Can The Register run Crysis Remastered? Yes, but we don't see why you would want to

Greetings, traveller, and welcome back to The Register Plays Games, our monthly gaming column – the "funk" edition. Maybe you've experienced the sensation, maybe you haven't, but after finishing our last subject, Death Stranding (which was great by the way), we found ourselves in a quandary. WTF do we play next? And can we bring …

[Sgt_Oddball]

You sirs need to have a ganders..

At "Lair of the clockwork God" if only for the mad concept mashing of platformer and point'n'click.

Think droll black humour, sarcastic wit at both genres and charming gameplay switching between the two styles (by switching between the two main characters).

It's also quite highly regarded on the steams (though now available on consoles).

I'll stop being such a shameless shill now and go back to my usual misanthropic self.

[Steve K]

Re: You sirs need to have a ganders..

Downloading now......

[Cederic]

wait? 70fps?

It can reach 70fps at 1080p? On a RTX2080?

Shit. I can't think of a modern game that at 1080p wouldn't treat dropping to 70fps on that card as a "Guys, we need some optimisation here" red flag.

Incidentally the ultimate PC performance test was Geoff Crammond's Grand Prix 2. Built to run on CPUs not GPUs it remained for years a true test of your PC's processing power. Darn fine game too.

[juice]

Re: wait? 70fps?

> Shit. I can't think of a modern game that at 1080p wouldn't treat dropping to 70fps on that card as a "Guys, we need some optimisation here" red flag.

It was optimised... just not for modern hardware.

As I understand it, the original game engine was essentially single-threaded[*] - back in 2007, multi-core CPUs were relatively rare, so there was little or no benefit to reworking things to use extra threads.

And then, they ported Crysis to the Xbox 360 and PS3. And while these are multi-core, and relatively powerful for the time, I suspect that any optimisations in these ports were focused around the fact that you can get closer to the metal on dedicated hardware, as opposed to the chaotic mix of options available on a PC.

And then they built Crysis Remastered, which is based on the console port, which is based on the original single-threaded PC game engine.

So on your nice, modern and shiny machine, your GPU will be mostly sitting and twiddling it's thumbs, as everything's being bottlenecked by that single thread hammering a single core of your CPU.

Sadly, it's doubtful they can do anything about this - we've long since hit a ceiling on how fast we can make a single core, and rewriting a ~15 year old single-threaded game engine to make it multi-threaded would be a pretty major undertaking...

[*] A lot of reviews mention two threads; I CBA looking up exactly how tasks are divided up between them, but I'd guess one handles physics+graphics, and the other handles more boring stuff like audio, NPC AI and the like. Either way, it ain't taking advantage of modern CPU architectures.

[Sorry that handle is already taken.]

Crysis

So your trouble playing Crysis... does this mean that after all this time it's still poorly (or un-)optimised it for multi-threading? I believe the reason it's notorious for breaking even modern PCs is that it was published when multi-threading was a novelty on x86 and therefore simply ignored the fact.

While I enjoyed Crysis, what frustrated me most about it were the weapon mechanics. Attaching a suppressor to a rifle reduced its impact to something between a spud gun and a BB gun. I had to expend entire magazines to drop individual KPA soldiers (even with head shots!) while suppressed.

[Mark192]

Re: Crysis

"does this mean that after all this time it's still poorly (or un-)optimised it for multi-threading?"

A review on a different site said it only used 2 threads and that this was a limitation of the game engine.

[Sorry that handle is already taken.]

Re: Crysis

Hmm. One would think a "remaster" might address that non-trivial shortcoming...

[MJI]

Crysis

I gave up it got boring.

One son finished and liked it.

Hardware - 1 Power PC core with 7 supplementary cores.

OS - Power PC Variant of BSD.

For jungles Nate was much more fun. For shooting where do I start?

[Blank Reg]

Re: Crysis

I don't I played more than an hour or two, that was more than enough. Good thing I got it out of the bargain bin.

[Brewster's Angle Grinder]

Re: Crysis

I gave up on in early on. And then came back to it when I had nothing else to play. It gets a lot better later on - especially when you start fighting the aliens.

[Prst. V.Jeltz]

Re: Crysis

I gave up the original when the Aliens turned up, just after a rather impressive scene with a mountain collapsing.

[Arbuthnot the Magnificent]

Crysis original

I played the original back in the day and really liked it. Over lockdown I played it and Warhead (courtesy of GOG, lost the originals years ago) on my Phenom 2 / RX470 rig. Now that's admittedly not a high-end system but I still had to tone the graphics down to make it smooth - an RX470 with 8GB VRAM! BUT it still looked really good, and I think it's a great game, interesting story and characters, great open environment and cool mechanics. I'll admit I don't understand the modern obsession with chasing framerates that the human eye cannot even detect - gameplay is more important.

[Excellentsword]

Re: Crysis original

The difference between 30 and 60fps is enormous, as is the difference between 60 and 120. Higher than that will be less obvious. But the issue here isn't so much frame rates as it is stability.

