Crysis Demo Impressions
Let’s get one thing straight; unless you have a supercomputer at home, you’re not going to be “blown away” by the visuals. There, I said it. Now, if you do happen to own a rather powerful machine, the graphics will certainly impress you unlike any other game. If you can get a decent frame rate to enjoy it, that is.
As many others, I downloaded the demo, installed, and played with the suggested settings. Let’s be honest, the visuals weren’t impressive, neither was the frame rate. This would be okay if my PC wasn’t up to date, but actually, it’s pretty “up to date”, with a 2.4 GHz Core 2 Duo, Nvidia 7950 GT, and 2 GB RAM (in Win XP). And I still got a not-so-good frame rate, playable, but not something that’s going to make you enjoy the game to its full potential.
Unimpressed, I went and overclocked my CPU to 3 GHz, and overclocked the graphics card as much as I could. Back into Crysis, I set everything to “Medium”, 2xAA, and a resolution of 16580×1050. The game didn’t look that much better, and the frame rate was around 25, dropping to under 20 during heavy combat in the jungle. Dropping the resolution and increasing the AA (to 4x) didn’t show any noticeable difference in the visuals or frame rate.
Of course, one can’t expect that a game like Crysis would run smoothly on every machine, especially on high settings (meduim settings, in my case). But comparing it to the Unreal Tournament 3 demo, the difference is huge. UT3 ran on high settings and delivered great visuals and great frame rate. So did Call of Duty 4. We’ll have to see what happens when the full versions of those three games are out, only then can one properly compare. But at least we have a pretty good indication that you will need a very powerful PC to run Crysis in its full glory. Check out some screens I took after the jump.
