Cryostasis Tech Demo Performance Review
SLI and PhysX Scaling
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Introduction
Today we are going to look into Cryostasis, a unique, horror/survival FPS developed by Action Froms. The game is set in a 1981 Russian Ice Breaker called the North Wind, which has been shipwrecked near the North Pole. The main character, ALexander Nesterov is a Russian Meteorologist who must investigate what lead to the catastrophy on the Ship. But he is not the only one on the ship; Alexander soon finds out that the crew have apparently undergone a disturbing metamorphoses due to the intense cold. Alexander has to continue his search for clues to discover the truth behind North Wind.
Released in April 09, this is one of the first games to make extensive use of nvidia Physx technology. PhysX is an advanced Real-Time Physics engine which was originally developed by Ageia. The idea was to have a dedicated Physics Processor for in-game physics effects, thus offloading the CPU and saving precious CPU Cycles in the process. It was a great idea, but the execution was not so smooth. Several bad decisions caused the downfall of Ageia, and PhysX eventually got bought out by nvidia.
Modern nvidia GPU's (8 series and above) all have PhysX support built in. Fortunately, if you have the PCI-Express slot available on your motherboard, you can have a secondary nvidia GPU installed for PhysX. This way you don't take away any graphics rendering horsepower from your Graphics Card, nor your CPU is overloaded with complex physics calculations. But modern Processors have upto 8 active cores? Why not utilize those? Well, it is true that CPU multithreading is getting more and more common, but GPU PhysX with its hundereds of cores is light years ahead of the competition.
Game Features
Action Froms describe the game features as follows :
The game develops with help of a unique system called Mental Echo - the ability to penetrate another character's memory and change the actions taken by the character in the past
Highly detailed levels provide the player with more then just a thrilling gameplay
More than 15 fearful enemies with unique capabilities
7 NPC's which will help to reveal the story
8 historically-authentic types of weapons
Graphics Engine
The graphics engine for Cryostasis is AtmosFear 2.0 and shows off some sweet DX10 affects. According to Action Forms, this engine features:
Unified Dynamic Shadowing system - fully dynamic, moving light sources casting soft shadows on all objects
Parallax mapping/displacement, alpha and color projective, depth of field, gloss map, tone mapping
Advanced characters' and objects' physics
Realistic fur dynamically illuminated by light sources
The graphics seem to capture the feeling of being stranded and cold like few other engines can. An official Tech Demo for the game engine was recently released to demonstrate the various bells and whistles of the graphics engine and also the new PhysX technology features. Here are some screenshots from this demo. These were all taken at the highest image quality and 2560 X 1600 resolution. Click on an image to see the larger version (Opens in new window).
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