When was the first crysis made

And edge-blend anti-aliasing system is deployed, giving an FXAA-like effect that only impacted vegetation. Yes, Crysis was a heavy game on system resources and to this day it has a reputation that it was 'unoptimised'. Now, on the one hand, it was clear that Crytek took liberties with a platform that was, in effect, infinitely expandable across time with a view of technology catching up wth its design choices.

As then-Crytek now id software rendering mastermind Tiago Sousa told us back in the day : "In Crysis 1 times, our attitude was, 'oh what the heck, what's one more additional full resolution FP16 target or a couple of full screen passes, let's just add it' But on the other hand, performance tweaks were incorporated.

True volumetric clouds at the beginning of the game gave way to texture billboards once you landed, while the first member of Raptor team you meet - Jester - carries about a flashlight with a simplified spotlight effect which swaps back to a full volumetric effect in cutscenes.

A modern Crysis game based on the latest CryEngine would do this rather differently and in a way that is more physically accurate. The current tech - and its off-shoot in Amazon's Lumberyard - support a frustum voxel fog, where lights and shadows cast through it. Every light is technically "volumetric" with no picking and choosing due to performance reasons; the cost is much more flat. There would be no need for fake god rays from the sun or moon, as those effects just happen naturally as part of the rendering pipeline.

Crysis is fully capable of a full 24 hour time of day lighting cycle, but the game has areas where the passing of time is linked to progress through the level, leading up to that famous moment where you overlook the harbour, tasked with taking out jamming equipment. Like the opening scene in the plane, there are so many of Crysis's graphical effects coming into play here: the ocean rendering, the atmospheric scattering simulation, the crepuscular rays from the sun, the back lighting on the trees, and the incredible view distances just filled to the brim with AI and AI creatures.

And then there was the vegetation and trees, with their procedural breaking of branches right down to the twig level. Head down to the harbour, shoot an oil barrel and watch it leak based on where you shot it. There's a level of simulation here you just don't see any more in modern games - the focus has changed, as we've explained recently in our Far Cry tech retrospective. Some rendering effects we saw in Crysis do still persist into present day titles.

There's the debut of screen-space ambient occlusion SSAO , along with a glorious showcase in parallax occlusion mapping, an effect that only really came into its own on the current-gen consoles. Essentially a way to fake geometric depth on a surface, the game also supports shadows being cast from the parallax maps back on to themselves.

POM only really gained momentum in the current-gen era and most games either just have parallax occlusion maps with no shadows, or just with shadows from one light source. It illustrates just how far ahead of the curve Crysis was, and while the game was indeed very heavy on GPU resources, that wasn't exactly unreasonable based on the quality of the visuals it was generating. The team's 'Maximum Game' ethos also saw them eschewing rendering shortcuts that would display artefacts in motion - Crysis looked amazing both in still shots and video.

The Crysis ports on Xbox and PlayStation 3 perform really poorly, but they hold the key to improved performance in a potential PC re-release.

And part of Crysis's reputation for melting cutting-edge hardware comes from all of those effects, framebuffers and high resolution textures, which made the title consume a lot of VRAM. GPUs of the era tended to top out at MB, and running the game on very high settings could see that limit easily surpassed - with parallax occlusion mapping in particular sucking up a lot of memory.

Had tools like Riva Tuner Statistics Server been available then, the chances are we would have seen more tweaks to texture settings and fewer complaints online. But Crysis also hails from an era where the future of CPU technology was heading in a very different direction than Crytek may have originally envisaged. It is multi-core aware to a certain extent - gaming workloads can be seen across four threads - but the expectation for PC computing, especially from Intel with its Netburst architecture, was that the real increase in speed in computing would happen from massive increases in clock speed, with the expectations of anything up to 8GHz Pentiums in the future.

It never happened, of course, and that's the key reason why it is impossible to run Crysis at 60fps, even on a Core i7 K overclocked to 5GHz. At its nadir in the Ascension stage sensibly removed from the console versions , the fastest gaming CPU money can buy struggles to move beyond the mids. In intense, physics-driven firefights with a lot of enemy AI, you can also expect frame-rates to struggle. The Intel chip keeps you north of 60fps a lot of the time, but we were surprised to see how much the new Ryzen 7 X struggles to maintain 60fps in the heavier scenes - even with its XFR tech working exactly as it should, propelling the active cores to a max 4.

And it's here where the case for a proper Crysis remaster can start to be made. In fact, it already has been made - it was just never released for PC, instead arriving on Xbox and PlayStation 3. There are many, many cutbacks to the game though it does retain parallax occlusion mapping and many other effects more suited to the current generation and performance - to be frank - can be terrible. But it arrived after the more console-friendly Crysis 2, and the jobs-based CPU scheduling - which spreads tasks across Xbox 's six threads and PS3's six available SPUs - would surely provide a revelatory increase in speed on modern PCs.

In an ideal world, we'd love to see a Crysis Trilogy remaster or even a remake with all-new assets. However, the CryEngine of that era was built with multi-platform development in mind. The idea of this version existing but not being available has been hugely frustrating for us across the years.

The PC Crysis games have always had scalability, especially with a target performance in 30fps territory. Here are our attempts to run the entire trilogy at 4K on a GTX Yes, Crytek's extravagance with GPU resources means that some nips and tucks are required to run the game maxed on Ti-level GPUs at 4K60 - but by and large, graphics-wise, we're there. But owing to the more single-threaded nature of the CPU side of the equation, a locked 60fps Crysis experience will likely never happen, unless a port to a more modern CryEngine eventually appears.

