NVIDIA ForceWare 169.09 - Crysis rendering follow-up @ Elite Bastards

[Chierin]

A couple of weeks ago, we stumbled across a rather intriguing issue in the then recently released Crysis single player demo with NVIDIA's ForceWare 169 series of drivers - With each driver set we tested, be they WHQL or beta, water reflections in-game were being rendered incorrectly, an issue which could be resolved by renaming the game executable to something other than 'Crysis.exe'. However, doing this also saw performance drop somewhat, with an average reduction in frame rate of around 7% after renaming the executable. NVIDIA has since released an updated beta set of ForceWare drivers - ForceWare 169.09, which (aside from SLI support for the game) also claims to fix this water rendering issue. Given the interest in our initial discovery of this issue, it seems only fair and relevant to follow up the story with the release of these new drivers, to ensure that the issue in question is indeed fixed, as well as investigating how this change (if at all) affects performance.


NVIDIA ForceWare 169.09 - Crysis rendering follow-up

"At 1280x1024, renaming the executable in ForceWare 169.04 gave us close to a 7% drop in performance. Utilising ForceWare 169.09, there is no longer any performance drop from renaming the Crysis executable, but performance overall is around 7% lower than that seen in the previous driver set, putting it on a par with the older driver with the game EXE renamed. This is still faster than the older ForceWare 163.69 WHQL driver, but suggests that much of the additional performance seen in ForceWare 169.01 through to 169.04 was due to that water reflection rendering issue."

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