AlienALX
Well-known member
The other day I was going through my games library in Steam thinking about testing games in Crossfire and I noticed that something seemed absent.
It then dawned on me that I only had Crysis 2 : Maximum Edition in my list. Crysis 3 is installed via Origin, but where was Crysis '1'? I then realised that I had it twice. Once for when I bought the original back in 2007 and once when I bought some sort of maximum edition that included both Crysis and Crysis : Warhead. I figured I would do some internet searching to see if it supported 4k and to my surprise it did ! mission on !
Sadly I also remembered that Crysis is protected by a really nasty type of DRM. I couldn't remember which of them it was but Securom was the most likely and it caused havoc with my PC the last time I used it. I decided it was probably better to buy the game on Steam and toodled off to a code site to look for it. £6, IIRC and it was now in my library. Sweet !
First and foremost Crysis is now nine years old . That, in gaming terms should make it very very old. I first found out just how old it was when I fired up the game and saw this.
Quickly followed by this.
Man, time eh? it flies by. OK so upon loading the game and trying to change the res you will probably be faced with this.
Ignore the 4k setting, that will not be there. You will have a maximum resolution of 1200p. Now, to change the res.Locate -
Documents/my games/Crysis and locate the game.cfg file. Open it with Wordpad or similar and then look for r_height and r_width and change them as per.
Now when you enter the game it will automatically be at 4k. Don't lower the resolution because if you do you will need to do that ^ again as it does not save your added resolution to the list of supported resolutions.
Other issues you may face.
Most 4k monitors (it could even be all) are Displayport. Displayport works differently to HDMI in so much that to achieve 60HZ (and thus a frame cap of 60 FPS with Vsync on) it splits two 30hz signals. Sadly in some games they will detect that you have a 30hz monitor and default the Vsync to 24hz. This means if you use Vsync you will get 24 FPS max. To circumvent this problem I simply disabled Vsync, which did result in some tearing. I've had exactly the same experience with a couple of other games now (Dying Light being one of them) but that was fixed. I have shot an email over to Matt and he is going to ask the guys at AMD to fix this issue. Cool !
So the burning question, what does it look like? well tbh I wasn't expecting much. I was expecting the textures to look stretched. I was completely wrong. Take a look at this.
Even the stunning shadows looked, well, stunning.
To term a TTL phrase? I was completely gobsmacked. Dumbfounded, even. How can a game this old look this good? And when I say good I mean "Every bit as a game released this year" good.
Whilst tweaking the game and trying to achieve a 60 FPS limit (by hacking with RadeonPro) I managed to break the game completely, and when I reinstalled it it went back to 1080p. So I figured I would play it at that res for a bit to see what difference 4k actually made. It looked utterly awful. Everything looked fuzzy and nasty.
I decided in the end to play through using no Vsync and that I would put up with the tearing. What was also very surprising was how different running the game at 4k made the game feel. Now as you know in Crysis the enemies usually come in waves from all directions. So you can't just hole up behind a wall without them coming in from behind. In the past I would try and pick them off from as far away as possible using the scope feature (in the weapon tweak part with the red dot). However, playing at 4k meant that even tiny Korean heads were crystal clear and it made picking them off from distance far, far easier.
I don't really know how this game has stood the test of time so well tbh. I mean sure, it may be missing all of that fancy stuff like DX11 Tessellation and lighting but when you are actually in motion and playing the game DX10 does the job more than well enough.
It really does feel like a game released yesterday.
Performance? well as you know (actually it's so old you may have forgotten) Crysis is an absolute GPU killer. When you enable 4k you are going to need serious power to throw it around. Even a nine year old game keeps two perfectly scaling Fury X in their place. I get an average of 58 FPS with lows of 42. Again, this surprised me. I thought my GPUs would pick it up and throw it around like a rag doll but this was not to be.
Overall? this is something that should definitely be on your computing bucket list. It's just something that you should experience.
It then dawned on me that I only had Crysis 2 : Maximum Edition in my list. Crysis 3 is installed via Origin, but where was Crysis '1'? I then realised that I had it twice. Once for when I bought the original back in 2007 and once when I bought some sort of maximum edition that included both Crysis and Crysis : Warhead. I figured I would do some internet searching to see if it supported 4k and to my surprise it did ! mission on !
Sadly I also remembered that Crysis is protected by a really nasty type of DRM. I couldn't remember which of them it was but Securom was the most likely and it caused havoc with my PC the last time I used it. I decided it was probably better to buy the game on Steam and toodled off to a code site to look for it. £6, IIRC and it was now in my library. Sweet !
First and foremost Crysis is now nine years old . That, in gaming terms should make it very very old. I first found out just how old it was when I fired up the game and saw this.
Quickly followed by this.
Man, time eh? it flies by. OK so upon loading the game and trying to change the res you will probably be faced with this.
Ignore the 4k setting, that will not be there. You will have a maximum resolution of 1200p. Now, to change the res.Locate -
Documents/my games/Crysis and locate the game.cfg file. Open it with Wordpad or similar and then look for r_height and r_width and change them as per.
Now when you enter the game it will automatically be at 4k. Don't lower the resolution because if you do you will need to do that ^ again as it does not save your added resolution to the list of supported resolutions.
Other issues you may face.
Most 4k monitors (it could even be all) are Displayport. Displayport works differently to HDMI in so much that to achieve 60HZ (and thus a frame cap of 60 FPS with Vsync on) it splits two 30hz signals. Sadly in some games they will detect that you have a 30hz monitor and default the Vsync to 24hz. This means if you use Vsync you will get 24 FPS max. To circumvent this problem I simply disabled Vsync, which did result in some tearing. I've had exactly the same experience with a couple of other games now (Dying Light being one of them) but that was fixed. I have shot an email over to Matt and he is going to ask the guys at AMD to fix this issue. Cool !
So the burning question, what does it look like? well tbh I wasn't expecting much. I was expecting the textures to look stretched. I was completely wrong. Take a look at this.
Even the stunning shadows looked, well, stunning.
To term a TTL phrase? I was completely gobsmacked. Dumbfounded, even. How can a game this old look this good? And when I say good I mean "Every bit as a game released this year" good.
Whilst tweaking the game and trying to achieve a 60 FPS limit (by hacking with RadeonPro) I managed to break the game completely, and when I reinstalled it it went back to 1080p. So I figured I would play it at that res for a bit to see what difference 4k actually made. It looked utterly awful. Everything looked fuzzy and nasty.
I decided in the end to play through using no Vsync and that I would put up with the tearing. What was also very surprising was how different running the game at 4k made the game feel. Now as you know in Crysis the enemies usually come in waves from all directions. So you can't just hole up behind a wall without them coming in from behind. In the past I would try and pick them off from as far away as possible using the scope feature (in the weapon tweak part with the red dot). However, playing at 4k meant that even tiny Korean heads were crystal clear and it made picking them off from distance far, far easier.
I don't really know how this game has stood the test of time so well tbh. I mean sure, it may be missing all of that fancy stuff like DX11 Tessellation and lighting but when you are actually in motion and playing the game DX10 does the job more than well enough.
It really does feel like a game released yesterday.
Performance? well as you know (actually it's so old you may have forgotten) Crysis is an absolute GPU killer. When you enable 4k you are going to need serious power to throw it around. Even a nine year old game keeps two perfectly scaling Fury X in their place. I get an average of 58 FPS with lows of 42. Again, this surprised me. I thought my GPUs would pick it up and throw it around like a rag doll but this was not to be.
Overall? this is something that should definitely be on your computing bucket list. It's just something that you should experience.
