Why Crysis still melts the fastest gaming PCs a decade after release
It's been ten years since Crysis first released on PC. In 2007, it pushed real time rendering to new heights and spawned the memetic phrase, "but can it run Crysis?". Never had a game released that pushed hardware and engine technology so much, and never has one since. In fact, combine the latest and greatest Intel Core i7 8700K overclocked to 5.0GHz with an Nvidia Titan Xp and there'll still be areas of the game that drop beneath 60fps - even at 1080p. For its own very specific reasons, Crysis is still more than capable of melting the most modern, top-end PCs, but regardless, it remains a phenomenal technological achievement. It deserves a remaster at the very least, but a franchise of this standing really deserves a full next-gen sequel, with state-of-the-art rendering and back-to-basics gameplay.
But what made Crysis so groundbreaking - and perhaps so misunderstood - at the time of its release? In the video below, I play through the first level of the game, highlighting the strengths and weaknesses of its rendering - and it's this initial stage that was our first glimpse of the game back in 2007. Crytek released a demo of this area with a full level editor, where you could spawn weapons, entities and enemies that only show up later in the game. It was a short, but comprehensive showing of all of Crysis' systems and grandeur in one 1.8GB download.
The game started as it meant to go on. In the very first scene alone, there's a separable gaussian depth of field on foreground objects, soft z-feathered particles for the fog in between the alien stalactite structures, and even ray-marched volumetric lighting that is visible as the alien vessel opens up. From here we transition over to a shot of Raptor team's transport flying into the island and we are greeted with some subtle metallic sheen on the jet itself, and some quite gorgeous rendered volumetric clouds with permeability, back scattering, and even inner shadowing. Let's remember that this hails from the year 2007 of course, where most games still were relying on static skyboxes.
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