Crysis Remastered’s Easy System Requirements Worry Me

Peter Donnell / 4 years ago

Do you remember what made Crysis so great? I do, it was pure and simple. It was bragging rights. It wasn’t the innovative gameplay, it wasn’t the open world, it was the fact it was a total pain in the ass to get it running well. A game that was truly ahead of the (then-current) PC hardware market and that took most of us at least a couple of years before we caught up!

When the game launched, it felt like a technological leap, a brute force push for GPU and CPU manufacturers to step up and give us systems that can run it. Albeit, we know the game wasn’t exactly well optimised either, but it didn’t matter, because it looked better than anything else out there, regardless of what framerate you got.

Personally, I found the game a bit… well, a bit crap. I know it’s a classic and well-loved by many, but honestly, I hear more praise for the gameplay of the sequels than the original. It was a trendsetter, but it was far from one of the best examples of open-world shooting and action, stealth, and other elements we now largely take as a ‘given’.

Minimum and Recommended? Where’s MAXIMUM DAMAGE!?

So when the system requirements appeared on Epic Games Store this week for the Crysis Remaster I was hyped. But a minimum of an i5-3450 or Ryzen 3, paired with GTX 1050 Ti or Radeon 470? OK so I’m going to guess that will either be 720p and 60 FPS, or 1080p and 30 FPS on lower settings. With the listed ‘recommended’, I would expect this to represent “normal” settings with no frills for 1080p and 60 FPS. For that, incidentally, you’ll need something around the i5-7600K or a Ryzen 5, and a 1660 Ti or VEGA 56.

That’s not exactly lighting my trousers on fire with excitement if I’m honest. Particularly for a game that’s touting a wave of stunning ray tracing features. I would remind you though, the ray tracing is in-engine and does not require an Nvidia RTX-class GPU to achieve it. However, I suspect you will still need the flagship cards on the market to play the game at 4K.

When it comes to 4K, maxing the graphics out, and pushing it to the limits, I am expecting the game to be fairly demanding, but I feel it’s still not enough. We need the game to be generational, and a complete nightmare to max out right now, so that in two years time we can finally punch the air and claim “YES, I CAN FINALLY RUN CRISIS…. AGAIN!”

Back in the day it took our Q6600 quad-core socket 775 CPU being ragged, and I only had a Sparkle 8800 GT at the time, a passively cooled GPU, but hey, it got the job done… barely (and with much heat generated).

Original Crysis Recommended Requirements

CPU: Core 2 Duo 2.2 GHz/Athlon X2 4400+ or better
CPU SPEED: Core 2 Duo 2.2 GHz/Athlon X2 4400+ or better
RAM: 2 GB
OS: Windows XP/Vista/7
VIDEO CARD: Supported chipsets: NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTS with 640MB RAM or similar.
TOTAL VIDEO RAM: 640 MB
3D: Yes
HARDWARE T&L: Yes
PIXEL SHADER: 3.0
VERTEX SHADER: 3.0
DIRECTX VERSION: 9.0c (included)
SOUND CARD: Yes
FREE DISK SPACE: 12 GB
DVD-ROM: 8X speed DVD-ROM. This game contains technology intended to prevent copying that may conflict with some DVD-ROM, DVD-RW and virtual drives.

I want this game to bring modern PC’s to their knees, to hell with the gameplay. The new game should require dual CPUs, quad GPUs, space thrusters… that kind of thing, and when you have them, it should be worth the effort. Am I mad? Perhaps. But do you agree with me? I mean, it’s not like the Crysis community ever stopped making the game better, and I suspect it’ll be drawn to light if the developers did a better job than the Crysis Enhanced Edition mod team have been doing. Perhaps we can just mod the hell out of the new one for the next decade or two.

Crysis Enhanced Edition Mod

Crysis Remastered Official Tech Trailer

Crysis Remastered Minimum Requirements

Operating System – Windows 10 64-Bit
Processor – Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-3450 / AMD Ryzen 3
Memory – 8GB
Storage – 20GB
Graphics Card – NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 TI /AMD Radeon 470
Graphics Memory – 4GB of VRAM (for 1080p)
Direct X 11

Crysis Remastered Recommended Requirements

Operating System – Windows 10 64-Bit (latest 2004 or better update)
Processor – Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-7600k or higher / AMD Ryzen 5 or higher
Memory – 12GB (?)
Storage – 20GB
Graphics Card – NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1660 TI / AMD Radeon Vega 56
Graphics Memory – 8GB of VRAM (for 4K)
Direct X 11

“Co-developed with Saber Interactive, the classic first person shooter will focus on the original game’s single-player campaign and is slated to contain high-quality textures up to 8K, HDR support, temporal anti-aliasing, Screen Space Directional Occlusion (SSDO), Global Illumination (SVOGI), state-of-the-art depth fields, new light settings, motion blur, parallax occlusion mapping, Screen Space Reflections and Shadows (SSR & SSS) as well as new and updated particle effects and more. Further additions such as ray tracing enhance the game with a major visual upgrade.
For the first time a Crytek game will feature ray tracing on Xbox One X and PlayStation 4 Pro powered by CRYENGINE’s proprietary software based ray tracing solution. The PC version will additionally support NVIDIA^® DLSS technology and hardware-based ray tracing using NVIDIA’s VKRay Vulkan extension, for NVIDIA^® GeForce^® RTX GPU.” – Crytek

So can you run it? I’m pretty sure you can. However, Crytek, I expected more of you. Crysis stopped being about the game a long time ago and has long been about the meme of running it. The game releases on the Epic Games Store on September 18th, and you can be certain I’ll be there to see how it looks.

In a nutshell though, and yes this might sound stupid, I’m not only genuinely disappointed that my PC can run Crysis Remastered, I’m absolutely gutted that it can (apparently) do it just so easily! – Crytek may not have originally intended for Crysis to be a PC-melting meme, but at this point, it’s what the community both wants and expects from the Remaster. And what we’re seemingly getting instead seems destined to end up being a forgettably mediocre slap of graphical gloss to a game that was (at least in my opinion) not that good in the first place!