[Filippo]

Re: Crysis original

"that the human eye cannot even detect" - that's a meme that sometimes goes around, but it's false. While it is true that you can't really perceive two frames as two separate images at anything more than 20 fps or so, the illusion of movement can definitely be perceived as more or less smooth depending on frame rate.

If you're playing fast-paced games that require accurate movements, such as Crysis, playing at 30fps makes the game rather frustrating as you won't be able to position your crosshairs quickly and precisely, and it'll take you a noticeable fraction of a second longer to determine the direction an enemy is moving towards.

That said, it varies between people. Personally, back in the time of CRTs, I was notorious for switching to 60hz every display I laid my hands on. 30hz flickered in a way that drove me crazy.

[Brewster's Angle Grinder]

Re: Crysis original

CRTs are completely different. Even a 60Hz scan can be headache inducing - I liked it at 100Hz minimum. But modern screen technologies don't have that problem. And I always half suspect the obsession with frame rates is a hangover. That said, I don't have the kind of hardware that would allow me to evaluate three figure frame rates.

[Jellied Eel]

Might I recommend.. Medieval Dynasty

It's an early-access game on Steam. Premise is you're in the Medieval era, bimbled off to find your Uncle, found out he's unwell, so howsabout some free land & a hammer to found your own city? Oh, and by the way, did I mention taxes.. And with shades of CK, you can also found your own dynasty. So off you wander in a first-person way to gather sticks, logs, reeds and.. pig shit to build, feed* and occupy the time of villagers you'll recruit. It looks great, but being early access, has some rough edges and a roadmap of things to be added.

Downside, has the usual bete noir of survival-type games, namely massive overeating required to satisfy the hunger meeter. Like needing to eat entire deer/boar/wolf populations to fill the meter. And also item durability. Some day, I'm going to make a smack-o-matic machine to demonstrate why stuff like rebar & crowbars don't lose durability the way they seem to in many games.

*I don't mean feeding that to your villagers, but needed for farming. Unless you fancy being a tyrant, but then your villages will just flee..

[Stumpy]

Re: Might I recommend.. Medieval Dynasty

I'll admit, I don't do early access games. I prefer to wait and get my sweaty palms on the finished product. That said though, this one is on my wishlist already.

If you like a good action roguelike, then Hades is worth checking out: https://www.supergiantgames.com/games/hades/

[JDPower]

If your gonna asterisk a sentence for further comment or explanation, can you at least put the explanation at the end of the paragraph, not bottom of the article, 20 paragraphs of scrolling away. Or, here's a radical idea, just put the additional info in brackets instead of asterisking to another place on the page. It's something Reg does far too often, and really not necessary for the sake of a single sentence.

[Sorry that handle is already taken.]

It's even worse on multi-page articles!

[Lorribot]

A different PC perspective

"Blundering around at 30-40fps may be fantastic if you're used to consoles, but PC gamers are made of sterner stuff"

Err... no. Rich people are made of sterner stuff the rest of use buy cheaper hardware and try and get the best looking and consistantly over 30FPS on the paltry hardware we managed to sneak past teh missus and hope we dont run out of that 4/6GB graphics RAM.

But Crysis was only ever a so-so game that fed off the original Far Cry game that was actually ground breaking (unfortunately released at the same time as Halflife 2 so often gets ignored but really kickstarted the open world genre and do it your way, susequant FarCry's have been disapointing), I remember turning up tehsettings so i could swim under water and see all the fishes swimming around at 15 FPS on my underpowered setup, then re buying on steam for £2 several years later (had lost the DVD) so is could relive the wonder on ultra settings (reolutions are poor) at 60+ fps. Now I play Subnautica with fish all over the place.

Games shoudl only be revisited/remastered if the story will stand up to it, Crysis fails there as it was always about pushing the hardware and the graphics, if they had ported it to the current Crytek engine and updated the textures aznd environments etc to run at 4k it would be a thing, but a half baked remastered is somewhat pointless. Just play Crysis 3 for now and relesae a Crysis 4 if you can come up with a story.

[Dave K]

Re: A different PC perspective

I agree about Crysis. I played the original many years ago and found the game distinctly underwhelming. It looked pretty at the time, sure! But to me it always felt like a tech-demo with a simple game bolted on top. I play games these days for the plot and the story as much as the shooting, and Crysis falls flat on this.

Saying that, the article mentioned Divinity: Original Sin 2, now that's a superb game with a great plot. Can't recommend it enough!

[Anonymous Coward]

I play Crysis on my RPi...

100K resolution, 1K FPS, all the eye candy set to overdrive, and I can still multitask with ease.

And I'm the sanest person here, the voices inside my head assure me.

*Wanders off muttering about squirrels stealing my nuts*

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: *Wanders off muttering about squirrels stealing my nuts*

Now that sounds like a game I'd want to play.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: *Wanders off muttering about squirrels stealing my nuts*

I'm not sure I want you playing with my nuts. For all I know you wear pants, are sane, & claim bacon should be crunchy.

*Makes shooing gestures*

Now shoo. I've got voices in my head telling me to stay home and laminate chips to the ceiling...