Can it play Crysis 3?
Posted on 5th Jan 2013 at 09:31 by Antony Leather with 69 comments
Turn back the clocks to 2007. It was the beginning of the GeForce 8800 GTX's phenomenally long reign as the best graphics card around, but also a period that saw more and more PC gaming titles relinquished to mere console ports. They barely touched the surface of Nvidia's graphics cards' pixel pushing - one of the main reasons it had such a long life.
If you bought an 8800 GTX when it was first released, then you made a great investment. However, many of us didn't (including me) and our failure to invest was probably because of the same reason. Crysis. When it came along in late 2007, everyone expected the new 8800 GTX to be able to play it at maximum settings at high resolutions, but we were wrong, and we gave up and decided to wait for the next generation of graphics cards, missing out on a great opportunity.
It was so demanding that for the next few years, it remained a stalwart benchmark tool and a fantastic tool for manufacturers to ship hardware for upgrades as enthusiasts grappled with it to get the best framerates. And so was born the phrase 'Can it play Crysis?'. Fast-forward to the present day and we have a similar situation to the pre-Crysis era.
While the console-port situation isn't quite as bad, a vast majority games simply don't need a high end graphics card to play at maximum settings, especially if you game at 1,920 x 1,080 and below. Above this, yes, the extra RAM and horsepower can make a difference, but only if you're lucky enough to own a huge, high-resolution monitor or multi-monitor setup.
I was speaking to a colleague in the industry the other day who deals mainly with graphics cards, and he claimed that most of us would be fine with a GTX 560 Ti, and that the graphics card market as a whole was pretty stagnant. We might see GTX 680's in forum signatures here on bit-tech but a vast majority of gamers make do with much less cutting-edge hardware.
He also said that the industry desperately needed a new demanding game to rally around. Something that pushed the GTX 680 to its limits. Crysis 3 was first touted to melt PCs, with a reference to the original game's stubbornly low frame rates.
Crytek CEO Cevat Yerli's comments went further to say the game was pushing current consoles to within an inch of their performance limits. Initial reports are that even the GTX 670 results in choppy framerates in the Crysis 3 Alpha but this could well improve with the final game.
The question as to whether Crysis was the saviour or nemesis of PC gaming is still open to debate. On one hand it made so many of us reach for our wallets to be able to play it at decent settings. On the other hand it also deterred many away from the PC and into the arms of consoles that offered smooth frame rates without the need for significant tweaking or costly upgrades.
Whether Crysis 3, or maybe another game will be the answer we'll have to wait and see. However, now is actually a great time to build your own PC thanks to the fact that even mid to low-end hardware can handle games at high settings. The Radeon HD 7850 1GB, that can be had for less than £120, is all you need to play The Witcher 2 at 1,920 x 1,080 at decent settings, as our benchmarks show. However the enthusiasts in us do pine for something to make even current high-end hardware groan and for us to reach for our wallets.
Do you think PC gaming is good value at the moment? Do you yearn for another game as demanding as Crysis to make things interesting again? Let us know in the comments
If you bought an 8800 GTX when it was first released, then you made a great investment. However, many of us didn't (including me) and our failure to invest was probably because of the same reason. Crysis. When it came along in late 2007, everyone expected the new 8800 GTX to be able to play it at maximum settings at high resolutions, but we were wrong, and we gave up and decided to wait for the next generation of graphics cards, missing out on a great opportunity.
It was so demanding that for the next few years, it remained a stalwart benchmark tool and a fantastic tool for manufacturers to ship hardware for upgrades as enthusiasts grappled with it to get the best framerates. And so was born the phrase 'Can it play Crysis?'. Fast-forward to the present day and we have a similar situation to the pre-Crysis era.
Crysis looked great but was tough to run - it boosted upgrade sales but also turned people away from the PC - click to enlarge
While the console-port situation isn't quite as bad, a vast majority games simply don't need a high end graphics card to play at maximum settings, especially if you game at 1,920 x 1,080 and below. Above this, yes, the extra RAM and horsepower can make a difference, but only if you're lucky enough to own a huge, high-resolution monitor or multi-monitor setup.
I was speaking to a colleague in the industry the other day who deals mainly with graphics cards, and he claimed that most of us would be fine with a GTX 560 Ti, and that the graphics card market as a whole was pretty stagnant. We might see GTX 680's in forum signatures here on bit-tech but a vast majority of gamers make do with much less cutting-edge hardware.
He also said that the industry desperately needed a new demanding game to rally around. Something that pushed the GTX 680 to its limits. Crysis 3 was first touted to melt PCs, with a reference to the original game's stubbornly low frame rates.
