If they're smart Nvidia have financial penalties or incentives written into the 2 million contract with Crytek regarding delivery of features like 3D vision and DX11. But, even if they got the whole 2 million back this still hurts them.

Without this being covered in detail in the contract then Nvidia got Maximum screwed.

Are people genuinely upset at the game being DX9 because of a lack of graphical features or because they read about other people being upset about graphical features?

I'm by no means a tech head, but as I understand it:

DX9->10 = clouds look more fluffy, massive performance drop using DX10
DX10->11 = tesselation, textured surfaces aren't flat. Potentially more efficient than DX10.

All this "No DX11!" is bordering on religious fervor. The vast majority of people- myself included- would not notice if Crytek snook in DX11 into the game. Everyone seems to expect the game to look massively different- I think the API used is not one of the main features of an engine.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UHWGXnmINLM

You WOULD notice.

I don't know if Crysis 2 would look "massively" different, but there would definitely be a noticeable difference, even on my little 24" widescreen monitor.

Are people genuinely upset at the game being DX9 because of a lack of graphical features or because they read about other people being upset about graphical features?

I'm by no means a tech head, but as I understand it:

DX9->10 = clouds look more fluffy, massive performance drop using DX10
DX10->11 = tesselation, textured surfaces aren't flat. Potentially more efficient than DX10.

All this "No DX11!" is bordering on religious fervor. The vast majority of people- myself included- would not notice if Crytek snook in DX11 into the game. Everyone seems to expect the game to look massively different- I think the API used is not one of the main features of an engine.


People are mad because the game runs too well and doesn't cripple their high end hardware. They want a benchmarking tool and not a game.

Are people genuinely upset at the game being DX9 because of a lack of graphical features or because they read about other people being upset about graphical features?

I'm by no means a tech head, but as I understand it:

DX9->10 = clouds look more fluffy, massive performance drop using DX10
DX10->11 = tesselation, textured surfaces aren't flat. Potentially more efficient than DX10.

All this "No DX11!" is bordering on religious fervor. The vast majority of people- myself included- would not notice if Crytek snook in DX11 into the game. Everyone seems to expect the game to look massively different- I think the API used is not one of the main features of an engine.


People are mad because the game runs too well and doesn't cripple their high end hardware. They want a benchmarking tool and not a game.

It's not just that. The texture work in Crysis 2 is actually worse than in Crysis 1. Don't believe me? Look at the file size for Textures.pak in your Crysis2 directory. It's under 500 megabytes.

Now look at the filesize for Crysis1's texture.pak. It's almost 1 gigabyte. And if you download Ultra Resolution Pack, it's almost FOUR gigabytes.

There are times when I'm running around in Crysis 2 and I think I'm playing a nice modern game with awesome shadows and lighting, but is marred by pixelated texture work (soda machines look BLURRY, and you can't read any text on monitors, and large billboards look really muddy). All of this can be attributed to poor texture work for Crysis 2.

Now, DirectX 11 claims to smooth out textures with its API so that you don't need to create high resolution textures. As in my previous post, you can clearly see how a seemingly poorly done texture in DX9 can look so much better in DirectX11.

But DirectX 11 wasn't release for Crysis 2 on launch day.

I'm still giving CryTek hope in giving us DirectX 11, but the fact that they had to push back DirectX 11 past the launch date makes me feel a little... Meh.