Crysis Remastered in the technology test – ComputerBase : Test |CUP | Specs |Config

tl;dr: Crysis was a technology milestone in 2007: optically groundbreaking, the title brought even the fastest systems to their knees. “Can it run Crysis?” Became a popular phrase. Crysis Remastered is supposed to build on old successes, but fails all along the line. The implementation is just bad.

The expectations were high

When Crysis was released in 2007, the title was graphically years ahead of all other games. It hardly bothered anyone that the hardware requirements were extremely high. But can it run Crysis? became a winged word that is still used lovingly today.

When Crytek announced that it would follow the current remaster trend with Crysis, the hype was correspondingly high. Many players have been looking forward to it. A new graphics cracker with justifiably brute demands seemed in sight. After all, the highest graphics preset should have the title “Can it run Crysis?”.

But the first trailer for the game was disappointing and the developers postponed the release date again. But the additional weeks of development time did not do the title any good either. On the contrary: Crysis Remastered is a complete disappointment.

Targeted parallel to GeForce RTX 3000?

So was it a coincidence that the game was released parallel to the GeForce RTX 3000? Not only players had other topics in mind these days, editorial teams around the world also knew how to save themselves from work – and left Crysis by the way for the time being. However, because deterrent examples deserve media attention, ComputerBase has now taken a closer look at the title in detail.

Problems as far as the eye can see

The new edition of Crysis fails because of the sum of the missteps, not because of a single problem. It’s best to get away with the basic game itself, because it still works well and is fun even 13 years after the original. But everything around it is quite a disaster.

In terms of play, Crysis Remastered does a few things differently than the original. Some things can be switched off in the options menu, while others remain completely different. In the new edition, for example, the character runs much slower than it did in 2007. But that doesn’t fail.

One level is missing, the technology is stuck

A big thing in terms of content, on the other hand, is the renunciation of a level. Since Crysis Remastered is not based on the PC version, but on the console version that was released years later and because the hardware requirements are too high, it does not include a chapter towards the end of the game, this is also missing in the remaster.

But it gets really bad when you look at the technology, which still knows how to convince on paper: Crysis Remastered relies on a current version of the in-house Cryengine and offers numerous new features compared to the original. A significantly better anti-aliasing, many new effects and also hardware-independent ray tracing are included.

Still, Crysis Remastered doesn’t look good. The significantly changed lighting mood, which outshines a lot, especially in daylight, is still a matter of taste. Even the haze that often prevails outside, which restricts the visibility, the light at night or minor bugs that make the graphics menu undesirably autonomous, are not in themselves the problem.

The performance is catastrophic

But the combination of everything and the simple underground performance are just too much of a good thing. Not only the completely senseless, because optically not more beautiful graphics setting “Can it run Crysis?” Generates a low frame rate on every hardware, also the reduced settings only bring improvement with clear optical incisions.

It is noticeable that the game apparently has an unbelievably difficult position in many outdoor scenes to even begin to utilize the graphics card. 50 percent GPU load at a lousy frame rate is not uncommon on a GeForce RTX 3080. In addition, Crysis Remastered can only use four CPU threads. Apparently the engine has to do things it just wasn’t meant to do.

Crytek also noticed the problematic CPU usage. One “solution” was that the vegetation suddenly stopped reacting to bombardment after a patch. Trees can still be “felled” with a machine gun, but all the bushes no longer react to bullets. The animations were already jerking before the update because their frame rate was apparently limited to 30 FPS. In 2007, on the other hand, there was a smooth vegetation on the PC in the original.

The frame times are another thing. Crysis Remastered is not only running slowly, but also unevenly. Sometimes the frame times in the game are very good, then again really bad despite no changes in hardware, settings or test scene. The problem occurs primarily in low resolutions with faster graphics cards. The more the CPU limits, the more problematic the frame times are. If, on the other hand, only the graphics card is limited, the frame times are good. As a result, slower graphics cards have quieter frame times than faster ones – until, for whatever reason, there are huge hooks again and again. The frame times in Crysis Remastered are a lot, but not reproducible.

At the end of the day, the technology crowns the announcements that have not been complied with: The fact that, despite the confusing announcement about the Vulkan API, there is only DirectX 11 and Nvidia’s DLSS is not included, fits only too well into the picture.

