Crysis Remastered launches this Friday, September 18. A complete revamp of the original game, this itಞeration of Crysis makes use of vastly improved technologies that weren’t around 13 years ago, placing a particularly keen emphasis on ray tracing solutions.
In order to come to terms with what distingu🐈ishes the remaster from the original, I sat down with Crysis Remastered project lead Steffen Halbig and Crytek head of communications Jens Schaefer, where we discussed everything from overclocking graphics cards to the origins and endurance of everyone’s favourite video game meme: Can It Run Crysis?
What made you decide to remaster Crysis in 2020 as opposed to working on something new?
SH: The PC community were constantly asking us over the last ten years if we could make a new Crysis or Crysis Remastered. Over the last 13 years we got a lot of new technologies into CryEngine which would benefit Crysis, and we have our strong partner, Saber, with us. Especially nowᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚ𒀱ᩚᩚᩚ on top of the software ray tracing technology, it was a perfect fit to combine everything together and work on Crysis Remastered with all the latest technologies in CryEngine.
What do these new technologies afford you that the old ones didn’t?
SH: First of all, we have global illumination now, also called SVOGI CryEngine. Back in the days of Crysis 🥂we didn’t have this technology in place, which meant you always had to create fake lights, especially in houses. Everything looked so brightꦬ for indoor areas — but now with global illumination, you have this realistic light in place and it’s really beautiful. It’s everywhere in the game.
On top of that we have software ray tracing. Crysis is known for the ocean —ꦿ we have [a lot of] glass in the game, and so many reflections we can showcase. We have depth of field and from our side we havꦐe more options now. Back in the day it was impossible to add any 4K or 8K textures. Remember the 8800 Ultra Nvidia? How much memory does it have, 512 maybe? Now if you have the nanosuit in 8K it fits almost this memory alone. Stuff like this was not possible back in the day.
Especially for PC gamers, we went all in. All the stuff, textures - it was always the question in development, “Hey Stefan, slowly we [are using] more graphic memory.” I said I don’t care, we give everything to the PC communit♋y and I hope you will feel it.
What does CryEngine offer you that other game engines don’t have?
SH: I think the most important part of CryEngine is the scalability of the performance. It was always known that CryEngine could get high-end visuals and great performance. Espe♍cially now for ray tracing, we give you four options in the g𓃲ame: Performance mode, High, Very High, and the Can It Run Crysis mode for ray tracing.
Also on top of Can I🦹t Run Crysis graphics mode we have Can It Run Crysis ray tracing mode. I can tell you already that with a 2080Ti Titan RTX you don’t need to play this game in 4K in Can It Run Crysis mode, you won’t get much fps. Maybe with the Ampere cards in the future. We didn’t test it yet, but let’s say maybe you’re getting around 30fps — but it’s not stable.
But yeah, scalability is very cool. We can get maybe 50 or 60% more performance in Performance mode but it’s something pe🅘ople can choose. Also with the software ray tracing solution in place, for the first time GTX and MD users can enjoy ray tracing next to RTX users.
What’s the Can It Run Crysis meme like in the office?
SH: We had a meeting five or six months ago. Sometimes we have special meetings only for PC on what we can do to raise the bargain for the PC part. I said let’s have a mode included which gives you unlimited view, no pop-up from textures, no changes anymore. Normally in a game if you are 50 metres away from a stone, you see a texture change because in the distance it has lower poly to save performance or memory, and when you go closer it looks sharper. With Can It Run Crysis it won’t cha🐽nge, everything looks sharp in the whole game and everything will load instantly. This setting is for the PC gamers out there who want to have this high-end stuff. It’s future proofed for the next one or two graphics card generations. It’s a gift for PC gamers.
If that’s for PC gamers, what does next-gen offer you for Crysis outside of PC development?
SH: More performance, that’s for sure. That’s obviously ♏one of the best parts. More memory, more CPU power, more GPU power 🌌is very important.
In games development, we need to make sure that every൲thing is running in the same branch. It must be covered in consoles and it must be covered in PC. Sometimes you have the problem that PC looks similar to consoles, and PC gamers are not happy. Because of this, two months ago Xbox and PlayStation would be branched out to a different pipeline and only the PC is standaloꦓne and gets everything we can do. Because of this we are able to make a big difference between PC and consoles at the end.
On that note, which of the next-gen consoles do you think you’ll get better performance on with CryEngine?
