Crysis Remastered

amazon Crysis Remastered reviews

Although the concept of “hardware killer” appeared quite early with the launch of the “trilogy” Far Cry, DOOM 3, and Half-Life 2 were enough to stagnate even generations of powerful hardware. At that time, it was not until 2007, when Crysis officially appeared in front of the world gaming community, that this title found a worthy owner.

Even in the years since the catchphrase of many gamers when shopping for a powerful PC is always “Can you play Crysis?”, or even there are many crazy fans of the system PC “crows out” to gamers on the console that despite possessing winged compliments, powerful console generations at that time like XBOX 360 or PlayStation 3 could not “carry” Crysis.

Many years have passed, technological advancement has also brought extremely powerful hardware, and the whole gaming world has also received many beautiful games like Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, Ghost of Tsushima, or nearly This is New World developed by Amazon with the ability to “cook” EVGA RTX™ 3090 graphics cards, but Crysis has always occupied a very deep position in the hearts of gamers and technology lovers and for a long time. For a long time, this game is still brought out by users to test some new brands and hardware models.

It is also because of the powerful “hardware killer” ability that makes many gamers falter, so despite achieving a lot of success and buzz, the studio that gave birth to the game series, CryTek, almost went bankrupt in 2014. before being restructured and operating to this day.

Recently, with the trend of Remastered, Remake, Reboot, and even… Reforged old games, Crytek has decided to “revive” the Crysis Trilogy trilogy with special “Remastered” technology from genuine.

In this article, the writer will introduce you to the first part, and also the most impressive part of the series called Crysis Remastered.

Is your computer powerful enough to play Crysis?

Technically, just experience for more than 30 minutes, the writer can evaluate the quality of Crysis Remastered graphics at a beautiful and realistic level, even very beautiful by modern standards even though this is just one version of “slap slap” of a game released almost 14 years ago.

As a technical studio with the desire to create a powerful engine with the world’s leading graphics platform in the early years of the 21st century, Crytek has… accidentally succeeded with the game Far Cry in 2004. , but eventually lost this game to the big Ubisoft, so Crysis can be seen as an attempt to regain the name of this fledgling studio, and also the introduction to the CryEngine game engine.

So Crytek created a game that far surpassed the graphic standards of that time, even though many games with realistic graphics released in the past few years did not meet the standards established by the Crysis standards in 2007.

The first is in the race to build with polygons.

It must be known that Crysis is a game ahead of all times when it uses tens of thousands of polygons to render its characters.

The main character with the nano suit alone needed… 67,252 polygons to display, with the side characters in the game screen built using more than 22,000 polygons while the game has top-notch graphics on the system. PlayStation 3 is God of War 3 released 3 years after Crysis, and then God of War: Ascension with the main character Kratos is only rendered with approximately 20,000 polygons, while the monsters in the level are rendered more “raw” rendering that has dragged this extremely powerful console to a halt with a frame rate of only about 25fps.

This number of Crysis is almost equivalent to new games like God of War (2018) or Red Dead Redemption 2 released in the past few years, so in terms of image quality, although the model remains the same characters released from 2007 to Crysis Remastered version, you will not see these models “hard” in the style of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 Remastered, even though these two games were released at the same time and were “remastered” again the same year.

Then there are dozens of the most advanced technologies of the time in the DirectX10 library such as real-time shading, a physics engine integrated directly into the game that allows destruction and interaction with nearly any object, and light flow effects … making the game set progressive visual standards beyond the times, even approaching many titles released at a later stage.

That’s not to mention the game’s surface texture library owns a standard 1080p texture data system, surpassing the 720p standard of most games at the time.

Remember at the time the game was just released, the writer then used an Intel Core 2 Duo E6300 processor model NVIDIA GeForce 8800GT graphics card, the fourth most powerful in NVIDIA’s product range at that time (behind GeForce 8800 Ultra, GeForce 8800GTX, and GeForce 8800GTS), but can only play the game at High settings with 720p resolution at approximately 30fps.

To make it easy for gamers to imagine, this is equivalent to users currently using a system with an AMD Ryzen 7 5600x processor and a powerful GeForce RTX 3070 graphics card that cannot push the highest setting of the game at 1080p resolution.

It’s a bit long so that readers can easily imagine, that even if you play with the original version released in 2007, the quality of graphics, the core factor that makes the game Crysis famous, your experiences are still very good in 2021.

So, what have Crytek and Saber Interactive improved with the Crysis Remastered version?

Most easily, the game’s surface texture has been upgraded to 8K resolution, providing sharp and clear images when playing on even today’s most advanced screen models.

This makes a lot of small details sharper, especially the patterns on the alien monsters’ machines or the wonderful white sand beaches with a blue ocean.

Besides, being a little more difficult to distinguish, Crytek has integrated for the game the ability to handle Ray Tracing effects with … software.

This stems from an ambitious project by Crytek that was started after the end of Crysis 3, the final version of the series released in 2011.

The company’s engineers were looking for a way to enhance the game’s graphics quality to the highest level with Ray Tracing, a technology that belonged only to the filmmakers and special effects at that time, which required machines. The machine has enormous power to render picture frames.

After two years of development, the result of Crytek is a unique technology called Sparse voxel octree global illumination – SVOGI, released in 2013 and incorporated into the company’s CryEngine suite, five years ahead of the company’s efforts. NVIDIA and Microsoft achieve certain results in using specialized hardware to handle Ray Tracing effects.