There is some relief with graphic presets

“Can it run Crysis?” Shouldn’t be tried out as a graphics preset. It doesn’t run well on any PC, and it doesn’t look any better. “Very high” has an identical graphic quality to offer, the differences are usually not noticeable even with a magnifying glass. The performance increases noticeably, especially in the problematic scenes, but remains low. “High” then runs a little faster, only “Medium” brings a really big boost in performance. Then Crysis Remastered doesn’t look any better than the original.

At least the anti-aliasing was successful!

At least there are positive things to say about the anti-aliasing, because it is not only significantly better in Crysis Remastered than in the original, but generally very good. The anti-aliasing in the highest setting “SMAA 2TX” offers a very high level of image stability, which is also necessary with the large amount of vegetation. It is all the more annoying that the game switches the anti-aliasing to the visibly less quiet mode “SMAA 1TX” after every restart. Sometimes it even changes the anti-aliasing when changing another graphic option.

Ray tracing with little effect

Crysis Remastered offers manufacturer-independent ray tracing. This means that graphics cards without special RT cores can also use ray tracing, regardless of whether they are from AMD or Nvidia. In this case, the calculations are carried out on the classic shader units. The game uses the cryengine’s voxel approach.

Crysis Remastered can also handle the RT cores of a GeForce RTX graphics card. Since the DirectX 11 API used cannot address them, Crytek has built in a special solution that has not yet been seen, which uses Nvidia’s VKRay interface (ray tracing via Vulkan), which really only applies to the ray tracing part. The game itself continues to run on a GeForce RTX graphics card with DirectX 11.

Apart from the reflections, the differences are small

Ray tracing is available in the quality levels “Performance”, “High”, “Very high” and “Can it run Crysis?”. In addition, the radiation technology can be switched off completely. Most of the time, ray tracing in Crysis Remastered has a moderate to minor influence on the image quality and a slightly more realistic shadow representation is noticeable. The advantages are somewhat greater indoors, where the lighting looks noticeably better.

Ray tracing has a much greater effect on the reflections. Water of all kinds, be it the sea or puddles, show significantly more details with ray tracing. Ray tracing is only really noticeable in a level that plays on an aircraft carrier in the rain and shows numerous reflections. Then the effects look really nice, otherwise they are a small bonus. The higher the quality level is turned, the more rays are apparently fired. The performance setting in particular looks very pixelated. In addition, some reflections are only displayed with higher RT settings.

If more beautiful also means faster

If it weren’t so sad, you could laugh about it: In keeping with the other technical condition of Crysis Remastered, ray tracing runs slower on all graphics cards on “Very high” than with “Can it run Crysis?” And thus on the highest setting. The game doesn’t always behave like this, the behavior doesn’t show up in other scenes.

Apart from that, it is noticeable that the performance setting hardly costs or only costs a low speed compared to deactivated ray tracing. The performance loss is 4 to 9 percent, which is surprisingly little. On the other hand, the reflections are not particularly nice. The “high” mode, on the other hand, costs significantly more power. And differences between the graphics cards can also be seen. The GeForce GTX 1080 loses 21 percent performance compared to deactivated ray tracing, the Radeon RX Vega 64 23 percent and the Radeon RX 5700 XT 22 percent. Here the GeForce RTX graphics cards with the separate RT units have a clear advantage. The GeForce RTX 2070 Super is only 14 percent slower, the GeForce RTX 3080 by 16 percent. The difference is not massive, but it is there.

“Can it run Crysis?” Strikes a little more than the high setting. On the GeForce GTX 1080, the maximum mode costs 28 percent of FPS, on the Radeon RX Vega 64 it is 25 percent and on the Radeon RX 5700 XT 26 percent. With the GeForce RTX 2070 Super, the RT cores no longer provide any additional performance for inexplicable reasons, because the Turing card loses a comparable amount of FPS with 26 percent as the GeForce GTX 1080. The GeForce RTX 3080, on the other hand, is different, with minus 21 percent performs best. Nevertheless, it can generally be said that separate RT units in Crysis Remastered Stand bring little benefit today.

On the next page: GPU benchmarks, game review and conclusion