CRYSIS

Peering at the screen in a way unbecoming of a serious journalist

- By Ian Evenden

Crysis became a meme for its high graphics requirements, but it's almost 20 years old - surely modern systems have advanced far enough to do it justice? Well... kinda.

I'm reinstalling plain old Crysis here, not Crysis Remastered or the version from the Crysis Trilogy set, which means I'm not benefitting from any quality of life improvements that came with the newer releases. It's the standard version you get from Steam, and it won't run on my gaming PC. That's right, a PC with an RTX 3080 in it is unable to run Crysis. Sadly for the meme-sters, it's probably a software or driver issue rather than a lack of rendering power, it just stops dead and resets back to the Steam library page instead of attempting to render a slideshow. None of the solutions I unearth from the internet work, so I move to my backup PC.

This is a mini-PC that has a Core 19-13900h in it, and a useful 32GB of RAM, but no discrete GPU. The recommended graphics card for Crysis is a GeForce 8800 GTS, a card from 2007's Tesla generation that can have as much as 640MB of VRAM but more usually came in a 512MB configuration with a 256-bit bus.

This gives it a peak performance of around 416 GFLOPS, while the integrated Iris Xe GPU in the 19 returns 1.7 TFLOPS. Theoretically, of course. For comparison, the RTX 3080 that's frustratingly unable to play Crysis is capable of almost 30 TFLOPS.

This looks good for Crysis on integrated graphics, but there's a further hitch. My mini-PC is hooked up to a 4K monitor, and the game is unable to run in fullscreen at anything less than 4K resolution. Lower settings work, but run in a window that's so small I'm left peering at the screen in a way unbecoming of a serious journalist. Ticking the 'full screen' option in the game's settings doesn't solve the problem, and after some experimentation with the game's performance analyser and the Game Bar's frame counter, I'm left with medium settings.

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