SH: There are pros and cons for each console. Thi🍃s waﷺs always the case in the past. I don’t have any favourites now
JS: At this point it’s a little subjective because we actually hav🔯e to get our ha💙nds on them and test them. If you’re an Xbox player you probably prefer that, but we don’t have an opinion yet.
Can we expect any new content or is Crysis Remastered a replica of the original designed to show what you can do now?
SH: It’s a remaster, not a remake. One of the changes is we have new controls in the game, wh🍃ich are faster, without the nanosuit menu you had back in the day. [But] you can choose the old nanosuit options. We focused 95% on the visuals of the game, because Crysi𒉰s was created back in the day, people loved it, but the most loved part was graphics and visuals and we focused on that.
Why do you think other developers didn’t attempt to push PCs as far as Crysis back in the day?
SH: Sometimes it costs more if you dedicate more time for only one platform if you co-develop it together with Xbox and PlayStation. Consoles stay as they are, the hardware won’t change, you’re always limiteﷺd to it, and we took the extra mile with PC because we think that PC gamers — this is what they want from us, something high-end and also, like the original Crysis, something that is pushing the hardware to the limits. Maybe other developers don’t spend that much love for the PC part but we did.
Why do you think we haven’t seen CryEngine become as widely adopted as Unreal or Unity?
SH: We are still good with CryEngine. Un♌ity an⛎d Unreal also focused on the mobile genre a lot back in the day, which was very popular. People wanted to have a package if they were working on an engine that they have all platforms included. We have support for PlayStation Xbox, and PC systems, but maybe people wanted more. For all the games on the current console generation and PC we are still on par with them.
I meant the opposite — CryEngine is strong, why do other developers not use an engine that powerful?
SH: I can agree with that. As I mentioned, from a scalabili📖ty point of view, you can do so many things. “What you see is what you play” was a meme for CryEngine back in the day,
JS: I think they should [use CryEngine]. In the past CryEngine was known for getting great results, but it was also very hard to use. We got a lot better at this, especially in the last few years we wrote a lot of documentation on making it more accessible for developers. This already changed a bit, but when you look at the engine market we are still definitely not the engine that’s used the most widely, but we’re trying to get there. I think people should use it more, especially now with software ray tracing and the fun stuff we do, which is not something other ♒engines do. I think people should use it more, totally.
On that note, why haven’t we seen more developers try to bring ray tracing to current-gen consoles?
SH: Because they don’t have the t🐠echnology in place. Our software technology is heavily based on CPU usage, not just GPU.
In CryEngine, if you’re exporting a level you need to find the ray tracing area [first]. You’re making a line around the map, and saying th🌜is area will be ray traced. With Crysis, it’s everywhere. All these files will be saved in a specific pack file. If you have the game downloaded and go into the game folders you’ll see a very big file called SVOGI.pack or a “mesh textures” file. All the ray tracing information is saved there.
When you’re playing the game,🦂 all the information in that file must be calculated from the CPU side and brought to the screen and the reflections. GPU will support this process, and at the end you’re getting rivers with reflections. Because of this MD users and GTX users can also use ray tracing. We have this technol🅠ogy in place and other companies and engines don’t. I think that’s the biggest point.
Which part of that process is the most essential?
SH: If you play in 1080p or 720p, you need a high-end CPU because you’re bottle-ne꧟cking. To go into 4K the CPU bottleneck gets less and the GPU bottleneck gets higher. For lower resolutions you would need a high end CPU, but not a high end graphics card, and for higher resolutions you need a high-end CPU and high-end graphics cards.
The Xbox Series S CPU is more powerful than the PS5, but only the CPU. Do you think that will present massive barriers to porting PC games to next-gen?
SH: From past development, especially on the Switch also, CPU bottleneck is always a topic. As a developer I appreciate any performance boost you get with the CPU, because from the GPU side you cꦫan always tweak — let’s have less details on꧑ the assets or less view distance. From the CPU side it’s much harder to make improvements.
What are the plans for Crysis from here on out?
S🌌H: We’ll focus solely on the release first. The only thing I can say now is let’s see what the future brings. Stay tuned.
JS: Steffen wants to go on vacation.
SH: To have a nice transition — We also changed the light settings in Crysis Remastered and you have a brighter look in the game now, which we t🔯hink is a new look for the game that 👍people will love to see. If you’re walking around the beach and seeing the new water with the reflections and all the updated textures and assets, you’ll feel like you’re on vacation.
JS: Is that where you’re going, Stefan?
