A Real Crysis

When the Crysis demo was released, everyone started complaining about its incredibly slow performance. Everyone hoped that the demo was merely a half-baked, poorly-optimized shadow of the final game. However, when Crysis itself finally hit the shelves, many were disappointed. It was so slow that unless you had the latest and highest-end PC hardware in the market, you could end up watching a Crysis slideshow instead.

Okay, Crytek would prefer us to use the marketing-friendly term, "hardware-challenging" but let us just tell it as it is. Crysis and its demo were real dogs on the hardware. Even gamers armed with quad-core systems and new graphics cards like the NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTS 512MB cannot hope to play at 1600 x 1200 with the settings set to High. Oh, you may brave the "shakes" but wait till the snow starts falling, then you will see what we mean by watching slideshows.

Seriously, Crytek can claim they have the most graphically-advanced game in the world, but frankly, we think they could have done it without forcing everyone to upgrade. They should take a leaf out of 2K Games' book. Look at how well they did BioShock. It had amazing graphics, as beautiful as Crysis, we dare say; and yet, BioShock didn't require the kind of crazy hardware that Crysis needed just to run at all.

What every gamer had been clamouring for since he/she started playing Crysis is a performance patch. Something to make the game go zoom. An octane booster to go from a piddling 10-20 fps to a more exciting range like 40-60 fps. The status quo was just not acceptable.

Finally! A Patch

On January 8, 2008, Crytek released the long-awaited Crysis patch 1.1 which mainly addressed its performance deficiencies, as well as a few bug fixes and tweaks. W00t! Take a look at the change log :

Fixes

• Fixed: Potential crash in D3D10
• Fixed: Orange boxes apearing when hispec savegame loaded into lowspec game.
• Fixed: Inconsistent damage dealt to vehicles when shot by LAW.
• Fixed: Reflection resolution on D3D10, MultiGPU reflection update fix
• Fixed: Memory leak with FSAA modes
• Fixed: Infinite ammo hacks.
• Fixed: Memory leak in D3D10 when switching screen modes
• Fixed: Muti optimizations
• Fixed: When player melees during gun raise animation, their gun will be in a permanantly raised position.
• Fixed: Crash when loading savegame with level exported recently by editor
• Fixed: Virtual keyboard does not function properly when a game pad is connected
• Fixed: Users can lose the ability to look around with the Right Stick
• Fixed: Setting screen resolution to "default" stops user from selecting last resolution
• Fixed: Bug when changing resolution in D3D10
• Fixed: Issues with Depth of field and water droplets in D3D10
• Fixed: Crash on NaN warning

Updates

• Added: Motion Blur UI and V.SYNC UI options
• Optimized: Motion blur
• Optimized: FSAA (Full Scene Anti-Aliasing)
• Optimized sound id implementation
• Enabled VSync functionality in D3D10
• New benchmarking files for ice CPU benchmark.
• http/xmlrpc password protected remote control session
• Marked debug cvars as cheat
• F12 (screenshot) now works in restricted mode as well

Tweaks

• Reduced LAW splash damage vs. infantry in PowerStruggle mode
• Slowed Rocket projectile speed down in MP slightly
• Disabled automatic turret bounding boxes on vehicles to prevent issues with LAW hit detection
• Reduced grenade explosion radius in multiplayer
• Clamped water tesselation to avoid cheating in MP
• MultiGPU improvements with depth map updates

Impressive list of fixes and tweaks. Will this patch finally allow gamers to run Crysis on their current hardware? Let's find out...