Crytek CEO Cevat Yerli's comments went further to say the game was pushing current consoles to within an inch of their performance limits. Initial reports are that even the GTX 670 results in choppy framerates in the Crysis 3 Alpha but this could well improve with the final game.
The Witcher 2 is one of the most demanding current games but even it is tamed by affordable hardware - click to enlarge
The question as to whether Crysis was the saviour or nemesis of PC gaming is still open to debate. On one hand it made so many of us reach for our wallets to be able to play it at decent settings. On the other hand it also deterred many away from the PC and into the arms of consoles that offered smooth frame rates without the need for significant tweaking or costly upgrades.
Whether Crysis 3, or maybe another game will be the answer we'll have to wait and see. However, now is actually a great time to build your own PC thanks to the fact that even mid to low-end hardware can handle games at high settings. The Radeon HD 7850 1GB, that can be had for less than £120, is all you need to play The Witcher 2 at 1,920 x 1,080 at decent settings, as our benchmarks show. However the enthusiasts in us do pine for something to make even current high-end hardware groan and for us to reach for our wallets.
Do you think PC gaming is good value at the moment? Do you yearn for another game as demanding as Crysis to make things interesting again? Let us know in the comments
69 Comments
Discuss in the forums ReplyIt can't possibly be 2011, the year you're talking about.
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!
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).
...
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.
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..
Sorry, brain fart, meant 2007!
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.
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.
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.
If someone releases a game that melts gpu's it won't matter, if its a crap game no one will buy it.
heh, this.
I loved Crysis Warhead though and I still load it up when I get a new graphics card. Some of the graphics have dated but some scenes still look incredible.
I must have benched this game on at least 3 cards starting with my 8800 GT and up to my current 570. Maybe the one before the 8800 as well,can not quite remember - maybe a Radeon X850 or something?
Some of the graphical techniques in the game were so far ahead of their time....
Of course I may be wrong for Crysis 3.
For the record I think the EGO engine used for the Dirt Series and Formula 1 games is probably one of the best I've experienced in recent years from a graphical quality:system reqs. ratio perspective.
brap brap brap
But the first half is why it's great. It's like Far Cry 1. Terrible end game (well not really, because the trigens were masochistically difficult) but hilarious human interactions.
That said, I don't think Crysis was poorly coded as much as it was ahead of it's time. It didn't have 3+ core support for the reason that at the time Quad Core machines weren't commonplace yet. That was probably a terrible idea but it happened. Admittedly the frames dipped heavily, but the game engine was and is still amazing. To all the people who say it's poorly coded, I can see why. I'll also offer that the game was excessively coded (which is just as bad but more respectable) in the sense that many things were over done. (think the Tank mesh/model for Crysis 1.)
You also have to remember that the game had a ton of stuff in the background too.
I just remember that almost everything was rendered in real time 3D. Even the clouds. Which is insane to be honest. The Engine is epic. As long as Crysis 3 continues in the tradition of the first one with the expansive maps I'm good.
http://forums.bit-tech.net/picture.php?albumid=801&pictureid=16383
;)
If you spent that much every 12 months on a computer then you're doing it way wrong. Crysis wasn't the only pc game you know.
Upgrading your PC hardware every 12 months is a waste of money. If your favorite new game can't run at max quality when you desperately want it to, then upgrade, but that shouldn't happen every 12 months unless you are buying crap hardware everytime.
I'm a bit oldskool so I remember the days when games had 8 colours and looked like **** but I played them for weeks/months on end because they had this thing called gameplay.
Sent from my Windows 8 device using Board Express
How so? I always had the latest and greatest kit installed, and water cooled (which adds £100 to any graphics card), what's wrong with that? I would think on a tech forum, users would be understanding of this. There are plenty of members here that spend more than that, more regularly than that on a PC.
SLI was what put me off PC gaming quite a bit - why buy one graphics card when you can buy two at twice the price? That along with the issues a the time in so many games, namely that 4 years ago it simply didn't work (or barely worked) in half of the games out there - no dice.
I played Skyrim on the PS3, and it was still great. The only reason I would have rather played it on the PC was the mods available, not the graphics. (I very nearly did revamp the PC for Skyrim, but bottled it at the last minute, didn't make sense for just one game).
I agree, that's why I binned the PC in the end. There was always something that came out that started to stutter on max settings (and I wasn't buying crap hardware). Perhaps that has changed now, given that the article suggests that an 8800GTX would have had some longevity - I wouldn't know, as I got rid. I simply came to the conclusion that PC gaming in it's entirety was a waste of money.