SH: I’m dropping into Crysis, yeah.
JS: Nowadays, not a bad idea.
And what about the Can It Run Crysis mode?
SH: You can change almost every setting to Can It Run Crysis. One or two only go to Very High, but we have 12 settings in place — 11 normal ones like in the original game and the 12th is for ray tracing qual♏ity options.
What kind of rig would you need to run Crysis Remastered with all the bells and whistles?
SH: We’൲re talking about 4K? There is no card. I’m talking about 30fps stable, there is no card out there yet. Maybe Ampere will handle it, but at the moment, no.
How far away are we from a card that can handle it?
SH: We also have hardware ray tracing in place. It’s mostly performance, you don’t get any big differences. It’s sometimes 10 or 20% more performance if you have an RTX card because you can use RT cores for a boost. But aside from that, you have the nanosuit reflection everywhere in the game. You look into the water, the glass, the window and you see yourself, but with hardware ray tracing we wanted to make it so you see more than only your character reflections. For example if a North Korean is walking next to you, you can se🎉e them in the reflections, too. With software ray tracing you only see yourself, for hardware ray tracing we’re trying in the next one or two days that also characters will be more reflective. If you play the game, search for a glass window in the car and look at yourself, it looks really cool.
So even when you run it yourselves it’s 30fps and not stable?
SH: We don’t have any new high end graphics cards from Nvidia. We have a Titan RTX 2080Ti in the office. At home☂ I have a Titan RTX and I overclocked it a little bit, but still 30fps in 4K is not possible for stable play in Can It Run Crysis mode. You can have lower ray tracing options or you need to go with lower resolution.
Can It Run Crysis is the future-proof mode. We’ll be covered for thဣe 5 or 6 years from hardware reviewers.
How do you want people who played the original Crysis to feel when they play Crysis Remastered?
SH: We want people to get that Crysis feeling from the original in 2007 but wit꧋h a completely new experience. So it’s like, ‘This is similar for me, because I know this location, but other than that all the visuals and improvements make it feel like a completely new game.’ Especially because we re-rendered all the mountains in the game. Every time you’re walking around in Crysis there are new mountains, which are so detailed with trees and textures, and everywhere in the game gets a new feeling as something different.
I don’t know if you saw the screenshot we posted on social media, [but] that is only Very High. When you s♐ee the game on Friday, you’ll see more details. It’s just a screenshot, not a video, but with Can It Run Crysis mode enabled, even when you’re walking around the 🦩picture always looks the same, nothing pops up anymore.
How many different departments convene to make that possible?
SH: We had a team dedicated for the last four months. The first two months, we dedicated the time to have PlayStation, Xbox and PC combined for texture updates. And then we went into the 4K and💙 8K textures for the nanosuit, we needed to branch off and the full team worked only on PC to implement everything possible from the textures and assets side.
We had a team dedicated for this with three or four people full-time for the last few months. Going through the game every metre, saying, “there’s a texture that looks so good, l🤪et’s update this,” or “there’🐟s an asset that doesn't look good, let’s update that.”
Some people seem to think that each generation offers diminishing returns in terms of the improvements that are made. Do you think there’s any cutting edge tech you can imagine will make visuals pop in the near future?
SH: The new Ampere card has a lot of power. It has over 10,000 CUDA cores, they h🐎ave 64 RT cores included, the giga rays are so much. So what is important is graphic memory. For the Can It Run Crysis mode you need a lot of graphic memory, especially in 4K you need the 10GB because everything is loaded in. Memory is very important. Graphics cards are getting faster and faster is a normal process. They get more efficient, that’s also fine.
You also need to think about draw calls. If there are many trees in the level, the draw calls count is getting very high, which is also important for the CPU. It’s a mix again. For assisted RAM I don’t have any concerns, 16GB is stil♐l fine. But for CPU you need a higher clock rate to handle the higher amount of draw calls and not run into any bottlenecks.
Is there anything you’re particularly proud of that you put into the remaster?
SH: We put all our love into the PC part of the game, becaus🃏e we think that it’s time 🔯to say thank you to the PC community for the last few years.
JS: Because of all the support we got over the years. It’s a 13-year-old game but we still get ꩵmessages about it today, and that’s why we also put that mode named after a meme in. We’re really thankful for them sticking around, and always installing it on new PCs when they got new hardware. For some people, Crysis is the go-to just to see how it runs on their new machine. It just makes us happy.