Graphical Presets

There are certain settings which will flat-out slaughter your framerate. Crytek knows this. That’s why if you switch to the advanced tab in the system settings for the game and change all the settings to Very High then some of the more general options aren’t enabled.

Mainly, I’m talking about Anti-aliasing and Anisotropic Filtering. Putting either of these on even at the lowest levels will see the little mouse which powers the inside of your computer via a treadmill have a heart attack and die. Poor little thing – you killed him, you know that don’t you?

So, be prepared for some of the graphical screenshots below to look a little jagged around the edges because Anti-aliasing is disabled. The game would be a slideshow if you enabled it, albeit the most beautiful one you’ve ever seen.

We’re going to look at the graphical presets first – which is every setting in the advanced menu set to the same option. This is mainly handy for those who don’t want to fiddle around with specific settings or who wouldn’t know enhanced Shader Quality if it bit a hole in their arse and crawled inside to lay its eggs. Whatever, let’s get on with it.

Very High

Let's start off big and look at the Very High setting. This is with every option in the game set to Very High, but with AA and AF both turned off.


Performance-wise this was a let down but not a surprise. FPS in the low teens in empty areas meant for a game which was jerkier than a chicken coated in Reggae Reggae Sauce.

Looks great though, doesn’t it? The key things to look for here include the level of parallax occlusion mapping on the textures and the dynamic light-rays shining through the tree in the top right. The fire coming from the car bonnet is gorgeous and the physics are fully incorporated into the game too – you can destroy pretty much any part of the car.

High

OK, so Very High is a bit out of reach for your system. That’s OK, really. Even my GeForce 8800 Ultra had to play the game at High, so there’s no reason to be ashamed.


There we have it – the penultimate setting. The game still looks great and the main differences are only really in the texture and shader settings, meaning that the distance is a little bit foggier and hazier (in a good way) and that the textures are missing that extra polish. Compare the fence on the right hand side to see what I mean.

Medium

Hmm. You still can’t handle it? If High is just out of grasp then Medium may be the ticket for you. Unfortunately, it’s a little more complex than that. Check out the picture to see what I mean.


Compare Medium and High and look again at the fence on the right. It’s weird, but it looks like High is omitting the extra splatters of white paint while Medium is adding them back in. It’s OK though, I have a theory.

If you look closely at the textures in-game then you can spot the difference. It appears that High is omitting some of the extra texture details in favour of using more bump mapping and so on. The actual texture itself is less impressive, but the material looks more real and less flat than in Medium. There are points in the game too where Medium really does look a bit…well, the easiest way to say it is that it tends to look like arse. Not good arse either.

Low

OK, so you’re at the bottom of the pile now – in with the dregs. You’ve either got a cheap system, an old system, or you’re trying to get maximum performance. This is what you have to put up with.


It doesn’t look that bad here, right? Sure, the mountain in the distance looks like something you’d find in a tissue on the street and the lighting is a bit plain, but it’s acceptable, right?

No, not really. The explanation for why not is in the details. Compare individual aspects between the pictures above – the colour of the sky, the shadows on the ground, the texture and smoke on the car which I semi-deliberately crashed there. On the Low setting a lot of these things are either missing or reduced and, once you’ve seen Very High, this is pretty unacceptable.

There’s a difference of opinion in the office at the moment about whether or not Far Cry looked like this or not. Some people think Far Cry looked about the same as this, but I disagree. I’ve seen both games in motion and while this screenshot may make you think otherwise, Far Cry was just a little bit better. A lot of that is because in Far Cry you could have it running like this, but add bump-mapping, shadows and AA on top of it all. Here, all of those are disabled.