Gaming Can it play Crysis 3?

http://www.bit-tech.net/blog/gaming/2013/01/05/crysis-pc-gaming-s-saviour-or-nemesis/

Antony ponders Crysis and the impact it had on the hardware industry when it was launched. Can Crysis 3 rejuvenate the upgrade market in an era where mid-range hardware is sufficient for most?

 

Most probably a typo

and then:

It can't possibly be 2011, the year you're talking about.

 

2011 is wrong yeah

I dont yearn to reach for my wallet, I want my current setup to run alot for as much of the future as possible I dont mind that the Graphics card market is stagnant, the current top end stuff looks fantastic!

 

Unreal Engine 4 will change all of this when it comes along. It's a complete beast of a game engine and many developers will flock to it as they're already very comfortable with UE3.

 

My memory is that when it was said and done Crysis didn't play well on even the most high end hardware not because it was so demanding but because it was poorly coded. Maybe my memory has just gotten faulty, but wasn't there significant discussion about this in the years after it's release when people bought the next generation of hardware and it didn't help?

 

Id have to agree with crysis been poorly coded. The game does not even look that good compared to some console titles that have been released in the same time frame. ( Uncharted series comes to mind)

Crysis 2 was not a great game nice graphics demo but it lacked alot of the exploration / freedom of the first one.

Dout Crysis 3 will change alot in the game itself. It may look better but that does not really make a difference if the game itself is pure crap.

UE4 will be designed for consoles first and foremost as thats where the market is now. We live in a console world where the sales of the biggest titles double or tripple what pc developers have seen in recent years.

This will not change any time soon the next gen consoles are ment to be powered by AMD 7850s, thats kinda the level of hardware we are talking about.

If you own a 7970 or 680 you will not need a new card for 2-3 years minimum probably longer if your willing to accept less than max settings.

The days when graphics were the be all and end all of gaming has long since passed. Angry birds has more sales than most pc games have ever seen and its the most basic of games ever made.

 

This. If they wanted to bring systems to a halt, they could code it so mediocrely that it could bring an overclocked 7970GE to its knees. It has to be highly demanding whereby these demands result in noticeable and perceptible graphical gains (i.e. not some super-tessellated objects whose sole purpose is to act as an anchor to the performance).

 

Oh, you mean like Crysis 2 DX11/HD?

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I dunno about wanting a game that pushes as hard as Crysis did, to be honest... but then, my demands have changed as I've gone Surround and that demands a lot more performance out of the GPUs than a single monitor if you want settings cranked up.

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On the UE4 front... I just hope that Epic have approached wide aspect ratios correctly this time, and taken into account those using multimonitor setups. UE3 is still abominable at that. Just calculate FOV based off of aspect ratio, for crying out loud - it's not that hard to do.

 

The GPU makers have certainly lost me as a customer for the past 4yrs, still running a 1Gb 4850, that's let me play all the major games of this generation, thanks to the consoles base line development specs.

From 1998 to 2008 I used to upgrade my GPU once every 12mths or so, but I wasn't prepared to spend £200 or more this time around just for a few higher res textures, which is pretty much all you get these days as a PC gamer.

Until the new generation of DX11 based games starting hitting on the new Xbox and PS4 in 2014, I really don't see a need to replace my 4850.

Seeing as they will be based on custom PC CPU & GPU combinations, visual fidelity should increase enormously over the DX9 based games we currently get.

So, no new GPU for me until at least 2014, Assuming my 4850 doesn't die in the meantime that is..

 

Personally I saw Crysis as a great game, with awe inspiring graphics which I wanted to be able to run as well as possible. The graphics were clean, detailed and sharp in a way that many other "good looking" games weren't and I think that held alot of the appeal for me. I had an 8800GTS 320MB when it came out and I went on an upgrade spree over the next few years
I had a
GTX 260
GTX 260 SLI (one went faulty)
GTX 280 SLI
GTX 480
GTX 480 SLI

And it also pushed me to upgrade over that time from gaming at 1280 *1024 to 1680*1050 and now to 1920*1200. I would personally say That having Crysis as a constant benchmark of performance was something that drove me to spend more, tweak more and play more. I played the multiplayer tons with my friends and having great graphics and smooth framerates was really important. I haven't seen a game since which has captured my imagination as well as the original did.