I spent £300 on a PS3 4 years ago and it still plays the latest games. Are the graphics as good as on a PC? Probably not. Are good games still good and crap games still crap regardless? Yep.
Perhaps controversial on a PC-centric forum, but discussion is what forums are for ;)
Crysis, was too small as game (9h never touched it afterward) to worth any vast investment. Played well in my BFG 8800GTS640 back then also. :)
Most demanding game atm is WOT, for heaven sake.
I seriously hope that games don't require a 680 to play, as that would turn a lot of people away from pc gaming. The one reason console gaming is more popular is that its fairly cheap, and the hardware doesn't need upgrading often.
I get what you mean... I'd take playable any day. Personally, there are effects that I don't even like. Motion Blur for instance, so it's a win win to turn it off in my case. However, I still want it cranked as high as possible with smooth framerate.
Playable to me is just consistent. It could be 24fps for all I care, but as long as it isn't spikey and annoying with drops in performance, I'm happy as Larry I am.
People want to have the latest game that pushes their hardware to a lump of melted aluminium. But not everyone wants to fork out £800 for the latest top end card to play the same game.
Take a game like Sleeping Dogs for example. For it to run smoothly, I have to turn AA from 'Extreme' to 'High'. No big deal. I can live with that. What really irks me is that, the fps drops from 60 (vsync on) to around 40 while driving in certain areas. The GPUs aren't even close to full load on these occasions.
What I'm getting at, is that the game looks stunning, but not so stunning that my rig should be struggling at certain points in the game. I think this is the case with other games to. They look great, but should they bring our PCs to their knees? Do they look THAT much better than their console counterparts? I don't think they do.
Ironically I now have the cash to spend on a decent machine but I would have loved for gaming to have been more affordable when I was a student -- I limped along on a budget Geforce 2/4 for ages before I could afford a 7800GT.
Additionally, what is true of gaming 20 years ago is still true now -- gameplay always goes before graphics. Crysis 3 doesn't interest me in the slightest if it's a glorified benchmark.
http://www.anandtech.com/show/6096/evga-geforce-gtx-680-classified-review/5
While some posters have already covered it, Crysis / Warhead was not properly optimized for multi-core CPUs. Having said that, we have to look at the performance of Crysis vs. more modern games and how they compare. 3 games that come to mind that can give Crysis a run for the $ graphically are Witcher 2, Metro 2033 and BF3. BF3 still has terrible textures and pre-scripted physics model that's less advanced than that of Crysis. Its main standouts are character animation due to EA sports and lighting model far superior to Crysis. The actual in-game models, polygon count, vegetation are not more advanced. More importantly, you cannot get 60 fps avg in any of those games maxed out on a single HD7970Ghz. You can almost get there in Crysis. So while Crysis could have been optimized better, it's not that bad compared to its graphical competitors.
Now let's compare some games that came out in 2012 that hamerred performance and don't look anything special: Sleeping Dogs, Assassin's Creed 3, and Hitman Absolution. The reality is when we compare performance of Crysis, it actually runs faster and looks better than any game that came out in all of 2012.
It's shocking but it's true. Even compared to Far Cry 3, Crysis still has superior graphics in many areas. The vegetation is fully dynamic, the physics model is far more complex and character models are way more detailed in Crysis than in Far Cry 3. We shouldn't have a situation of a 2007 game giving a run for the $ compared to a 2012 game and it does:
Crysis vs. Far Cry 3 - Crysis wins
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E3ohqbEn1v8
Thank you consolitis!
And that's the point - Crysis was made as a PC game only, for the PC from the ground-up. We need more games like Crysis that showcase what the PC hardware can do when developers push the limits of available graphics tech.
Crysis made GPU hardware exciting again. It puts the PC at the forefront of technology. Obviously gameplay >>> graphics but if the future of PC gaming are just higher resolution console ports of PS4/Xbox 720, it will make PC feel less special/exciting. One key advantage of PC gaming is being on the cutting edge of graphics innovation. Furthermore, it's not dissimilar to supercars. The tech used in supercars eventually trickles down to every day cars. Games like Crysis showcased what was possible for all game developers to accomplish. It set a new base to which all future games would be judged graphically. Someone has to make strides in physics, AI, graphics, sound/music, animation, etc. Any game that pushes the limits of any one or many of these aspects is great for PC gaming. If games are just console ports with high resolution texture packs and weak DX11 effects thrown in as an after-thought, those are not next generation PC graphics.
