Legit Reviews

Cryostasis is the first PC game to use the graphics card to calculate fluid simulation using smoothed particle hydrodynamics (SPH) and the game is loaded with tons of other physics that will blow you away. With the techdemo for the game being released today we figured that we'd show you how the demo performs on ATI Radeon and NVIDIA GeForce graphics cards. We even toss in a dedicated PhysX card to see what it will do for performance.

Cryostasis is a first person, survival-horror shooter set for release in early 2009. The game is set in a dark and gritty environment where ice is constantly melting around you, making water a key theme in the game. In order to achieve lifelike liquid behavior, thousands of fluid particles must be simulated. The first room in the Cryostasis Techdemo alone contains just under 30,000 fluid particles which interact realistically with the environment and other particles.

Article Title: Cryostasis PC Game TechDemo - Physics Benchmarking
Article URL: http://www.legitreviews.com/article/852/1/
DIGG: http://digg.com/pc_games/Cryostasis_PC_ ... nchmarking

The water looks like BB's as they bounce off.

Very nice. If the whole game is like this, I think I might actually pre-order it.

So where is this available for download?

Testing this demo was quite thrilling given the amount of physics acceleration that was occurring. I've never seen water flow so realistically. Now all they have to work on is making the water actually look like water. Right now it looks like liquid aerogel.

edit: Don't know where the public release of the demo is. I don't know if it'll actually be released either

Are the FPS graphs correct? Looks like you have labeled "Low" as red, which is showing a lower FPS. Shouldn't "High" quality be labled red and "Low" labeled green?

Looks really cool. I will be holding onto a graphics card for dedicated physics next time I upgrade.

stopthekilling77 wrote:So where is this available for download?

Right here - http://www.nvidia.com/content/graphicsp ... wnload.asp

vicaphit wrote:Are the FPS graphs correct? Looks like you have labeled "Low" as red, which is showing a lower FPS. Shouldn't "High" quality be labled red and "Low" labeled green?

Are you really asking about the colors that i used for the bars on the charts?

I used red for the lows as that is caution or stop as the worst performance and green for the high as that is the fastest...

Actually I don't know why i picked those colors, but using the legend they match up correctly.

I thought High, Medium, and Low were for graphics quality, the graphs show low as less frames per second.

low - the lowest FPS observed during the benchmark
average - the average FPS during the entire benchmark run
high - the peak FPS observed during the benchmark

All benchmark scores are averaged from three runs... three since it took ~15 minutes to run it on the ATI cards and all the testing was done the day prior to the article being posted.

The GTX 260 alone is still running PhysX, right?

It would be fascinating to see what the results from an nVidia card without PhysX enabled would be like. That would tell use whether it's a driver issue that's causing low framerates for the HD4870 or just the fact it's having to rely on the CPU for the physics.

Great review and very interesting.
My understanding of the new nVidia drivers is that you can SLi and have a dedicated PhysX card.
Would love to see what performance gains a dedicated PhysX card adds in SLi mode.

Do you need an SLI motherboard to do the GPU + PhysX cards or will it work on an Intel MB?
I'm thinking the new nVidia 295 + a PhysX card.

jnanster wrote:Do you need an SLI motherboard to do the GPU + PhysX cards or will it work on an Intel MB?
I'm thinking the new nVidia 295 + a PhysX card.

It'll work just fine on any board with two PCIe slots.

Apoptosis wrote:low - the lowest FPS observed during the benchmark
average - the average FPS during the entire benchmark run
high - the peak FPS observed during the benchmark

All benchmark scores are averaged from three runs... three since it took ~15 minutes to run it on the ATI cards and all the testing was done the day prior to the article being posted.

Oh, I thought it meant low medium and high graphics quality.

jnanster wrote:Great review and very interesting.
My understanding of the new nVidia drivers is that you can SLi and have a dedicated PhysX card.
Would love to see what performance gains a dedicated PhysX card adds in SLi mode.

I have answered this and all the other questions in this thread in this article update - http://www.legitreviews.com/article/855/1/

Did I miss something in that article, or did it really show that 3 280s, almost $1000 in VGAs, only gave 65 FPS at 1280x1024?

Then turn PhysX off and you get 12 FPS with a single card?

What's up with this game that makes it SO DEMANDING????? I will admit right now that since I bought my new rig 6 months ago, I've dropped away from knowing about all the new stuff. I hadn't even heard of this game before this article. Is this game today what Crysis was a year or two ago?

KPRROK wrote:Did I miss something in that article, or did it really show that 3 280s, almost $1000 in VGAs, only gave 65 FPS at 1280x1024?

Then turn PhysX off and you get 12 FPS with a single card?

What's up with this game that makes it SO DEMANDING????? I will admit right now that since I bought my new rig 6 months ago, I've dropped away from knowing about all the new stuff. I hadn't even heard of this game before this article. Is this game today what Crysis was a year or two ago?

Yes, you are understanding things correctly! Cryostasis has a ton of physics that can be rendered and if you choose to render it the performance hit on gaming systems will be high. The game testing that I showed in this article was done with Medium image quality settings, so in a sense you are correct. This title is just as demanding as Crysis was just a couple years back!

something similar in a real game is in crysis! i was playing today and as soon as i got to the no gravity part my FPS went way down even those there's less triangles to render (IE: no foliage)

So how big a difference is there between the 9600gt as a physics card vs a 280?