1w ago

Crysis director says it was so hard to run it became a meme because its highest settings were meant for future PCs: 'I wanted to make sure Crysis does not age'

www.pcgamer.com Crysis director says it was so hard to run it became a meme because its highest settings were meant for future PCs: 'I wanted to make sure Crysis does not age'

"A lot of people tried to maximise Crysis immediately, and I'm like, 'Oh, that's not why we built the Ultra mode, or Very High.'"

Crysis director says it was so hard to run it became a meme because its highest settings were meant for future PCs: 'I wanted to make sure Crysis does not age'

PC Gaming @lemmy.ca

alessandro @lemmy.ca

1w ago

Crysis director says it was so hard to run it became a meme because its highest settings were meant for future PCs: 'I wanted to make sure Crysis does not age'

www.pcgamer.com /games/fps/crysis-director-says-it-was-so-hard-to-run-it-became-a-meme-because-its-highest-settings-were-meant-for-future-pcs-i-wanted-to-make-sure-crysis-does-not-age/

59 4

34 comments

Unfortunately, they miscalculated and thought that single threaded performance (specifically higher clock speeds) would continue to advance at the same pace as it has been before the release of Crysis, but what ended up happening instead is more focus on multithreading by releasing CPUs with more cores with smaller IPC improvements comparitively.
IPC improvements were obviously still a thing, but it took a while for hardware to be able to run Crysis maxed out at good framerates.
- It also wasn't exactly the best optimized game either. Call of duty 4 came out the same year and looked spectacular without crushing your computer.
  
  They weren't even in the same league though graphically (on PC). Crysis really was that one game which blew everything else out of the water. In many ways it set the precedent for companies to implement ultra quality settings which only worked with the very best GPUs of each generation.
  
  It helps Call of Duty 4 in that their levels were a lot more restricted and didn't have all the physics and AI calculations that Crysis had to do. Even then, Crysis had better graphics and more advanced effects.

The weird thing is that it had low quality settings to make less powerful pcs be able to run it.
- I finished the whole game on a core 2 duo, and some nvidia gpu from the same era I don't even remember.
- And you could fine tune basically any setting.
  
  I wish they hyped that as cool too, I never even tried to run it lol

No one here is mentioning that Crysis released right when single core processors were maxing out their clock speed while dual and quad core processors were basically brand new. It wasn't obvious to software developers that we wouldn't have 12GHz processors in a couple years because the entire industry would just keep adding more and more cores rather than sizing up each core.
So a big bottleneck for Crysis was that it would max out single core performance on every PC for years because single core clock speed didn't improve very much after that point.

The joke is i don't think any "future pcs" can run crysis now since it's not compatible with new windows versions iirc. I got a cobwebbed copy i can't play in my steam library rn
- It works on Linux on Proton, at least.

Still looking great at FHD resolution.

If you do that today gamers will cry about it being "unoptimized"
- People complain about it because modern games run horribly compared to older games and don't look any better. Modern games really are unoptimized.
- Gamers back then were crying about it being unoptimized back then too. There is no care about what the game accomplishes, only that it has to run perfectly smooth on their hardware.
- If you get 20 fps on medium settings in crowded areas with latest RTX card, yeah, it's unoptimized.
  
  No, mate. Zalyssia just feels like that. We're all very drunk.

What’s the point in making a game that only works well in the future where other games look better or you stopped caring? I never played crisis then and I tried it recently and it felt outdated and cheap so I put it down
- It worked well, it just had the capacity to upscale when the tech made it.
  Like having one car and owning a two car garage, it doesnt not work but it does give you options.

