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Crysis

"I need more FPS," "Sell Your Children!"

High-end PC gaming is an unapologetically exclusive endeavor, and FPS gamers represent the epitome of hardware excess. Some enthusiast gamers won't think twice about mortgaging the farm to eke a few extra frames per second out of the latest shooter. If you enjoy going into debt to play video games, then Crysis is the game for you. As noted above, this is one gorgeous-looking game, but its beauty comes at a price. In fact, you could spend over one thousand U.S. dollars alone on graphics cards and still not reach a steady 30 frames per second at a resolution of 1920x1200.

With the minimum specs listed on the box, it's all Low across the board.

EA's minimum system requirements are barely enough to run the game with Low settings at 800x600.

Crytek has stated repeatedly that this game is built to scale with future hardware, and that's a position that's easy to accept. Who wouldn't want to revisit a game in two years' time and enjoy improved visuals? Unfortunately, Crysis demands a powerful system at even moderate settings, and there's a definite delta between the best graphics quality and the best playable graphics quality. The developers are betting on the assertion that their latest game will have legs, either through multiplayer, expansion packs or community-based modding (the latter being helped by the superb Sandbox Editor, which comes with the game). Whether or not we'll be playing Crysis on our eight-core 45nm CPUs with 2009-era GPUs remains to be seen.

Graphics options on the publisher's recommended hardware.

EA's recommended system is no slouch, but even those specs are good for only 1280x1024 at Medium/High quality settings.

PC game publishers know that most consumers are blissfully ignorant when it comes to computer hardware. Based on this assumption, PC games now feature minimum requirements printed in a 2-point font on the top of the game box. It may not be an intentional deception, but it's not exactly willful disclosure either. Coupled with the new trend on Games for Windows-branded titles – no recommended requirements, only minimum – and the logical conclusion is that publishers aren't doing enough to make customers aware of the extraordinary hardware requirements of modern PC games. With this in mind, let's review Crysis' minimum requirements: an AMD Athlon 2800+ or Intel Pentium 4 2.8GHz, 1GB RAM and either an ATI Radeon 9800 Pro or NVIDIA GeForce 6800 GT (each with 256MB of video memory).

Graphics options with YouGamers' minimum specs.

With a system meeting the YouGamers' minimum requirements, the resolution can be moved to 1024x768.

If you're using Vista, the requirements get bumped up a bit more to an AMD Athlon 3200+ or Intel Pentium 4 3.2GHz, and an ATI Radeon X800 Pro (the GeForce 6800 GT is still the baseline NVIDIA card under Vista). To put it bluntly: any mix of these CPUs and GPUs will enable you to run the game, but not much else. At 800x600 with Low graphics settings, the visual experience is dismal. If you prefer that your video games are blurry and nearly unrecognizable, then feel free to use the publisher's minimum specifications.

If you'd rather not play the FPS equivalent of pea soup, then you'll need to have at least an AMD Athlon 64 3800+ (2.4GHz) or an Intel Pentium 4 650 (3.4GHz) with 1GB system RAM. For a GPU, consider a 256MB video ram on either an ATI Radeon X1950 or an NVIDIA GeForce 7900 GT. With these specs, you'll at least be able to move beyond "pea soup" and into "chicken and dumplings" territory. It's not quite filet mignon (and the resulting visual quality is well below what YouGamers ordinarily recommends), but the game will have more flavor than the publisher's specs.

For The More Fortunate

So what of the publisher's recommended specs? Well, there aren't any. However, Crytek did offer gamers a courtesy by briefly outlining their suggested minimum requirements, outside the watchful eye of EA. Here's what Cervat Yerli, CEO of Crytek, recommends for hardware to push those pixels in Crysis: an 2.2 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, 2GB system memory and a 640MB GeForce 8800 GTS video card. While this is an entirely reasonable set of requirements, it still doesn't provide the visual acumen that YouGamers espouses as noteworthy.

Graphics options with a YouGamers recommended system; note that some settings are still turned to High, and antialiasing remains disabled.

YouGamers recommended specs allow for higher resolutions and greater detail.

To get the most from Crysis, some serious hardware is required. For CPU processing power, an AMD Athlon 64 X2 6000+ or Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 is recommended, coupled with 2GB RAM. The GPU requirements are just as rich: save up for a 512MB ATI Radeon HD 2900XT or 768MB NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTX video card if you want to run Crysis with High graphics settings at a decent widescreen resolution. There isn't a standard configuration available today which will run Crysis with Very High settings across the board at even 1440x900, but a gamer can dream, can't he?

Page 1: IntroductionPage 2: GameplayPage 3: VisualsPage 4: Hardware and PerformancePage 5: Summary and ScoresPage 6: Crysis Gallery

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