What's particularly shocking to me is just how old Crysis is in terms of the day's hardware. The fastest of those is the Ultra, which delivered a measly GFLOPS of compute performance, with a slightly more impressive To put that in perspective, a GTX Ti has about 30x more computational power and 4.

Now to be fair, the best monitors in consisted of inch panels running at x, but most places didn't even both testing Crysis at that resolution because it just wasn't feasible. Our modern 4k resolution x is just over twice as many pixels, but with orders of magnitude more computational power, we should be able to take down Crysis with ease, right?

What does it take to run Crysis at maximum quality, at 4k resolutions? First, one small caveat: I couldn't max out antialiasing with 8xAA, which even now proved to be too much for any single GPU. I did limited testing, mostly because I was only concerned with conquering Crysis, not providing a modern look at the past decade of graphics and processor hardware.

GTX Ti as a point of reference only manages 42 fps in limited testing, so that's not going to suffice. So I overclocked the CPU to 4. There are a few things to note.

First, don't use FRAPS with Crysis—it doesn't appear to like the game these days in my experience, it caused major stuttering. Second, you'll see in the video that framerates still dip below 60 fps on occasion. However, I'm recording the video using ShadowPlay GeForce Experience , which at 4k ends up dropping gaming performance by around 10 percent. I'm also looking at an early portion of the game, and some of the later levels can be a bit more demanding.

If I turn off ShadowPlay, average framerates are well above 60 fps, but there are still occasional fps drops. Beyond the steep system requirements, it's worth pointing out that even a decade later, Crysis is still one of the best-looking games on PC. There are a few shortcuts that might not be needed in a modern implementation—palm trees only break in one of two spots when you cut them down, shadows don't look quite as nice or as accurate as in the latest games, and you won't encounter large groups of NPCs.

Crysis , Crysis Warhead and a multiplayer expansion called Crysis Wars were re-released as a compilation pack titled Crysis Maximum Edition on 5 May At the time Crysis was released, and years thereafter, it has been praised for its milestones in graphical design commensurate with high hardware requirements.

As with Crytek's previous game Far Cry , Crysis is an open-ended first-person shooter game with many ways to meet objectives. The player's weapons can be customized without pausing the flow of time, for example changing firing modes, changing scopes or adding sound suppressors. The player is also capable of selecting various modes in Nomad's military " Nanosuit " which draws power from the suit's energy. When the suit's energy is depleted, no modes can be used and the player is more vulnerable to damage before the suit recharges.

One of four modes can be selected: Armour deflects damage and recharges the suit's energy faster; Strength allows superhuman strength in hand-to-hand combat, the ability to throw objects and enemies with deadly force, much higher vertical jumps, steadier aiming and reduced weapon recoil; Speed increases running and swimming speed to superhuman levels, as well as other forms of motion such as reloading weapons; and Cloak, which renders Nomad almost completely invisible and suppresses movement noise.

The suit's integral facemask has its own HUD, displaying typical data including a tactical map, health, current energy levels, and weapons information.

The view is electronic in nature, shown in-game through things such as a booting readout and visual distortion during abnormal operation. A particularly useful utility is the binocular function, which allows the player to zoom in and electronically tag enemies and vehicles from afar, thereby tracking their movement on the tactical display.

The player can engage enemies in a variety of ways; using stealth or aggression, bullets or non-lethal tranquilizers, ranged rifles or short-range weaponry, and so on. Enemy soldiers employ tactical maneuvers and work as squads. AI soldiers will respond to noise caused by the player, including using signal flares to call for reinforcements.

If the player has not been detected in the area, enemies will exhibit relaxed behaviour, but if aware of the player they will draw weapons and become combative. A team of American civilian archaeologists, led by Dr.

David Rosenthal , send out a distress call indicating that they discovered something that could change the world. Thus Raptor Team was dispatched to the islands, with the core mission of evacuating them out and securing any valuable information that they have. The team consists of Nomad , Psycho , Aztec , Jester and team leader Prophet all under codenames ; they are outfitted with Nanosuits , which help protect them from gunfire and explosions, as well as giving them superhuman strength and abilities.

As they perform a high-altitude jump onto one of the islands, an unknown flying entity disrupts the jump by smashing into Nomad, and the team is separated. The crash deactivates Nomad's Nanosuit and destroys his parachute, but he is saved because he lands on water and his suit absorbs the impact of the landing.

After he makes his way to shore, Prophet is able to reset Nomad's suit, restoring its normal function. As Raptor Team regroups after the jump, Aztec is killed by an unknown entity. When the team finds him, they discover that whatever killed him also killed and dismembered a nearby squad of KPA.

The remaining members of Raptor Team proceed with the mission, and find the hostages' boat frozen near the coast of the island. They also get their first look at the aliens who have been attacking their team, when a flying alien machine sneaks up on them and snatches Jester, killing him shortly thereafter.

The first hostage the team rescues turns out to be a CIA agent who was sent to monitor Dr. Rosenthal's work. In the jungle, Nomad finds another hostage named Badowski dead with ice shards in his back, as the KPA battle an alien machine nearby. After Nomad regroups with Prophet, Prophet is suddenly snatched by another flying machine, which flies away with him in its grasp.

Shortly after, Nomad is contacted over the radio by the American military asking if he wishes to abort the mission since most of his team has been killed or missing; Nomad refuses, saying that he can still complete the mission. Nomad makes his way to Dr. Rosenthal's research complex, where he has found a rare fossilized artifact predating humanity by two million years.

The partially excavated artifact resembles one of the flying machines designated "exosuits" that has been attacking the team. Rosenthal also references other discoveries of similar artifacts in Afghanistan and Siberia, suggesting that the Ceph , the name of the alien race and antagonists of the game series, have a global presence, and are not just confined to the island.