It's just over two years since CryTek released its astonishing first-person shooter Crysis, and despite enormous technological leaps in the PC space, it remains the single most important game available for testing graphical performance. At maximum settings, even the most powerful available combination of CPU and GPU still cannot run this game at 1080p with a sustained, v-synced, 60 frames per second.
That being the case, the tantalising glimpses we've had of Crysis running on console during CryTek's recent technology demos are all the more remarkable. The firm's motto, "maximum game", suggests a zero-compromise approach to its releases, which doesn't quite seem in step with the accepted wisdom that something has to give when you convert state-of-the-art PC games into PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 releases. So the question is, based on what has been revealed to date, can consoles run Crysis? Looking ahead to 2010, what can we expect from the sequel, which is also CryTek's first cross-platform project?
First of all, it's only fair to point out that the actual form Crysis 2 will take remains a complete unknown - CryTek is playing its cards very close to its chest. However, we do know that it is based around the developer's new multi-platform middleware, CryEngine 3, and in its quest to sell the engine to other developers the firm has released plenty of source material that gives us some idea of the properties of Crysis 2's underlying tech.
CryEngine 3 looks like a remarkable piece of kit, seemingly combining all the elements of the Crysis engine and then some, alongside tools that allow developers to sculpt levels and gameplay within a single, unified environment that provides "what you see is what you play" results on all three platforms as the game is being made. It's within this environment that we've seen our first tantalising glimpses of Crysis assets running on both PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360.
It's undoubtedly Crysis, but with a visual look quite unlike any of the default settings on PC. Elements of the engine have been repurposed. They've been scaled back in many places, but it's clearly still Crysis, and obviously running on console in real time. So just what has CryTek done to make the impossible a reality and what's the performance like in its own demos?
Digital Foundry charged accomplished Crysis modder Nebula with an uneviable task: to recreate the console look within the existing PC game. CryTek's engine is so scalable and so flexible that for someone with an intimate knowledge of the game this isn't quite the onerous task you might imagine. CE3 appears to be based significantly on the core Crysis tech, so it's no surprise that we're able to scale back CE2 to give a very close replica of console CE3, even if some of the headline tech (such as the hugely impressive global illumination engine in CE3) can't be copied.
Before we continue, check out some of Nebula's existing mods. It's a series of before-and-after comparisons that pits CryTek's original up against our collaborator's remixed renditions. The tech is so flexible that in the right hands, it is capable of more subtle, realistic lighting and more apparent atmospherics. Despite the increase in overall image quality, the mods run with no performance penalty over the unmodified game, as you can see in the debug readouts in the top-right of each screen.
Despite the more realistic, less-artificial-looking lighting scheme, engine load with the mods in place is no different to the unmodified Crysis. Original CryTek version to the left, mods to the right.
So, let's check out the custom Nebula PC mod against CryTek's CE3 console demo with a selection of reference shots to show just how close he managed to get.
Original CryEngine 3 console shots on the left, our PC replica on the right. Building the replica allowed us to better understand the nature of CryTek's console rendition of these classic Crysis scenes.
The major differences between the replica and the console CryEngine3 are twofold. Firstly, CryTek has created a custom skybox which is not seen in the original game and significantly alters the overall lighting scheme. Secondly, it's worth bearing in mind that matching exact time of day wasn't possible, and this has potentially the most dramatic impact of all on the closeness of our replica shots.
So, Crysis on console. How did CryTek manage it? With the replica model complete based on all aspects of the game seen within CryTek's tech demos, we have a very good idea of the tweaks, changes and additions made within the CE3 demos. Our understanding of the engine's capabilities has also had a boost thanks to the extended glimpses of the engine editor in CryTek's various public demos of the tech at work.