This technology will use the CPU to calculate, and process light streams and their reflections with the surrounding environment to simulate environmental lighting effects (Global Illumination – GI) using only software by using clever use of scripts in the Vulkan library.

GI has always been the “hardest” field in the application of Ray Tracing technology to game making because its changes to the game’s graphic quality are quite subtle and difficult to achieve easily identifiable with the naked eye but requires extremely powerful processing hardware.

Even with much-improved graphics processing power in recent years, with separate hardware dedicated to ray tracing, only Metro Exodus dares to use this technology limitedly when it was launched in 2019, and only … bloomed this year with the Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition version only.

This shows how far Crytek’s great ambition at that time was.

But it must be said that thanks to SVOGI, users who own powerful old graphics cards that do not support rendering with Ray Tracing with hardware such as AMD RX 5700 XT can experience this quite a special effect on Crysis Remastered despite “consuming” a lot of the system’s processing power.

In addition, Crytek also did not forget to integrate a Ray Traced Reflection to add more reality to the game, making the already beautiful game, now even more beautiful, closer to the titles. Modern games that apply Ray Tracing technology, such as the “twin brother” Far Cry 6, have just been released recently.

When comparing two “tropical paradises” side by side, it is difficult to disparage the graphic quality of Crysis Remastered, even though the graphical upgrades of this “aged” game are difficult to show out with the overall view.

In addition, the player’s vision is also pushed a lot further with Post Processing effects, physical effects are enhanced with explosions that become intense with lightning. With powerful physical explosions scattered everywhere.

Of course, all of these factors gobble up your hardware power mercilessly.

But it cannot be denied that in addition to the old elements in terms of gameplay and plot and the extremely intelligent AI system that made the original version successful, the graphics upgrades have made Crysis Remastered becomes a beautiful game, even if the player looks at it with a modern look.

Owning a graphics platform that keeps up with the times, even if it is just a slight upgrade from a game released in 2007, Crysis Remastered still has many problems, including problems that have appeared from 14 years ago to new problems arising from the process of “refurbishing” the game.

where can you get a Crysis Remastered online

Crysis Remastered Nintendo Switch: Buy it now

Crysis Remastered Trilogy (Code in a box): Buy it now

Crysis Remastered Trilogy – PlayStation 4: Buy it now

Crysis Remastered Trilogy – Xbox One: Buy it now

There are many old problems.

Lightly a bit, it can be mentioned that the conflict with the Unikey typing software that makes the keyboard “inactive” is still there. Well, it’s easy to accept because Crytek doesn’t need to care about what software Unikey is.

Or a little bigger, all the activities in the game are encapsulated in only… two CPU cores.

It must be said that when the original Crysis was released in 2007, the vast majority of gamers only owned single-core processors, or slightly better than Core 2 Duo dual-core processors.

So Crytek programmers use a core to “carry” graphics tasks, the leftover resources of this core (Hyper-Threading technology if the user uses a single-core processor), or another physical processor core (if the user uses a dual-core processor) will be used for lighter tasks such as controlling NPCs or triggering in-game scenarios…

It wouldn’t be a big deal when the game was programmed in this way in 2007, but when you put it in the context of a game that has been reworked a lot like Crysis Remastered coming out in 2021, you will meet dozens of unimaginable troubles.

For example, whether you use a processor with up to 12 cores, 24 threads like the AMD Ryzen 9 5900x, or more “weak” like using the AMD Ryzen 5 5600G APU model with only 6 cores and 12 threads the game still only works on two cores.

This makes the game a heavy bottleneck with most graphics cards on the market today, whether it’s “old” graphics cards like the ASUS STRIX RX480 8GB or a powerful high-end graphics card like ASUS TUF GAMING RX 6800 XT.

You will feel slight “hiccups” when the CPU is not capable of processing data for the graphics card, making the game experience bad, even if you own a powerful enough machine configuration to ” battle” every modern game today at the highest setting.

Even the writer himself has a little doubt that with this basic processing allocation problem, there exists any gaming PC on the market today that can handle the game at the highest setting “CAN” IT RUN CRYSIS?” or not.

So the sad thing is that Crysis Remastered continues to become a new generation hardware killer, capable of “killing” any “heavy” hardware while the graphics quality of the game is not comparable worthy of that title.

Besides, Crytek also has a rather cumbersome processing phase when making an “edit” version of its game based on a heavily reduced version of the graphics features for PlayStation 3 and XBOX 360. , instead of proceeding directly on the original version.

They had to re-add high-quality models to the game and reworked many effects with next-generation engine updates. But that’s all there is to it.

A lot of features and effects that have been … gone forever when completely and thoroughly cut on the console version, will also not be present on the Remastered version this time.

For example, the physical effect of the grass has been completely removed, or the elements of fog, water vapor, and mass clouds (Volumetric Cloud) also no longer appear on the new version.

For players who have experienced the original version of the game, the physical interaction of the plants in the game is even better than a recently released game called Horizon Zero Dawn when the grasses are not only known to sway with the movement of the character but also able to drift, collapse around the explosion, giving a stronger impression of the power of the explosion than any “word” can describe.

These factors are very small, but it shows the meticulousness of the game design team, making even the most demanding gamers marvel when they look at every little detail, giving a deep impression that many other games released decades later still cannot achieve.

In general, these are all issues of great concern to Crysis Remastered, it makes the game experience much more uncomfortable, far from the smooth feeling in every little detail that the version original ever brought to gamers.