In case you really don’t like my blog, just click here to have dinosaurs run all over it and smash it to pieces.
Or throw meteors at it, or have it eaten by flies… You get the picture.
Oh, and you can do this to any site! (RIAA *cough*)
I keep going on about Crysis, but you need to see this. Are We talking photorealism here or what. Check this out:
Enable the “Very High” quality setting in Crysis and Crysis Warhead on your dx9 or dx10 compatible hardware without having Vista and DX10 (DirectX 10)!
After building a new PC-rig, I had to try it out with the best PC game on the market today. At least as far as near photorealisticgraphics goes, Crysis. Under Windows XP (DirectX9) you can’t select the “Very High” settings in the graphics menu. These are reserved for Vista (DX10). However I don’t know if this is because of a Vista marketing thing, but the Very High quality can easily be achieved under Windows XP (DX9) , replacing a few textfiles in the Crysis Folder. (CRYSISGameConfigCVarGroups)
This has been known for quite some time. What it does isthat it changes crysis “High” settings to have “Very High” quality. The old version of the hack just changed this. This meant that there was no way of selecting the old “High” setting, because “High” was now “Very High” and the step below was Medium.
My version of the hack changes the “Medium” setting to high quality, and the “Low” setting to medium quality.
You are right, then there is no way of achieving low quality anymore. But if you are interested in “Very High” settings, youare probably not going to want to run that on a machine that only can display low settings…
Here is some further technical explanation:
I did a remake of the Cvar files. Instead of just copying the high settings to [3] I also renamed old [3] to [2], old [2] to [1] and removed old [1]
This way what used to be:
High is Very High
(This is all the candy!)
Medium is High
(What used to be our highest setting is now activated when we choose medium)
Low is Medium
(It doesnt go any lower since there are only 3 steps in XP i had to get rid of low settings alltogether)
Before with the old cVars “hack” if I chose to lower some settings, I actually had to go two steps to medium (from very high) now since meduim corresponds to high it’s only one step in that sense. There will of course be no Low settings, since they are now like the old medium, but I think anyone who uses thisk hack does not need to have anything set at low
Before we had 4 2 1 now we have 4 3 2 Which makes more sense.
Just like the original hack, I didn’t touch the MotionBlur file which is set to 1 (Very High Would be 3)
Results
It seems to work fine, these are screenshots taken at 1280*800 scaled to 50% and auto contrast corrected with Microsoft office image editor to sharpen them a bit.
This is Low (as standard Medium):
This is Medium (as standard High):
This is High (the tweaked mode Very High):
This means that if you install these cvars files, just go back to the menu and select “Medium” settings and everything will be just as it was previously on “High”, consequently setting something to “Low” will correspond to the old “Medium” setting.
I think you get the point 
Here is the zip-file with the cvars
Unzip to the folder CRYSISGameConfigCVarGroups
“CRYSIS” represents the install folder for crysis. It might vary. Thx Jonno.
If you think this was helpful, consider buying me a cup of coffee:
Disclaimer: I’ve had one report of losing savegames after changing the cvars files. This makes no sense at all, because the two things don’t have anything remotely to do with eachother. Sometimes updating the game with a PATCH might make you appear you lost your savegames, just see that you load the game with the same profile as before and your savegames will be back. However this hack only changes some graphics card settings and should in no way make you lose your savegames. But of course, you should use common sense when editing gamefiles. If you don’t know what you’re doing don’t mess with it, and buy a console 
If you want a free way to automatically backup your savegames try 2GB Free Online Backup – Mozy
The Mars rover “Spirit” picked up an interesting shape a while ago, something resembling a human being. This is what it looks like:
Or is it a rock?
The figure was spotted recently by a hobby astronomer, and posted on a web page. Some thought it was bigfoot (I have to agree It has the same pose, like in the middle of a stride), and some thought it looked like a naked man.
Considering Mars is basically just sand, and sand heated to white hot luminescence combined with water seems to create DNA spontaneously out of the blueprints apparently abundant in the cosmos, I don’t know maybe that is a man. Everything is just energy anyway, and everything is just frequencies, different frequencies carry information packets. Check this movie out :
I’m optimistically sceptical about spontaneous DNA. The papers on it are out there. Kinda revolutionising if it is true. Puts everything on end.
Regarding the man figure, its the same principle that made us see the face on mars. We are very much programmed to recognize faces and body shapes in arbitrary patterns. We find what we look for.
What do you see? A Couple or Doplhins?
