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By: Nick Evanson Mar 09, 2007

First impressions of the Intel Crysis demo at the GDC

Intel were out in force at this year's GDC with lots of demonstrations of games that are multithreaded and optimised for dual and quad core PC games - three notable examples were The Lord of the Rings Online, Supreme Commander and the massively anticipated Crysis, from Crytek. YouGamers joined the queue to have a go on the early demo...so what was it like?

Intel were running several beta (some quite early) demos of various games to highlight the importance of multiple core CPUs at this year's GDC, with Crysis being the most stared at. I managed to grab a short 5 minute play of the demo and managed to pick up some of the details of the system that the demo was being played on.

The demo was set in, no surprise, a jungle encampment full of sheet metal huts, a few barrels of unstable stuff, a couple of vehicles and a host of rather aggressive soldiers, seemingly irate that I had just come stomping into their village. The demo was limited though: some of the interactivity between the player and the environment was disabled; some vegetation could be destroyed, whereas others reacted to bullets but remained indestructible. Plenty of other shader effects were in full flow though: volumetric smoke clouds that blocked the HDR sun; motion blur when moving around rapidly or zooming in with a weapon; dynamic shadows off the environment and so on. It's always difficult to gain any idea of the gameplay when (a) you can't really hear what's going on and (b) dozens of other people are glaring at your inept skills.

An Alienware PC was used to run the demo and contained an Intel "quad core CPU" and a single "GeForce 8800" - which particular models and how much RAM was in there, I couldn't ascertain but I should image that they used high end components to demo Crysis. To paraphrase the Intel rep, you're going to need a top end system to get the very best gaming experience which was pretty much the same with Crysis' mummy: Far Cry. The PC was running on Windows Vista but the cool Intel guy assured me that it will fully support DX9 as well as DX10, which is good news. With big explosions filling the screen, the frame rate noticeably dropped but do bare in mind that it was a beta demo I played - not a final, optimised game.

So what's Crysis going to be like then? Well, 5 minutes of play isn't anywhere near enough and the demo was restricted to being a case of "enter the village, shoot the heck out of anything that moves...and shoot stuff that doesn't just to be on the safe side." I didn't come away disappointed though and the Crysis hype has just risen to a new level - let's hope that CryTek can really deliver on this one!