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greenmedic88 on 19 May 2010
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disolitude said:
hsrob said:
disolitude said:
All the joking aside, I think his point is clear. Crysis 1 was an unoptimized mess of a game which looked great but required skynet to run at max. With Crysis 2 they finally learned how to code an an optimized engine...

I don't think this is entirely fair. If it were true shouldn't we have seen many better-looking games by now given that PC graphics hardware is so much more powerful now than in 2007? All it would take is an engine decently optimised to take advantage of current hardware.

Not sure about you but I have seen no such game.

Metro2033, Battlefield BC2 (DX11) come close if not beat it in some areas.

All I know is that I can't run Crysis Warhead maxed out at 1080p with a GTX295 and overclocked AMD Phenom 940 and maintain constant 30 fps. All these other games that are almost as good looking I can run at almost 60 fps. It looks amazing but it really is badly optimized. You need a 1000 dollar video card in 2010...to run it flawlessly maxed out.

Here is a nice benchmark showing the performace you can expect with 3rd best video card on the market today.

http://www.pcgameshardware.com/aid,671298/Geforce-GTX-295-vs-Radeon-HD-4870-X2-Benchmarks-with-8x-anti-aliasing/Reviews/?page=4

And this is exactly why PC fans really need to stop referring to Crysis/Warhead as the be all end all of game graphics.

When a $500 video card doesn't play Crysis with "everything maxed out" which is invariably what PC Guy uses to compare graphics, it's a hard sell to claim that the best visuals ever seen in a game are on PC/Crysis when the reality is they are only seen on the best PC configuration almost nobody owns.

The problem with Crysis is that it simply has way too much stuff being rendered in the background that the player can't even see from his perspective, which is why it's such a resource hog. Dial in rendering distance settings like GTAIV (another game that will eat as many resources as you can throw at it) probably would have helped. Warhead played smoother, but had a lot more pop in textures which more or less shows this is partly how they optimized.

Anyway, assuming Crysis 2 takes advantage of DX11 on Windows, it should maintain the bar for PC graphics, but I expect simpler (to render) environments (not moving organic jungle foliage) due to the city setting, and possibly even smaller playing fields rather than free roam acces to an entire jungle island.

As for consoles, processing capabilities aside, it still boils down to available texture memory, which is well under 512MB on either console, which is just about the bare minimum VRAM found on any PC with discrete video. That alone will hobble any game not specifically designed around this handicap.