Quick test: Graphics card performance in Crysis Remastered

In 2007, the game studio Crytek released the title Crysis, which over the years has brought most computers to its knees. Much of the technology behind the game had not been seen before, and the components of that time, struggled to run the game with sensible frame rate. Shortly afterwards, the now legendary expression was coined “But can it run Crysis?“And even today, the original is an extremely heavy-handed game.

Now, 13 years later, we are here again with Crysis Remastered, developed by Saber Interactive with the help of Crytek, to answer the question again: Can it run Crysis (Remastered)?

Components of the test systems

As usual, we spin up the editors’ test benches for graphics cards with Intel Core i9-10900K under the hood, which also has a slight overclocking of 5 GHz over all cores. The test loop used is from the first assignment Contact over a time of 55 seconds, where the frame rate is captured by the CapframeX software.

Performance at different levels of detail

Before we jump to the usual tests, it is worth looking at all the preset detail levels that are in the game. In total, there are five different modes to choose from that go from Low, Medium, High, Very High and the very fitting Can it run Crysis? which then pulls up to 11. For this purpose, we bring in AMD’s Radeon RX 5700 and Nvidia’s Geforce RTX 2060 – two models that are very close to each other in terms of price and are also very popular among mid-range graphics cards.

With the level of detail in the two lowest settings, the Radeon RX 5700 gets a reasonable frame rate, even if there is a big jump between all resolutions. The heaviest levels of detail drag the performance all the way down to the bottom, but at the same time also create very varying results that should not really be true either.

A quick look at the loads reveals what makes it stand out with performance. Despite the fact that the processor used has 10 cores and 20 threads, the game usually uses only two of these, which then have to work full time to hang with graphics cards – and unfortunately fail with this on the coup.

In other words, the game suffers from the same problem as the first Crysis in that it is almost completely single-threaded. A few features seem to have moved out in a separate thread and it is slightly better than the 2007 edition but it is not by far on par with modern games.

Further to Geforce RTX 2060, a similar theme can be seen here as well. One difference is that the AMD card is slightly stronger in the lower levels of detail, while the Geforce RTX 2060 manages to squeeze out a few extra frames in the heavier settings. However, there is also no performance to talk about when everything is set up to the highest position and we really can not recommend these levels of detail.

Performance difference with ray tracing

To really put on eye candy, Crysis Remastered has received ray tracing, but not via DirectX Raytracing but instead via a Vulcan-based variant that is on top of the game’s DirectX 11-based graphics engine. Crysis Remastered uses a proprietary ray tracing-implementation that simulates how the light rays hit a surface and then bounce on to other surfaces.

This is run on older Nvidia products and AMD-based cards ray tracing entirely on the card’s standard shader devices while being partially hardware accelerated on Nvidia’s RTX-based cards. The solution is unique in its kind and possibly a regular implementation of DirectX 12 with DXR could have offered better performance on Nvidia’s RTX series.

Based on the color of a certain surface, the rays can affect the color tone of a room or a small nearby surface. The technology is also called SVOGI (sparse voxel octree global illumination) and as the name reveals, it is based on voxels. Even shiny surfaces have been given ray tracingtreatment which allows you to see yourself in glass windows or see reflections in the water and other wet surfaces.

Because Crysis Remastered uses a unique and interesting ray tracingimplementation, we can for the first time compare the performance difference between Geforce and Radeon in a scenario with ray tracing. Here we can see that the activation of ray tracing lowers Radeon card performance by 35 percent while RTX 2060 “only” loses about 19 percent of its performance.

Geforce RTX 2060 also has a much more choppy experience when ray tracing turned off, which was tested several times to see if there was anything quirky at the time. The same theme continued each round, which again indicates that there is some potential for improvement for Crysis Remastered.

Performance with different graphics cards

When we have ticked off all levels of detail and also the impact of ray tracingimplementation, it’s time to move on to more graphics cards, and just because it’s Crysis, the slider is pulled up to the highest “Can it run Crysis?”. We will soon find out the answer.

First out in the 1,920 × 1,080 pixel resolution, the new performance monster Geforce RTX 3080 also ends up alarmingly low at 70 FPS, just five frames above the previous generation RTX 2080 Ti with more cards close behind. These are clear signs that something is not right in the game engine where there should reasonably be more performance to be gained.

Furthermore, to 2,560 × 1,440 pixels, the Geforce RTX 3080 loses only six frames from the previous resolution, where there should reasonably be a larger performance gap. Further down the list, a large number of cards between 20 and 30 FPS are found, which in normal cases usually have a significantly higher frame rate.

Lastly, the highest resolution is 4K UHD where the Geforce RTX 3080 gets to show its strength, but unfortunately it is not really enough for a comfortable gaming experience with just under 40 FPS on average. The rest of the cards have, what the editors usually call, a slide show rather than a gaming experience.

Summary thoughts

Even today, it is very difficult to “maximize” the original Crysis with a sensible frame rate, which at the time was an incredibly nice game with fantastic technology behind it. The engine used then was Cryengine 2 and was, as I said, full of technical goodies. The sequel Cryengine 3 was slightly more adapted for the game consoles Xbox 360 and Playstation 3, as Crysis would also be launched on those platforms.

Crysis Remastered is strangely enough based on the Cryengine 3 conversion and more specifically the console version, where many PC-specific features had to be ironed out. One thing that remains even in Remastered is the lousy handling of processor wires that stops at two in number, which regardless of processor model will be a bottleneck for the graphics card.

Other than that, the game often does not look very good, especially not considering the hardware required to run it right now. Some textures and effects look worse than the original from 2007 and the geometry density is often perceived as unchanged. Personally, I find it very sad when the first Crysis really pushed the technology to the forefront, and there are small glimpses of this with the unique ray tracingthe implementation that works unexpectedly well.

One thing that is missing from the original is also that the developers simply excluded the campaign assignment Ascension in the Remastered edition. Probably because it was not part of the console version that Crysis Remastered is based on.

Of course takes ray tracing some performance but at the same time it is not at all as much as we are used to with DXR-based titles. It is probably related to the low basic performance we get out to begin with. Again, it is a bit ruined by the lousy optimization of the game engine, where modern hardware can not be fully utilized.

Crysis Remastered could have been so much better and is not really worth its name.

Have you already had time to grab a copy of Crysis Remastered, if so what do you think of the game?