A closer look at the techdemo

With the game taking place on a frozen ship with ice literally melting right in front of you, water plays a large role in Cryostasis. The techdemo really pushes the hardware, with the first sequence containing nearly 30,000 fluid particles that interact with the environment and other objects.

The techdemo opens with a daunting character standing underneath a leaking pipe. Water literally rains down on him, with the water splashing realistically off his body:

The water realistically pools around the character and collects around objects on the floor:


In the next sequence, your character walks into a frozen room with a cloth hanging from the ceiling. The cloth is stiff from the ice on it. Your character then pushes a button, heating up the room, melting the ice, and allowing the cloth to flap around in the breeze from the fan:


Next your character shoots an enemy. His lifeless body falls into a pool of water where water flows realistically around him:


After turning on another heater, a hose shoots water down a flight of stairs. Looking closer you see that the water from the hose splashes up against the wall and pools on the ledge before falling down the staircase:


At the bottom of the stairs the water particles sheet down the wall and splash off the steps before pooling at the foot of the stairs:


Now its time to show off the game’s buoyancy effects. Barrels float in the water differently based on their weight, the deep pool of water ripples and splashes as objects are shot into the water:


Next you walk into a room with objects on a table. Water interacts realistically with the objects, sheeting off the table and falling on the floor, where it pools into a puddle after falling off the table:


In the final sequence, you walk into a room where a character is throwing barrels onto a large cloth tarp. The barrels bounce off the tarp before falling on the floor:

Hardware requirements

In order to run the PhysX techdemo on the GPU, a GeForce 8-series or better card is required. However, if you don’t have a CUDA-compliant GeForce 8 or better graphics card, the techdemo will run PhysX on your system’s CPU. Therefore those of you with Radeon 3800/4800 series hardware can check out the techdemo if you’d like, although the game runs significantly slower with PhysX running off the CPU, we’ll provide exact benchmarks for those of you seeking specifics a little later in this article. Needless to say it isn’t a pleasant experience, and it’s exacerbated by numerous graphical artifacts and rendering errors we saw running Radeon 4800 hardware with Catalyst 8.12.

Of course keep in mind this is prerelease code running on a techdemo provided by NVIDIA, so its doubtful ATI has had any time to squash these issues.

Since the techdemo runs a scripted sequence, we aren’t able to interact with the environment and thus we have no idea what an ideal frame rate for this game would be. In addition, the techdemo doesn’t provide a setting for turning PhysX on or off, so we don’t know how the game compares visually with PhysX on versus off, nor do we know the performance hit PhysX brings. With 30,000 fluid particles in one early sequence, you can expect there’s going to be some form of performance impact.

Unfortunately it also appears that the techdemo lacks support for AGEIA’s PPU PhysX card as well. While we could clearly see our BFG PhysX card was working in the PhysX control panel, the PPU-based techdemo ran at the same frame rate as CPU-based software PhysX rendering. Hopefully this will get cleared up in time for the game’s retail release.