@ rollo,
I don't know how you think Uncharted 3 looks better than Crysis. Let's not confuse artistic design (Uncharted 3, Trine 2) with technical graphics. Uncharted 3 technically is a very weak game. It has static shadows, no dynamic area lights, pre-scripted physics model, low polygon character models, a ton of static pre-rendered walls/scenes and the vegetation is not interactive.
Uncharted 3 - just avg. graphics actually:
http://i.imgur.com/hQDEx.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/KRJi2.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/ONxsb.jpg
even at its best, it's nothing special:
http://img252.imageshack.us/img252/321/uncharted32012022921180.jpg
You can't even begin to compare Crysis 1 technically vs. Uncharted 3. Artistically, sure Uncharted 3 looks great, but so do plenty of other games like Journey, Trine 2, etc.
I hope Crysis 3 brings GTX690 to its knees but actually looks stunning. All too often we see when increasing graphics from very high to ultra results in a huge performance hit with limited improvement in graphics. Aslo, MSAA frequently contributes to a 30-40% performance hit in modern games which use deferred lighting game engines. Small graphical changes like going from HBAO to HDAO resulting in an exponential drop in GPU performance for limited graphical gain.
I still run through the original Crysis every time I get a new GFX card, and my 670 plays it just fine at 1600p with everything turned up.
My problem with Crysis was the reviewers - every last frikkin one of them sang it's praises and scored it based on the pretty graphics. Nobody can say it was a really great game, from a gameplay standpoint - it had some neat gimmicks and certainly did look pretty but, once you got to the floaty alien zero grav ship level, it turned to pants.
Yes the reviewers had the latest tech to play the game - they have to - and they all said it was very demanding, but how about scoring it for the masses? 95% of PC gamers never got to experience the game in the same way as the reviewers did until YEARS later.
Developers who release demanding games with piss-poor optimisation should get some kind of punitive score from the games journos - but no, they all gave it high scores and everyone wanted it; and most were disappointed that they didn't get the experience described in the reviews.
When was the last time a checkout assistant at Game or some other store asked you "are you sure your PC can run this?" when you arrive at the counter? I know it happened because two different people rang me from the store to ask if they should buy it. It seems like the store staff were willing to lose a sale rather have yet another customer bring it back to moan about the pretty slide show on their monitor.
Don't get me wrong, I like Crysis. I think it was a good game (but not a great one), however deeply flawed it was.
[/rant]
This used to happen to me most times when I went into GAME, I used to just bite my tongue to avoid being an ass.
To be fair it must be a PITA to have to repeatedly explain it isn't their fault that little Johnnies P4 with integrated graphics can't run the latest and greatest.
^ This, couldn't have said it better in my view. +rep to you sir ;)
I agree with that, the Skyrim PC mods are pretty sweet. SLI is better than it used to be, but expensive if you go bleeding edge. With two 550Ti's, I didn't spend too much money, at least for me... obviously cost varies from person to person. I game only on a PC and wanted to run Skyrim with everything maxed out. It ran ok on one 550, but there was definitely performance issues before I bought the second card.
I also agree with you that gameplay is far better than graphics quality. The best thing about gaming on a PC is backwards compatibility. Except for my really old games (circa 1990s), I can still install and play them on my current machine. If only I could get "Lords of the Realm II" to install on a 64bit OS I would be in bliss. But 16bit exe's aren't supported. For now, I will keep either my backup PC or my laptop on 32bit OSs so I can still play that game.
Technically, every game that runs smooth on an xbox should run smooth on a very mediocre pc. (at the same settings)
That they don't indicates at poor porting/optimisation.
This in turn means the problem is home made, they're not supposed to run well on pc.
Check the prices for ps3/xbox games vs. pc prices and you'll see why the studio will prefer to shift consoletitles.
I tried to play the original Crysis on a various selection of graphics setup's.
8800 GTS 320Mb SLI
8800 GTS 512Mb SLI
GTX 280 1Gb SLI
GTX 480
I am looking forward to Crysis 3 and seeing what happens with it in terms of performance.
I played through Crysis on my P4 with a 7950GT (AGP) and 2gb ram. The same pc I'm running now.
I agree with you mate, same boat, same attitude.
Also, BlueFalcon that was a great post, I imagine you'll have a full rep bar before long :)
Brilliant post mate!
i for one hope that CRYSIS eeeeps every little bit of power out of current gpus, graphics need a step forward, i blame console ports, but looks like developers are starting to do a little more with pc
I m playing GW2 with a 460 and its doing amazing in 1,920 x 1,080, high setting-shadows off. I only have some low fps in big battles in wvw. Not planning to upgrade for at least one more year, i am happy with it so far.
yeah i know what you mean mate, im hoping that the 2 7970's will last a while!
