the good old Intel marketing cheating over AMD in the Athalon era..
I think it's great that the frame-rate challenged can get the opportunity to run the game a little faster without missing much. I've use a number of drivers for Crysis and you would really have to know what to look for to notice anything.
Talk about a lot of fuss over nothing! They are BETA drivers. YOU DON"T HAVE TO USE THEM.
NVidia is trying to find the best balence of IQ and performance and implementing optimizations in the driver. This driver screws up the shadow/reflexion rendering.
NVidia most likely was just playing around with the shadow rendering to see what it would do, not to purposely try to cheat. I wouldn't be surprised if the problem was fixed by the time the real drivers make it out to the market. Of course then we will get all the ATI fanboys flooding the forums claiming they only fixed it because they were caught...
Of course the problem goes away when you rename the exe, that is how nVidia drivers work, anyone that has actually used an NVidia card in the past few years would know that. The optimizations that they implement are based on profiles setup by nVidia for each exe. Change the name of the exe and kiss the optimizations good-bye.