Based on what we've seen of the console engine, it's fair to say the developer is replacing a lot of 3D objects and foliage with 2D sprites depending on LOD (level of detail), significantly reducing load. It's also clearly apparent that rendering distances and LOD-switching have been tweaked considerably for console - transitions between those detail levels are more apparent than they are on the original PC version. On a related matter, it's also curious that the mountainsides have no rocks or rubble as seen in Crysis - at this point, we don't know whether this is an engine consideration (i.e. reducing the view distance to way below medium setting) or simply that the assets aren't in this rendition of the map being used for the CE3 demo.
Texture-handling overall appears to be very roughly in line with the PC game's medium setting, but with more detail. Crysis on PC has a lower resolution texture pack for this setting, but examination of the console version seems to indicate that these lower-res assets aren't being used. Texture streaming is disabled at this level on the PC version, but the chances are that it is included as standard in CE3, which would explain the bonus detail we see. This element is crucial for the console version of CryEngine3 - the ability to stream in new visual assets from hard disk or the optical drive is essential in matching the prowess of competing technologies such as Unreal Engine 3.
Water detailing looks like something of a mixed bag - anything from sub-medium to high quality in PC terms. The update rate of the water seems to be significantly lower than the medium setting, and the various crabs and fish seen in the PC build are also absent. The water effect itself seems to have the 3D waves of the high setting, while reflection quality is on par with Crysis's medium level.
Shadow levels are always something of jumble on console, and the effect throughout the CE3 demo is a touch disappointing. The update on the shadowmaps is very slow, worse than medium in Crysis, but obviously better than the low setting on the PC version where there are no shadows at all. In later CE3 demos, the update rate has been increased, suggesting either a performance boost during development, or else that the levels were tweaked for the later demos. In LOD terms, areas of terrain where there are no shadows at all appears to be in line, once again, with the medium setting in PC Crysis, as are the shadowmap cascade transitions. CryEngine3 features screen-space ambient occlusion (SSAO) as standard, and explosions are generating lightsources, so general shading is definitely up there with the high setting on the PC game.
Finally, post-processing is again a rather intriguing hybrid of elements from the very lowest and very highest settings seen in the original Crysis. There's no depth-of-field at all that we could discern, and no anti-aliasing either. However, the colour-grading, sun-shafts and god-rays all hail from the very opposite end of the quality spectrum. Motion blur is a key aspect in Crysis's image quality and this seems to be equivalent to the medium setting in the PC version. However, camera motion blur isn't used and there's no sense that the ultra-realistic per-object variation is being deployed here. In this sense, CE3 doesn't appear to be matching similar effects seen in Killzone 2, for example.
Overall, it's clear that CryTek has had plenty of fun tweaking the Crysis Island level within its spiffy new editor. There are changes that are not wholly attributable to the new engine: geometry and object placement are sometimes different, for starters. However, what is perhaps most exciting from what we've seen of the tech and its editor is that all the PC effects of CE2 are there, and more: it's just a case of how many can be deployed on console while maintaining frame-rate.
CryTek's technical showcase on console is an intriguing mix of sub-medium-level settings for some elements, all the way up to "very high" in others. It's clearly had a lot of time and effort put in to run the demo to a graphically pleasing degree while simultaneously maintaining performance good enough for the purposes of the demo. But just how well does this Crysis taster actually run? It certainly looks good enough to pass for a decent console rendition of this most technically demanding of games, but how playable would it be?
Inevitably, it's time to wheel out the Digital Foundry performance analysis. The content here covers the PS3 and Xbox 360 sections of both the CryTek tech demo movies released to date, and starts off with the Crysis sections before moving on to the other elements of the CE3 showcase. The inclusion of material from the second trailer is important. While Crysis itself is not represented, other sections from the debut video are, and in those cases performance appears to be like-for-like. This suggests that the technological underpinnings perform much as they did back in April for the GDC reveal.
