Crysis Remastered Is Coming This Summer

In 2007 Crytek released Crysis, one of the most influential games of all time, while setting the bar for luscious graphics and action-packed first-person shooters. The question, ”Yes, but can it run Crysis?”, has become a mantra in the gaming world and even today it stands up extremely well against modern first-person shooters, often beating them hands down. In the intervening years, thousands of mods have appeared, giving the game an ultra-realistic look, but of course, these have only been developed by amateur enthusiasts, great though they are. This time, Crytek has decided to work the magic on their very own creation and the gaming community has gone nuts over the announcement, which came entirely out the blue.

I Used To Run Crysis On A Potato

In 2007, I was running a Pentium 4 3.2 GHz, 4 GB RAM, and an Nvidia 6800 GT GPU with 256 MB of VRAM. When Crysis came along, I was sure that my PC would handle it, and it did, but only on the lowest of graphic settings since it was way ahead of its time in terms of textures and destructible objects. For example, you could shoot a tree and watch it fall over which we had never seen before, not to mention the frantic gameplay. But the toaster PC performance didn’t put me off one iota. I finished the game and still continue to play Crysis to this day, albeit on a slightly faster gaming machine. But even now, running Crysis at very high settings on my current machine — Ryzen 2600X/RX580/32GB RAM — pushes the system quite hard.

70 FPS in any first-person shooter is very respectable, but when you think about it, a game made 13 years ago and still capable of challenging modern gaming machines, has to be way ahead of its time, which Crysis was in so many ways. Just look at the water in this short clip.

What Can We Expect From Crysis Remastered?

One of the most anticipated features of Crysis Remastered is Real-Time Ray Tracing Reflections, a process previously only available on Nvidia RTX graphic cards and using hardware assets. Cryengine 5 uses RT through software and is API and hardware agnostic, meaning that:

The feature can be implemented by enabling ray tracing to run on most mainstream, contemporary AMD and NVIDIA GPUs. However, the future integration of this new CRYENGINE technology will be optimized to benefit from performance enhancements delivered by the latest generation of graphics cards and supported APIs like Vulkan and DX12.

Other features we can expect to see in Crysis Remastered:

• High-quality textures
• Improved art assets
• HD texture pack
• Temporal anti-aliasing
• SSDO (Screen space directional occlusion)
• SVOGI (Voxel based global illumination)
• State-of-the-art depth fields
• New light settings
• Motion blur
• Parallax occlusion mapping
• Particle effects
• Volumetric fog
• Shafts of light
• Software-based ray tracing
• Screen space reflections

Here’s a demo of what Cryengine 5 can do, perfectly illustrating software-based ray tracing and many other features. It’s also worth pointing out that this demo/benchmark can be downloaded free of charge direct from Crytek.

When Will Crysis Remastered Be Released?

From what most of us can gather, the game will be released this summer (northern hemisphere) and there are hints that it could be as soon as August. Some pundits are suggesting that August 7th, 2020 would be a perfect date for its release because that’s the calendar date that the entire Crysis story kicked off in the first place. However, Crytek hasn’t released a date as yet, but either way, the mouth-watering prospect of playing Crysis in all its glory, with a brand new lick of ray tracing paint should be enough to keep us in anticipation for the next three or four months, at least. I, for one, am more than happy to wait a while for the great unboxing moment.

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