Motion Blur Comparison

One of the changes in the 1.1 patch was the addition of the option to change the motion blur effect. Crytek also improved the performance of the motion blur effect. So, we thought, why not test it out. So far, we have only seen minor improvements in performance. Perhaps reducing the motion blur would improve performance. This is what we found :

Incredible. No matter what we set the Motion Blur option to, we got the same frame rates at all resolutions!

That seemed pretty farfetched so we retested again and again. Yet we kept getting the same results. We can only conclude that either the Motion Blur option isn't working right, or motion blur isn't a very GPU-intensive feature.

Conclusion

For a patch that Crytek claims "mainly addresses the performance of Crysis", it certainly did not do much. Although we noted a significant improvement in Crysis' anti-aliasing performance, this is really a moot issue. No one in the right mind would bother to use anti-aliasing, unless they can only run at a very low resolution like 800 x 600.

With anti-aliasing disabled, this patch only improved the frame rate of the NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTS 512MB graphics card by about 1.5 fps at all resolutions. Hardly significant but when it comes to Crysis, a little is better than nothing. At 1280 x 1024, the patch allowed the GeForce 8800 GTS 512MB to hit 35 fps. We almost swooned in ecstacy.... NOT. Ask me again when we actually hit 40 fps.

Needless to say, the small boost in performance was not enough to allow the GeForce 8800 GTS 512MB to achieve a usable frame rate at 1600 x 1200 or 1920 x 1080. Unless you like getting headaches when you play, it's better to use a lower resolution like 1280 x 1024 or even 1024 x 768 where the average frame rate is reasonably good at 35-45 fps.

Reducing the amount of motion blur had absolutely no effect on Crysis' performance. Too bad. We expected a DirectX 10 feature like motion blur to have a significant effect on performance which would explain why Crytek would add a Motion Blur option in the 1.1 patch. Perhaps, the Motion Blur option was broken...

Our verdict? Upgrade, you should. Small, the performance improvement may be, but other benefits you will find.

Okay, enough Yoda-speak. Performance issues and the useless Motion Blur option aside, the new Crysis 1.1 patch does come with significant improvements. For one thing, we noticed that there were no longer any memory leaks that we noted in the original Crysis, and the Crysis benchmark quit like it should instead of forcing us to kill it manually everytime we run it. That alone is worth the 140MB download.

Questions & Comments

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