Legit Reviews

ok, my school gets the computer mag PCUSER i was reading it and that edition came with on the dvd they give u a DX10 on XP for crysis crack that the people at PCuser had actually made, i just had a quick search in google and no luck finding it, anyone else seen anything similar?

It was also a little title on the cover of the mag, if i can find it on google i will post it..

Yeah its not really a crack, and its not really dx10, its just a kind of a tweak that changes the "high" settings to very high and makes it look very close to dx10.

http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1 ... 704,00.asp

As it turns out, the additional graphical features once thought to be exclusive to users who combined Microsoft Vista, a DirectX 10-compatible graphics card, and the hot new shooter Crysis, can now be run under Windows XP.
Through some tweaks to the game's configuration files, a user at Crisis-Online managed to enable the DX10 features under Windows XP, including improved shadows, some excellent-looking bump-mapping effects, 3D waves, and other graphical improvements.

Essentially, what the tweak does is allow DX9 users to use the "Very High" settings that are exclusively reserved for DX10 users.


The tweaks are relatively simple. Users need to edit all of the files found in "\Crysis SP Demo\Game\Config\CVarGroups". First, back up the folder. (Since they're all text-based config files, the backup is just a few megabytes, if that.) You'll then need to edit each file, taking the first block of text and swapping it out with the text with the third option. In the example (sys_spec_Particles.cfg)below, take the text at the bottom (in italics) and replace it with the text at the top (in bold).

[default]
; default of this CVarGroup
= 4
e_particles_quality=4
e_particles_lod=1
e_particles_max_emitter_draw_screen=32
r_UseSoftParticles=1
e_water_ocean_soft_particles= 1
e_particles_object_collisions=1


[1]
e_particles_quality=1
e_particles_lod=0.75
e_particles_max_emitter_draw_screen=4
r_UseSoftParticles=0
e_water_ocean_soft_particles=0
e_particles_object_collisions=0


[2]
e_particles_quality=2
e_particles_max_emitter_draw_screen=8


[3]
e_particles_quality=3
e_particles_max_emitter_draw_screen=16


Now, enter the game, and under the "advanced" graphics settings, turn up all of your settings to high. (Your system will still show the "high" settings enabled, even though the new eye candy is turned on.) After you've seen what the game looks like at its best, feel free to decrease some of the settings to improve performance.

Feel free to post screenshots in the forums; or, if you want to see what it looks like after you make the tweaks, check out the Crysis-Online thread.

I can confirm that the tweaks work. However, they don't work miracles, from a performance standpoint. I own an Nvidia 8600 card, and turning up the settings to "high" with the tweaks enabled gave me about 15 frames per second. But it looked fantastic.

Might i be able to ask what 8600 you have? and what cpu? I am currently running the XFX 8600GTS XXX edition which has the clocks at 740/2260 (Core/memory) and since i have such a crappy CPu i get when set on medium with 16Q AA i get an average of like 25 FPS (note their is no diff if i turn off AA) ill give it a shot and see what i get!

Thats just my copying/pasting from their website i have 8800gts, i get about 18-28fps with very high tweak @ 1440x990

but my card is oced a lot

Instead of using your way, i have googled it and found this http://www.incrysis.com/forums/viewtopi ... =18999&p=1
I noticed that yours was for the demo.... But either way i tihnk this will work i have done a benchmark running everything on high apart from Sound and motion blur (yea i hate it too) high
very high i think i did it right....

Could u do me a favour and post a zip file with your Cvar files?? i didnt quite under stand how to do it...

I often thought that MS should apply DX10 to XP considering what a failure Vista has been.

ibleet wrote:I often thought that MS should apply DX10 to XP considering what a failure Vista has been.

Actually, after having tried DX10 "on Vista" for 9 months, I didn't find much about it that I'll miss. For example: Hellgate London has a DX10 executable which enabled "motion blur" and something else I forget. I only remember the motion blur feature because it sucked so badly. Besides you also should remember that DX10 has no hardware sound acceleration. Well unless you get Creative Labs latest (read pricy!) card. Which, wouldn't you know it, Still has buggy drivers!?!

here it is

http://www.ngohq.com/news/12492-crysis- ... -hack.html

Well then using the tweak and the built in benchmark this is my score.

Cannyone wrote:

ibleet wrote:I often thought that MS should apply DX10 to XP considering what a failure Vista has been.

Actually, after having tried DX10 "on Vista" for 9 months, I didn't find much about it that I'll miss. For example: Hellgate London has a DX10 executable which enabled "motion blur" and something else I forget. I only remember the motion blur feature because it sucked so badly. Besides you also should remember that DX10 has no hardware sound acceleration. Well unless you get Creative Labs latest (read pricy!) card. Which, wouldn't you know it, Still has buggy drivers!?!

While I agree that most "current" games that support DX10 exhibit mediocre differences between DX9 and DX10 some actually show wide IQ differences and that number will grow as developers get more accustomed with the API.

I agree that Hellgate has it's issues (still like the game and still think it's a little better under DX10) the game has MANY bugs, none of which I believe are "truly" Vista specific, that's the developer, not Vista.

As for the audio issue... One company that is worse than MS in monopolistic behavior is Creative Labs, their drivers and customer "care and support" frankly suck and they have held a stranglehold on computer audio for way too long pushing EAX as "the way to enlightenment".

While its true that DirectSound3d was removed from the Vista audio layer there are still two hardware paths for hardware accelerated audio. ASIO which AFAIK is mainly used for DAW type apps (I use the AISO drivers in Vista for recording) and OpenAL which is already replacing DirectSound3d in many games. Some linkage below:

ASIO http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audio_stream_input_output
OpenAL http://www.openal.org/openal_vista.html

Where the problem arises is that, partly due to Creative's monopoly with EAX, a great many games were written to SOLELY support DirectSound3D. Creative has provided an interim solution (I think most upcoming games will support OpenAL by default) called Alchemy which provides DirectSound3D to OpenAL translation allowing for Creatives "whiz-bang" junk to be used in Vista for those DirectSound3D only games (and there are many).

As for the "Well unless you get Creative Labs latest (read pricy!)" card, well that statement is just untrue. Alchemy is a free download for X-Fi series cards and costs $9.99 USD for Audigy series cards which are about $20 USD.

I am not a Vista shill, I wouldn't recommend someone with a two year old system with a gig of RAM and a DX9 card to switch to Vista now "just because" as they would see no gain, however, I also feel that we serve nobody by regurgitating bad press and misinformation about Vista to those who might actually benefit from the upgrade.

My two rusty pennies