Cryostasis: The Guide to stable framerate

[Chrome Ray]

I kinda get that I am late for discussion but the recent Gggmanlives review has sparked my interest in the game. I remember playing the game around the same time Metro 2033 came out and it didn't stand out as unoptimised as it's currently led to believe by many players. I guess Cryostasis is not that much laggy, as it has a lot of engine bottlenecks and with modern machines it's even more possible to overload the engine and cause FPS drops. With that in mind I reinstalled the game and played with the game settings a bit to figure out the bottlenecks and write down recomendations for best gameplay experience.

Patch or no patch?

Both GOG and Steam version didn't have the game's latest PhysX patch, which added a LOT of interactive objects and decals. The reason is that they were added with no regard to optimisation to the already unoptimised game. If you're not sure in your rig, better avoid the PhysX patch altogether.

Video card settings

First thing you figure out your target framerate, 30 or 60. I'd recommend 30 fps cap, as the game is slow paced so it will look more cinematic without much harm to gameplay, and it will be much easier to tweak on later stages.

In NVIDIA Control Panel game profile set:
Power management mode - Prefer maximum performance
for 30 FPS: Vertical sync - Adaptive (half refresh rate) OR
for 60 FPS: Triple buffering - Enabled

In game settings

Here the settings are set in order of priority. The first will have a big impact with little to no visual difference, the latter will decrease visual quality. So if you see that your framerate is stabilised it may be a good moment to stop and not go futher.

Set anisotropic filtering to 4
The shader that uses most of your PC resources is the snowfrost shader, that is literally everywhere in the game. And the thing is, the less textures are there the faster the game will work. SInce there is practically no open space, limiting anisotropic filtering to 4 will have no visible difference but might add a bit of valuable FPS.

Turn off water caustic
Seriously, nobody knows what this setting does except that it causes stutters.

Set resolution to 1280x720 or lower
Same as with anisotropic filtering, decreasing the resolution will grealty reduce the use of snowfrost shader. This may be one of the most important settings in terms of performance, while visually there isn't much geometry of high-res textures for you to see the difference.

Turn off motion blur
Object motion blur in this game is one of the earliest implementations. That's why it's not well optimised, and is a heavy influence on framerate.

Turn off water reflections, camera object blur, set shadow quality to medium
Both these settings are shader heavy, but not that much. Game looks better with them still on.


In the end you'll have a stable 30FPS 720p game kinda feeling like a console game from X360/PS3 generation. And maybe that's the best mindset for playing this game, given you no longer will have to worry about optimisation issues.

Cheers.

[Coot]

Thanks. I'll fiddle around with those. Cuastic effects are usually lighted water ripples reflecting onto the environment are they not?

[kolter]

How to install the patch on the steam version? When I try running the installer it doesn't find the game.