On the Subject of Crysis

Denise Milani

It's terribly unfashionable to be enthusiastic about a big-name game these days. Fortunately I don't give a rat's arse what all the smug, self-righteous, needlessly contrary kiddie-fiddlers think and I can say without hesitation that on the basis of the recently-released SP demo, Crysis is the dog's bollocks.
If only there was a graphics card on earth that could run it maxed-out, which brings us to the subject of optimisation. Just as with the Bioshock widescreen fiasco, Crysis is bringing out the armchair pundits claiming that Crytek have done a poor job of optimisation because the demo doesn't run at a million fps on their antiquated, bargain-basement systems. If that was true, every monkey with a knocked-off copy of Visual Studio would be banging out games that look as rich and pretty as Crysis, but of course they're not. This game is breaking new ground in visual complexity and that comes at a hefty performance cost. If you can't afford a computer that can at least run it in a playable form that's not Crytek's fault, it's yours for being a talentless, penniless wastrel.
The other classic I've noticed on forums is the ever-popular "the release version will be optimised" suggestion. Bless. As if Crytek have purposely coded the engine to be slow, and will hit a magic optimisation switch before the retail game goes gold and suddenly it will run ten times faster. Of course that never happens, and you can be sure that the release version will be 99% identical to the demo in terms of performance. Maybe future patches, and more likely revised graphics drivers, will squeeze out a little more but if you think your piece-of-shit, circa 1999 graphics card will ever do this game justice then you're only fooling yourself.