It’s been more than six months since Crysis Remastered was launched on a PC, and it’s fair to say that I, as a huge fan of the original game, was disappointed by its resurgence – though there’s a lot of praise, legacy luggage of the Xbox 360 PS3 ports effectively saw that aspects of the game were missing compared to the original 2007, while the processor performance was not as it should be. However, today’s 2.1 patch is a good leap: there are real improvements, missing content has been repaired, and for GeForce RTX card owners, the inclusion of DLSS AI scaling dramatically increases performance in graphically limited scenarios.
There is not much to say about the implementation of DLSS, other than to say that it is just as impressive as other recent outings and an excellent addition to the game. Again, elements of the visual presentation are actually enhanced as the original version, and although there is a TAA style, it is hardly noticeable in the action. What I especially enjoyed about this particular use of DLSS is that the grind to the process can be manually adjusted within the command console – the access to which I would very much like to see as standard in all DLSS-supported titles. Finally, the lower down on the RTX power ladder you go, the more impressive the gain given by DLSS, to the point that the relatively low RTX 2060, even in a GPU heavy scene, would be comfortably capable to exceed 60 frames per second at 1440p. resolution. It even delivers a pretty good increase in 4K output, which means higher-end RTX cards should deliver it with minimal hassle.
Besides DLSS, I’m happy to report that there have been many improvements to Crysis Remastered since we first looked at it: the issues with packet controls have been resolved and the switching modes in motion have been corrected, which could cause the chain speed to jump as you would have seen in your favorite nanosuit ninja videos. The infamous Ascension level – missing in the PS360 ports and indeed Crysis Remastered – is back now and it plays very smoothly, unlike the original 2007, which can still hamper even the most powerful processors of the modern era. Ascension even contains the real volumetric mishap of the original Cry Engine 2 version of the game, the omission of which was another problem elsewhere in the remaster … and one that surprisingly has still not been fixed.
A deep dive into the latest version of Crysis Remastered.
Problem performance is improved, however, with the stuttering stutter in jet-pull mode almost completely cleared up. However, the nature of the single-wire renderer is still an issue – just like the performance loss on the CPU, the higher you push the resolution. It looks like the CPU load has been seen some improvement, but it’s still a weak spot in the game. At the release I mentioned that it is important to keep the performance of the CPU and the headroom high to make sure that you stick to 60 fps throughout the experience. This means that you keep objects, shadows and vegetation on medium settings and then convert any of the other settings like shadow, physics, particles and volumetry to anything you want as the other settings generally have little to no large CPU cost not. This is essentially still true, but I have derived a more nuanced view of what is most expensive on the CPU: the heaviest CPU related setting you can customize is vegetation, where anything above medium even for a skilled processor is very can be challenging. .
In terms of optimized settings now, I think users should start on the same base of medium for shadows, objects and vegetation, but if your CPU has excellent performance with one thread, the vegetation increases to high, and if you have a very fast modern Intel or Ryzen 5000 chip , on top of that, add objects with high detail. However, shadows should only be enhanced if you have an absolutely monstrous processor. Again, the other settings are less striking in Crysis Remastered, as the performance of the CPU is more important than the GPU load. It’s still a disappointment to me that this title should be so CPU limited.
Overall, the new 2.1 update for Crysis Remastered has indeed been greatly improved over the launch game, with DLSS particularly useful for those who really want to print graphics on this game. Artistic issues have been improved in some cases, but are not yet consistent with the 2007 version elsewhere – which is again a disappointment. There have also been some new issues – motion blur has now been broken, but I expect it to be fixed soon. At this point, I think Crytek should help the Crysis community – and itself – by releasing the game editor, ensuring the life of the game, and enabling user modes to address the remaining issues. In the here and now, Crysis Remastered is still not the game I was hoping for, but it’s definitely a big step away from the launch code.