So poorly optimised you need future technology to run it isn't the future proofing strategy I'd go with, but ok...
- That is not at all how it works or what they are saying. For the time, it was not poorly optimised. Even at low settings it was one of the best looking games released, and pushed a lot of modern tech we take for granted today in games.
  Being designed to scale, does not mean its badly optimised.
- So, I've seen this phenomenon discussed before, though I don't think it was from the Crysis guys. They've got a legit point, and I don't think that this article does a very clear job of describing the problem.
  Basically, the problem is this: as a developer, you want to make your game able to take advantage of computing advances over the next N years other than just running faster. Okay, that's legit, right? You want people to be able to jack up the draw distance, use higher-res textures further out, whatever. You're trying to make life good for the players. You know what the game can do on current hardware, but you don't want to restrict players to just that, so you let the sliders enable those draw distances or shadow resolutions that current hardware can't reasonably handle.
  The problem is that the UI doesn't typically indicate this in very helpful ways. What happens is that a lot of players who have just gotten themselves a fancy gaming machine, immediately upon getting a game, go to the settings, and turn them all up to maximum so that they can take advantage of their new hardware. If the game doesn't run smoothly at those settings, then they complain that the game is badly-written. "I got a top of the line Geforce RTX 4090, and it still can't run Game X at a reasonable framerate. Don't the developers know how to do game development?"
  To some extent, developers have tried to deal with this by using terms that sound unreasonable, like "Extreme" or "Insane" instead of "High" to help to hint to players that they shouldn't be expecting to just go run at those settings on current hardware. I am not sure that they have succeeded.
  I think that this is really a UI problem. That is, the idea should be to clearly communicate to the user that some settings are really intended for future computers. Maybe "Future computers", or "Try this in the year 2028" or something. I suppose that games could just hide some settings and push an update down the line that unlocks them, though I think that that's a little obnoxious and would rather not have that happen on games that I buy -- and if a game company goes under, they might never get around to being unlocked. Maybe if games consistently had some kind of really reliable auto-profiling mechanism that could go run various "stress test" scenes with a variety of settings to find reasonable settings for given hardware, players wouldn't head straight for all-maximum settings. That requires that pretty much all games do a good job of implementing that, or I expect that players won't trust the feature to take advantage of their hardware. And if mods enter the picture, then it's hard for developers to create a reliable stress-test scene to render, since they don't know what mods will do.
  Console games tend to solve the problem by just taking the controls out of the player's hands. The developers decide where the quality controls are, since players have -- mostly -- one set of hardware, and then you don't get to touch them. The issue is really on the PC, where the question is "should the player be permitted to push the levers past what current hardware can reasonably do?"
  
  I feel like instead of the "settings have been optimized for your hardware" pop up that almost always sets them to something that doesn't account for the trade-off between looks and framerate that a player wants, there should be a "these settings are designed for future hardware and may not work well today" pop up when a player sets everything to max.
  I've noticed some games also don't actually max things out when you select the highest preset.
  I also really like the settings menu of the RE engine games. It has indicators that aggregate how much "load" you're putting on your system by turning each setting up or down, which lets you make more informed decisions on what settings to enable or disable. And it in fact will straight up tell you when you turn stuff too high, and warns you that things might not run well if you do.
  
  Maybe if games consistently had some kind of really reliable auto-profiling mechanism that could go run various “stress test” scenes with a variety of settings to find reasonable settings for given hardware
  ...like most games from early 10's? A lot of them had built-in benchmark that tested what your PC is capable of and then set things up for you.
  
  As much as I find distasteful the idea of shipping “mandatory” patches for single player games years down the line to fix issues that should’ve been caught during QA.. this might be a decent use case for them
  
  This is why I really respect when a game has very clear separations on the slider indicating that one end is very intensive, bonus points if the game warns me that it might but run well at maxed settings.
  
  What they should probably do is is cap the settings to what computers at release time can handle, then patch it later with "graphics enhancements" that do nothing but raise the cap. They could even do it more than one. It keeps users' expectations reasonable at launch and then lets the developers look like they're going the extra mile to support an older product.
  As a bonus, they could store the settings in a text file somewhere that more sophisticated users can easily edit to get max settings on day one.
- It was not poorly optimized, it was things like draw distance and texture resolution.

34 comments