Its not that its unplayable. I can't get a constant vsync going. This means that you end up with tearing on screen and I don't think the frame to frame smoothness is as good without vsync.
I will say that my GTX 560 Ti has been wonderful but I'd like to make a step up to the 670 to get smoother frame rates on some games. Plus I'm curious to see if they'll make bioshock infinite hard on a system.
Not really what you'd expect from a game that was supposed to push the pinnacle of hardware, is it?
I had an 8800 GTX, since launch till it's replacement. It's definitely up there with the greats ;)
Ti500
Ti4600
9800 Pro
X600XT
Before the age of silly incremental performance.
I doubt it, even stuff based on heavily modified UE3 engines should be a cinch for a high-end system. Unless they do some serious damage to the engine during "optimisation" of course.
But I agree, it'd be nice.
As a matter of fact, the mods help illustrate what is needed to help PC gaming keep its punch. The strength of consoles has always been their ease of use and peace of mind knowing a game would run. However, only on the PC was Oblivion recreated with new areas (by users), endless perks and refined graphics packages the console owners could only dream about.
Game designers need to to their job and make use of the PC's capabilities, since if the quality is identical on Xbox360 and PC, not only have they not done their job, but the users are quite correct in seeing no point in preferring PC gaming.
I think the issue with Crysis was that it changed all of the current ideals. "I have a high-end card! I can run any-Wait, WTF? THIS DOES NO WORKETH?!" the other issue was that, as mentioned, it was a bit of a pig for doing far too much at once on not enough cores, so it did run out of room to work with and lagged, this is why Warhead seems so much better, simply because Crytek seemingly sat down and cleaned up some of the existing issues, improving performance for all players. (This does beg the question; Why wasn't it done for the Original Crysis? But I think only Crytek can answer that one)
I'd say Metro 2033 is the most recent game that has come close to Crysis in terms of System Bashing. I love the game, personally, but it's also an absolute pig to run maxed out. AFAIK: Only GTX 580(s) can manage it at higher resolutions, simply because it was coded so specifically for the GTX 400/500 series - This is the cost of "Too much" optimization, the opposite side of the coin from too little, the risk that the optimisations will cause issues later on in the games life as people upgrade to the new greatest hardware out there for more performance.
It's something to mull over, at least, as a new lot of games peek over the horizon.
Im also serious - dishonored runs perfectly on my pc and I have xfire 6670 HDs which doesn't have a patch on some of the newer cards. It got 99% here and good reviews everywhere. Games don't need amazing graphics to be good, they need amazing story lines and game play.
It isn't perfect - there are a few minor glitches and hiccups - but I would still score it 90-95%. I understand Joe's love of the game, but 99% leaves very little room for error.
but I agree I do not need to upgrade yet even my i-7 920 @ 3.5ghz handles games fine
Irony is hardly a good reason to give a game its score.
Pat of the reason I persevere at some games is because of how it did in reviews so I hope they are accurate - which im sure they are :)
It was another way of saying "I really, really loved that." Scores are entirely subjective, would Joe having given this game 91% instead of 99% really have altered the number of sales amongst the readership? Nope. Neither would any other score over about 85%.
I believe that was the point, that scores are pretty meaningless in the scheme of things. Think of it as an A+ and you might find it more palatable.
That was the end of it for me too. I went years and thousands of dollars trying to keep up with the tech. But my bubble was burst, not only over Crysis but how many of the games that I wanted to play were only on the consoles. Like you, I bought a PS3 and my at the time cutting edge Core 2 Quad/GTX 9800 rig got demoted to web system. It was only last week that I finally built a new system based on the current tech (i7 3770k, Asus Maximus V Gene, Asus GTX 550 ti) I have Borderlands 2 to thank for that (and the death of my old Core 2 Q)
I read this article just now. It's pretty old at this stage. But when you read through you see the shear wastefulness of gpu usage in crysis 2, based on tessellation alone. It also doesn't bring a huge visual advantage (holy tessellated concrete barrier batman!) One wonders how bad other graphical elements of the game have been optimised.
There is also this video
d5WGGCFj7Dk
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d5WGGCFj7Dk
which shows the not huge differences between fully max and absolute bottom. The most obvious difference comes from the low res and lack of AA. If you knocked the res up to 1080p how bad with the aliasing be at that stage?
It seems as though the whole thing is a deliberate effort to slow down the gpu to keep pc gamers happy. Or sell graphics cards.
This is something I've long suspected. That once you move past medium settings on your pc you end up with you GPU doing crazy image processing things, which bring little to the table visually.
I suspect crysis 3 will have more of the same shenanigans.