holoz0r's A-Z of Steam: Will it Run Crysis?

Ten years ago, "Will it Run Crysis?" Was the question asked of all the PC gaming hardware in the world. This persisted for several GPU and CPU generations, in the search for sufficiently advanced hardware to run Crytek's highly ambitious title, Crysis.

I'm pleased to report that there's no problem anymore. "Will it Run Crysis?" has finally been answered by my (dated) but fairly beefy PC - an i7 4790k, 32GB of RAM, and a 1080ti. 4K, meet about 60 frames per second, with VSYNC on - with VSYNC off - who knows. I don't have a G-SYNC or high refresh rate monitor.

What I do have, however, is a set of eyes, and those eyes are fairly well pleased with just how well Crysis has aged visually. I say this - because there are elements of the game that have not aged well at all.

Take for instance, this screenshot:

I'm cloaked, in the trees. Just prior to this screenshot, I fired a few rounds to attract the attention of almost every enemy in the area, which proceeded to approach my position in single file, ready to walk into a massacre. Thus, the AI is still pretty basic, but at the same time, the AI is also horrendously unforgiving.

Filled with super-soldiers blessed with perfect vision, you will be hit from across the map by rifle rounds, shotgun shrapnel, and other assorted bullets from foes that you can't see. At least you can hear them.

Crysis doesn't leave you without advantage. You are a super-soldier, with a super suit. Stealth is one of the things you can do. You can also run very, very fast. You can jump really, high, and of course, you can use a dizzying array of fire-arms to dispatch your foes.

It flows well. It has excellent pacing - there's engaging, really important parts of enivornmental destruction that are entirely unscripted. In fact, some modern games don't go down to the level of detail that Crysis does. If you fire rounds through a tree - its leaves move.

You can even cut down a tree with gunfire if you want, proving the Mythbusters classic episode wrong. Cut down that tree with a pistol. It's an excellent use of military resources!

I enjoyed playing Crysis, and it seems as though 2019 is a pretty good time and place to do exactly this. Hardware is sufficiently advanced so that you can run the game without enormous struggles (or huge, massively expensive gaming gear - but you do need a decent PC!) - and operating systems haven't yet rendered the game's engine, dependencies or other nuances yet obselete.

It will clearly only be a matter of time until we see this game running on a Smartphone (I wish I was joking...)

I have said enough about the game to suggest that it is still worth picking up and playing now - so have a look at these pretty screenshots that I took while playing. I particularly like the ones that show fairly modern and sophisticated rendering technologies such as normal mapping, tesellation, and global illumination. This is why this game was, (and is) so damn pretty, and so damn hard to run on hardware, which gave birth to that timeless meme...

"Will it run Crysis?"

Normal mapping, combined with Global Illumination, makes these rocks look like they are individually modeled and textured, as opposed to having a height map render the depth from your first-person perspective.

Though it isn't a god-ray-projecting a shaft of light that casts shadows from a model, onto that very model (self shadowing) is a pretty expensive thing to do in real time - and it is done really well in this scene from early in the game.

The sky, the water, the sand, the beach - the rocks - these are all skillfully put together to create an image where the only part that looks extremely unrealistic is the gun itself!

There's quite a few Crysis titles in my Steam library, and I will be moving onto these next. I'm hoping the "will it run?" question won't be a theme of those games. I'd rather look at them as games, not as games that also happen to be memes.