Alot of these modern games have very grotty graphics with lots of dull dark environments, poor texturing and no gain from extra performance. What set Crysis apart was that bits of it were beautiful and alot of that beauty came from the scale of the world and the sense of freedom within it, something they're now dialing back. This combined with the detail and expression of characters faces, the subtle lighting effects, the soft shadowing effects and the fire, explosion and physics effects really made the game stand out to me. I agree we need a new game but if Crysis 2 and the Crysis 3 Alpha are anything to go by, Crysis 3 is not going to be it.

 

The whole Crysis debacle put a bad taste in my mouth that eventually ended up in me selling up my gaming PC and getting a PS3

Having spent around £1000 every 12 months for years on upgrading CPU/GPU/RAM/Board, not only did the poster-child game of high-end hardware barely run acceptably, it was frankly just a so-so game with lots of eye candy.

When it came time to start thinking about the next upgrade, I decided I had enough, sold up and haven't looked back since. Turns out there's more to a good game than shiny graphics.

 

That does sound a bit excessive, I'd say I spent £600 in 4 years on GPU's and maybe £300 on a new CPU, Mobo + Ram in the same time so I didn't get frustrated with having spent *too* much.

 

It was excessive, but water-cooled 8800GTXs weren't cheapo! Which makes it all the more ludicrous that Crysis only barely performed acceptably.

 

Games makers are in a slight catch-22. Gamers want machines that can play games on "max" settings, but game makers want games that can scale up as the hardware market moves on, and to be able to stick some fancy but expensive screenshots in reviews (or in the olden days, on the box) to ooh and ah.

If Crysis had come out without the high-end tweaks, so that you could have played it on "max" with an 8800 GTX, would that have satisfied you?

IMO the obsession with playing things on "max" settings is silly. I have a GTX 680 but I don't play many games on max settings, even when they are "playable"; instead, I use the card horsepower to ensure that frame rate never drops below 60. That means turning some settings right down, even on console ports. The marginal returns to the final few quality tweaks are low, but the rendering costs are very high.

Crytek would probably have been better off releasing Crysis with fewer configuration knobs, then slowly dribbled out the higher settings as the hardware came out. In any case, not being able to run "playable" framerates on an 8800GTX didn't stop me from buying the game at the time, and I had that card. It was perfectly playable with the settings turned down - it only hurt gamers' egos, those that invested in a machine with the idea that it entitled them to games with lower image quality ambitions. It was a crappy game for other reasons.

"Playable" framerate for me means "solid 60fps even in the busiest scenes" - because it's the busiest scenes where you really need your GPU to not let you down, it's usually when you're close to being overwhelmed by the enemy. These days, that means medium to low settings in most games even on the very latest hardware. Some things can be turned up to max, but not all.

 

I would have rather that the developers spent less time on making the graphics shiny and more time making the second half of the game not blow goats.

 

Very true, but let's not forget that PC gamers aren't just in it for the games any more than car fanatics are in it to win races. It's all about the hardware at the end of the day, and Crysis was a means to an end in that arena.

 

Its been a while since i played Crysis but I remember theres a bit with no gravity in a ship about half way being so unbelievably dull. All the crysis games have been enjoyable but aren't perfect, a bit buggy in places too

If someone releases a game that melts gpu's it won't matter, if its a crap game no one will buy it.

 

I do remember having an 8800 for a while, up until 2 years ago when I bought a 470 GTX which I still have now. I havnt had any issues playing any of the games I want to play. sure I only really play SC2 and BF3 now, with the odd game from steam like walking dead. I was never really into Crysis or other single player games. If they did bring out a new Unreal Tournament game with the UT4 engine then I would invest is a new PC, I have had mine now for over 2 years, so really I am due a refresh by my own standards. The only thing that is stopping me is that I just dont need it. a new SSD that I got a few months back has put extra life into my computer, things load up faster and its fine for now. Maybe I will give it another 6 months before i buy a new PC.

 

Just bring it on. I yearn for Crysis to go back to what it did best - push hardware and look stunning.