Crysis 2 Tweak Guide (Demo)

[alexsubri]

Sauce

It's sad the Crysis 2 demo is only DirectX 9, it's sad the depth of support for changing graphical setting is limited to the amorphous descriptions 'Hardcore', 'Advanced' and 'Gamer'. But something that makes us happy is that we can still tweak it despite all of this.

It turns out the game engine is still able to take the usual console settings via the command line when you launch the game. For simplicity we're going to concentrate on the standalone version rather than the Steam version.

The easiest way to get going this way is to create a short cut to the game's executable that you can find at:

“x:\Program Files (x86)\Electronic Arts\Crytek\Crysis 2 Demo\bin32\Crysis2Demo.exe"

Right-click on the Crysis 2 Demo icon drag and drop it on your desktop and choose Create shortcut here. Right-click on this and choose Properties, in the Target box after the line that should be the same as above, after the last quote symbol add a space and you can start adding console commands. So as an example our launch line looks as follows, with the game store on the E drive.

"E:\Program Files (x86)\Electronic Arts\Crytek\Crysis 2 Demo\bin32\Crysis2Demo.exe" +g_skipintro 1 +cl_fov 85 +r_glow 0 +r_motionblur 0

As you should be able to guess this disables the intro movies, adjusts the field of view to 85 degrees and removes any traces of glow and motion blur. A comprehensive list of CVARs can be found here, it is rather too long and many won't have an effect as they're locked in the demo.

So we've provided a quick run down on the most important below. However if you find playing with your own CVARs a little dirty then why not try this handy tweak tool that's now updated to version four.



We're going to run off and attempt to get some sensible benchmarks, though that can be somewhat tricky in a MP environment!

Update 1
So experimenting a little with the setting we get a default 'Hardcore' result of Min: 24 Max: 35 Avg: 30 tweaking the settings this ups the frame rate by just over 10 percent and from what we can see for little hit on image quality, improving the frame rate to Min: 30 Max: 37 Avg: 34. These results are from modest gaming hardware running a HD 4870 on a Core 2 E6420.

Crysis 2 Demo CVARS

r_FSAA [0/1] Enables multisampled AA
Default is 0

r_UseEdgeAA [0/1/2/3] Toggles edge blurring
Default is 1, 2 activates AA mode, 3 activates laplace edge AA

r_Glow [0/1] Toggles the glow effect
Default is 0, set to 1 to activate

r_MotionBlur [0/1/2/3] Enables per object and camera motion blur
Default is 1 on, 2 object and camera blur. 3 debug mode

r_NoDrawNear [0/1] Disables drawing near objects
Default is 1 on

r_PostMSAA [0/1/2] Enables amortized multisampling
Default is 1. 1: 2x quincunx, 2: 4xmsaa

r_PostProcessEffects [0/1/2] Enables post processing special effects.
Default is 1 (enabled). 2 enables and displays active effects

r_PostProcessGameFx [0/1] Enables post processing special effects game fx.
Default is 1 enabled. 0 disabled

cl_fov=[float] Set the current field of view in degrees
Default is 55

CROSSFIRE / SLI Users:

I haven't found out any remedies yet, there seems to be bugs in the ATI Crossfire that doesn't let us utilize crossfire properly. Various users have reported this all the way from 5770 Crossfire to 6970 Crossfire. Just turn off the Crossfire and play with one card I suppose...

SLI, I don't have nVidia, but those who can confirm let me know!

 

[erocker]

You only need one thread. I got rid of the other.

 

[alexsubri]

thanks, I just posted to Mussels, it wasn't displaying in the threads. It must've been a glitch on my end

 

[alexsubri]

can you merge this in the crysis 2 thread ?