Multiple GPUs in SLI or CrossFire could do so, but I wanted to stick with a single graphics card. 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. Our modern 4k resolution (3840x2160) 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? Maybe… Maxing out Crysis at 4k with 4xAA Now to be fair, the best monitors in 2007 consisted of 30-inch panels running at 2560x1600, but most places didn't even both testing Crysis at that resolution because it just wasn't feasible. Our modern 4-5GHz CPUs are much faster than a Core 2 or Athlon X2 from 2007, but a big part of that comes from increasing the core and thread count, which mostly won't help Crysis. Those are $1,000 processors that were rarely recommended, and while Core 2 Extreme included quad-core models by 2007, Crysis only ends up using two CPU cores in any meaningful way. You'll see the now-familiar 'Nvidia The Way It's Meant To Be Played' promo video, followed by a 'Play to win with Intel Core 2 Extreme inside' clip. Launching Crysis also gives a few hints at other potential performance factors. Many benchmarks ended up turning down the shader quality a notch to provide a reasonable balance between performance and quality-and really, Crysis with everything set to medium quality (plus high shaders if you want AA) still looks pretty amazing.

It looked good, perhaps a bit too good, and the hardware of the day wasn't up to the task. Crysis includes volumetric lighting, lush vegetation, and it was the very first game to ever implement screen space ambient occlusion.īlazing new trails and being first doesn't always lead to a 'best' solution, and that was true of Crysis's SSAO. Shaders were also somehow involved with the game's antialiasing support (turning on AA forces Shader Quality to high, which itself causes a large impact to performance), but the complexity goes far beyond antialiasing. Using shaders in games is common these days, but in 2007 having that many was bleeding edge stuff. Roy Taylor (of Nvidia at the time) stated that Crysis uses over 85,000 shaders-small programs designed to generate graphical effects. Crysis was one of the very first PC games to support DirectX 10, and it used the budding API in ways that perhaps weren't quite expected.

Crysis 2 requirements