Original Crysis Game with Ray-Traced Lighting Looks Brand New

Can an RTX 2080 Ti Run Ray-Traced Crysis?

Crytek‘s original Crysis game was released back in November 2007. It has since earned the reputation of being hard on PC hardare, mostly thanks to cutting edge graphics technology at that time.

Now almost 12 years old, it still looks impressive for a DirectX 9 game. Especially in comparison to its contemporaries.

However, what happens when you mix it in with new graphical improvements such as ray-traced lighting? It just so happens that the good folks over at Eurogamer’s Digital Foundry wanted to find out.

The result? It is pretty much as expected as the game looks like a fresh release. Naturally, they used the high-end NVIDIA RTX 2080 Ti to make sure they have enough GPU horsepower to spare.

How Do You Enable Ray-Traced Lighting on Crysis?

To transform the game, Digital Foundry modded the game using the Reshade post-process injection tool. This is from Pascal Gilcher, a modding veteran and NVIDIA Ansel contributor.

Reshade basically hooks into DirectX and applies post-process effects after it has read the data in its buffers. It can apply all kinds of effects including anti-aliasing, screen-space reflections, depth of field and even change colour tones.

The latest alpha build however, finally adds a new ray tracing feature. More specifically, it adds an additional layer of global illumination derived from path tracing. While this is not as elaborate as the path traced shader effects we have seen on Minecraft lately, it nonetheless adds a significant upgrade to the DX9 graphics.

To apply something like this on Crysis via post-process injection will of course, require significantly more GPU power than what even an RTX 2080 Ti can provide for now.

Crytek themselves however, have actually released a demo last month showing that ray tracing does not have to require $1000+ graphics cards to run. Their latest Cryengine 5 is apparently much more efficient now and using only a $300 Radeon Vega 56 can create impressive visuals like in the video below.