REVIEW : Crysis Remastered (PC)
The long-awaited moment is here finally a remastered version of crisis PC is here. The game won critics award in 2007, but what is new that remastered version is offering its players. Its primarily made by Saber Interactive with Crytek taking charge in multiple aspects of the Pc version. The gaming industry has come a long way in the last 13 years so how is this game performing as in 2020, the graphical competition is tougher than ever. So where does this remaster version of an epic game stands in technology, and performance and gameplay?
So lets first start with a technological update in the game which has a great and distinct impact on the image. Without giving it 2nd thoughts the most impressive addition of technology that the remaster includes is spars voxel octree global illumination from the latest version of CryEngine. So what does this technology do? This impressive technology essentially performs a specific type of software ray tracing to simulate how diffused light bounces around in environment after the first hit. A voxel is a part of techniques name that form of ray tracing is done through simplified scenes of Voxels. With this in the game, the light hitting the object can bounce diffuse lighting onto objects and surfaces nearby and the light will be affected by the shape and colour of the objects nearby. So a black box will bounce black coloured light in the areas around it. It also adds shadow effects in the region where light isn’t reaching so the image can be lighted up and darkened at the same time. Anyone can notice the difference in the games visual quality by turning ‘Cryengine total illumination’ on and off. When the settings are off the complete environment where the light isn’t reaching will seem a lot darker than with the settings on. When the setting is off the indirect lighting is handled by ambient colour probes like lighting and screen space ambient occlusion.
The software ray tracing method is an expensive one hence the next generation consoles and RTX cards have adapted to use specialized hardware to accelerate ray tracing process. This is where CRYSIS REMASTERED is unique and one of a kind. So the due respect has to be given to game designers. The game is a DX11 game which usually means no hardware ray tracing support for those GPUs with capability like RTX card on pc. The developers at CRYTEK have specifically made this game in DX11 with incorporates with Vulcan and responds to specific Vulcan calls are made to specific NIVIDIA extensions which then allows software ray tracing in DX11 to have hardware accelerated elements on RTX GPU. So those RTX GPU’s will be using specific hardware acceleration to massively speed up ray tracing process. One of the best thing that remasted version has is the screen space shadows/ pixel size shadows which give the game a more detailed look, this screen space shadows better help connect smaller elements in the game like leaves or twigs. The last more visible technical upgrade can be found in games post-processing. The basic Gaussian depth of field has been replaced with cryengine’s bokeh depth of field which makes the weapon modification menu amazing. The game is absurdly more detailed than the original one especially on very high to point of excess. From a technical point of view, the remastered version has added a lot then mentioned.
Coming on to the performance section and crisis remasted deserves a different optimized setting than other games. Crisis 1 was one big single-threaded game and so is the remasted version of the game which is a huge disappointment which CPU scaling for object draw was limited by single-thread performance. So the last thread on 10900k machine was just a static high per cent with dramatically less utilization on all other threads. The remastered version has much more threading than crisis 1 the original and ai activation will not dip the frame rates as it uses to in the original game. Although without those dramatic drops in frame rates when AI was activated at a very high setting above this in remaster the CPU limitation will put players just below 70fps on 10 900k. this is without ray tracing as ray tracing cost about 10% of your performance so frame rates will go down to 40 at a CPU limited resolution and this is on the fastest consumer gaming CPU out there. So 60fps with the high setting will only be available at very few selected high-end machines. Other machines will be soo single-thread limited that frame rates will drop to 30at 1080p and this is not the worst thing that can happen it can go even more below. So finding optimum for a system will be extremely difficult. Players have to worry a lot about their CPU performance to get to 60fps. To test out multiple configurations a very good option is provided in remastered to make an in-game demo and to test settings. This helps the player to analyze their optimum settings.
