It’s no coincidence that it became a meme to wonder if a PC could run Crysis, because a PC at the time would bleed to death on higher graphics settings!
PCGamer interviewed Cevat Yerli, the director of Crysis and founder of Crytek. According to Yerli, the FPS predicted in 2007 has become legendary for how difficult it was to get it to work back then, as the highest settings were designed for hardware from 2010 and beyond, but in a 2020 video, Digital Foundry editors show that you could run Crysis at 30 FPS on a 2007 configuration with the High preset.
“I wanted to make sure that Crysis did not age, that it was future proof, meaning that if I played it three years from now, it should look better than it does today. A lot of people were trying to maximize Crysis right away and I was like, ‘Oh, that’s not why we made the Ultra mode or the Very High mode. It was this ambivalent kind of meme that was good and bad, but I actually enjoyed it. Last year, Jensen Huang from Nvidia announced a new GPU, and they said, ‘Yeah, and it can run Crysis,'” Yerli said.
We’ve written before that Crytek has gone overboard with technology, and even Yerli admits that the studio has gone a bit overboard with shadows and shaders, for example. The team had traveled to Haiti to document the tropical environment, and this influenced Crytek’s early use of dynamic lighting technology, which was a hardware burden compared to “pre-baked” lights. Even subsurface light scattering was used to make the soft green transparency of the sun behind a leaf look appropriately beautiful. The technology existed in the engines, but it was slow and no one had ever done it on this scale.
Perhaps it’s no coincidence that a remastered version of Crysis was made. Except that nowadays Indiana Jones and the Great Circle fills the role of Crysis (even an RTX 4090 struggles with it!).
Source: PCGamer
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