Crysis Remastered PC: DLSS is added - but are the major issues resolved?

It's been over six months since Crysis Remastered launched on PC and it's fair to say that as a gigantic fan of the original game, I was left disappointed by its re-emergence - while there was much to praise, legacy baggage from the Xbox 360 and PS3 ports effectively saw aspects of the game lacking compared to the 2007 original, while CPU performance was not where it should have been. Today's 2.1 patch is a good jumping on point though: there are genuine improvements, missing content has been restored, and for owners of GeForce RTX cards, the inclusion of DLSS AI upscaling dramatically boosts performance in graphics-limited scenarios.

There's not much to say about the DLSS implementation, except to say that it's just as impressive as other recent outings and a great addition to the game. Once again, elements of the visual presentation are actually improved over native rendering and while there is some TAA-style ghosting, it's hardly noticeable in the thick of the action. What I particularly enjoyed about this particular use of DLSS is that post-process sharpening can be manually tweaked within the command console - access to which I'd dearly like to see as a standard in all DLSS-supported titles. Ultimately, the lower down the RTX power ladder you go, the more impressive the boost given by DLSS, to the point where even in a GPU-heavy scene, the relatively lowly RTX 2060 should be comfortably capable of exceeding 60 frames per second at 1440p resolution. It even makes a reasonably good stab of 4K output too - meaning that higher-end RTX cards should deliver this with minimal issues.

Beyond DLSS, I'm happy to report that there have been many improvements to Crysis Remastered since we first looked at it: the issues with suit controls are resolved and switching modes in motion is fixed, allowing for chained speed mode jumps like you might have seen in your favourite nanosuit ninja videos. The notorious Ascension level - missing from the PS360 ports and indeed Crysis Remastered - is now back and it plays very smoothly, unlike the 2007 original which can still befuddle even the most powerful CPUs of the modern era. Ascension even features the proper volumetric fog effect from the original Cry Engine 2 rendition of the game, the omission of which elsewhere in the remaster was another problem... and one that bafflingly, still has not been fixed.

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