It’s alive, it’s aliiiiive! The beast is born! This is my story about my new rig. Cheap and extremely powerful. If you are thinking about upgrading your PC, take this as a recommendation! Intel’s E2160 and ATI’s HD 3850 is a match made in heaven for gamers on a budget. Low price, great performance. If you have any questons regarding these products or anything regarding building a new computer, just drop me a comment and I’ll try to answer as best I can. Read on friends…
A few days ago my trusty Raeon 9800Pro died on me, and I decided to buy a new graphics card. I realized I’d have to change my motherboard to a PCI-E one, buying an AGP board now is like getting a VHS. I started looking for most bang for the buck (no not in that way…) and I read Tom’s Hardware’s praise of the Radeon 3800 series. I found a 512MB Asus EAH3850, with custom cooler said to run 20 degrees cooler than the reference design. The DX10.1 compliant 512MB DDR3 card put me back about 190€. I had a new graphics card. Now where to put it?
So, a CPU and motherboard then. Again Tom’s Hardware came to the rescue and praised the overclockability of the Intel Core 2 Duo E2160, so I figured why not. 1.8GHz at standard and was said to overclock to 3 GHz on pretty much standard voltage. Cool, 70€ for a 3 GHz Core 2 Duo can’t be bad. For motherboard I went with the one Tom recommended in the same article, the GA-P35-DS3R, except I went for the same one but without SLI- the DS3. It was 30€ cheaper and I figured I was not going to use SLI anyway. It’s a really high quality board with all solid capacitors, great components and solid build. Unfortunately i got a 2.0 revision instead of the 2.1. The 2.1 has some fancy power saving options, but they don’t work when overklocking so maybe I shouldn’t cry that much. 90€ – And its the size of a stamp:
I figured a new PSU would be needed, I had a 350W for my old Athlon XP system, but having used up about 3 no-name brand PSU’s I decided to go quality here, and I got a Corsair VX 450 PSU. It is rated at 80+, which means It’s efficient (less than 20% of the energy gets transformed into heat). Good for the forest, good for my electricity bills, and it makes it run quiet. Its large 120mm fan would be my main source of ventilation in the chassis. It has all cables running in black kevlar socks. Well maybe it’s not kevlar but they look cool! The whole thing looks cool, and it came in a white Corsair cloth-bag. I’m gonna use that as my beach bag this summer
Excellent!I also bought 2 sticks of 1Gb PC6400 DDRII RAM. Now, that means the ram can take 800Mhz (I wish they stopped using the PCXXXX markings, It just makes it hard to know the RAM speed.) 19€ a piece, 38€ for 2Gigs. RAM is incredibly cheap nowadays.
The building process
I put the thing together after a hard day of work, and slammed on the stock cooler that came with the cpu, and I mounted everything in my old chassis. From the outside it looks like my trusty gray box, but open it up and you see a monster 
Everything worked great from the beginning, I decided to reinstall Windows XP though, since the upgrade seemed to cause the old install some headache.Even without any overclocking I soon realized this rig was a great gaming rig! It ran Crysis at High settings 1280×800 without problems. FPS was around 40 and very playable. The ASUS included Company of Heroes was smooth, with about 60fps straight trough. 3DMark gave me a score of about 9000 marks. It did run a bit warm though, as if the stock cooler was not really cutting it. I had a 120MM Zalman lying around that I couldn’t use on my old rig so I decided to slap it on instead.
I bought some isopropyl alcohol (No not for calming my nerves, but for removing the one day old heatsink gunk from the CPU), and I followed Arctic Silver’s (no, it’s not a fox fur i think) instructions on how to apply the thermal paste to a Core 2 Duo. Just basically make a string along the center of the CPU, the same way the CPU socket handle is facing. It was a really quiet solution, and about 5-10 degrees cooler. Cool! )
The Overcooking – sorry, ~clocking
The Core2 Duo clocked nicely up to 333Mhz and with it’s 9x multiple it gives me 3.0GHz to play with.
Warning Science Content: With the Zalman heatsink and fan it idles around 33 degrees Celsius (Tcase) and Prime 95 stress test makes the Tcase heat up to 63 degrees. That gives a Core Tjuncition reading of 73 degrees celsius, 28 degrees below Tjunction max at 100′C (Tjunction Delta = 28′C)
The Radeon 3850 Clocked nicely up to 720Core and 950Mem, from it’s standard 668/828. The ATI Radeon 3850 is simply amazing! I have never seen price/performance ratios like this. Compared to the competition it just blows anything away.
Conclusion: A 450€ Killer game rig!
I’ve just managed to hack Crysis to enable the Very High settings (DX10) on Windows XP. The FPS on this Very high setting is around 30 for 1280×800. Not bad considering it’s a 450€ rig! ) I’m happy, I can play all the new games on high setting. My system is extremely responsive,
I’m having a blast!
And read here about how to enable Very High Quality in Crysis in XP
So what do I say?
Five Gnomes out of Five!