The CryEngine3 demo on console appears to be running at native 720p with no anti-aliasing, and based on this demo, performance is somewhat variable. It seems to be the case that in some sections (Crysis for sure), CryTek has v-synced the demo for more consistent image quality, but this can see the frame-rate vary from anything between 15FPS to what we can assume is the target 30FPS. It is disappointing to see sections of Crysis running so slowly, especially when our visual approximation on PC runs lightning fast on even a relatively "lite" computer.
Does this performance level suggest that a playable version of Crysis with a consistent frame-rate isn't possible on PS3 and Xbox 360? Well, it's a fact that CryTek's masterpiece is very memory-hungry. Consoles are effectively memory-starved up against even an entry-level PC, and Crysis requires a huge amount of RAM to run well compared to what's available in the consoles - it makes sense that a lot of the developmental effort in transitioning CE2 across to the multi-platform CE3 was spent in reducing the memory footprint.
It's also a matter of fact that CryTek's zero-compromise coding techniques result in some pretty massive source code. One developer recently told me that just the source for creating normal maps in Crysis is bigger than that for their entire engine - which has been used to ship over half a dozen games. There's no doubt that console development is a world removed from the cutting edge land of PC development that CryTek has prospered in, and despite the impressive demos, the firm still has it all to prove in the console space.
However, the fact that Frankfurt's finest are not producing a straight-up port of Crysis is also very significant. Moving onto a sequel allows CryTek to concentrate on levels and gameplay that do suit a cross-platform product. For example, level design with more occluding elements in the scenery could serve to boost performance significantly.
The Criterion Games philosophy of choosing "balancing points" that suit both console platforms appears to be in place at CryTek too. According to comments from the developer, shader-heavy work favours 360 while physics work is more suited to the Cell within PS3. The engine's "WYSIWYP" editor allows for scene-by-scene optimisation that gives the developers the best chance to achieve parity between the two consoles.
Our experiment in modding Crysis to replicate the console look also suggests that PC owners have little to worry about. While Crysis 2 may be console-focused by financial necessity, it's fair to assume that the PC version will benefit from higher-quality artwork, and will receive an enormous visual upgrade by default simply by scaling up many of the powerful environmental variables built into the engine by design.
It's also fair to say that PC owners should be able to get performance that far outstrips the 720p30 we can realistically expect from the PS3 and Xbox 360. The scalability of CryEngine3, along with the existence of those higher-quality assets designed for PC, also means that CryTek could conceivably release a supremely impressive version of Crysis 2 for the next-gen consoles when they materialise in the expected 2011/2012 time-frame. The developer is already on the record as saying that CE3 has been designed to scale up to accommodate the next generation of console platforms.
Another factor computer owners should consider is that the optimisation work required to get CryEngine working on console will inevitably lead to significant performance boosts when rolled back across to PC, a point of view expressed in this GDC presentation from Valve, which discusses in depth the challenges of moving from a pure PC development environment to multi-format. There was a useful performance bump between Crysis and Warhead, but both games still targeted a dual-core CPU for optimum performance. Bearing in mind the six hardware threads available in the Xenon CPU, plus the six available Cell SPUs, CryTek would have been hard at work in scaling their engine to work across many more processors. The best gaming CPUs on PC right now are quad-cores, so those efforts will transition across back to PC very nicely. Bottom line: we would hope that Crysis 2 will be a technical showcase regardless of platform, scaling to match the power of the system you run it on.
Regardless of the performance level, there is no doubt whatsoever that the CryEngine 3 tech demos are exciting stuff: we're seeing effects and scenarios in play that have the potential to transform the look and scope of console titles, and the importance of this cannot be understated. To an extent, this generation has been defined to a great degree by the almost ubiquitous Unreal Engine 3. CryEngine 3 is a chance for developers to go for a fresh new look with hugely impressive technology.
The question is: will they jump onboard the CryEngine Express, which for all its promise is essentially an unproven technology for multi-platform development? This is where Crysis 2 will be the ultimate litmus test, and while its debut may be too late to seriously threaten the dominance of UE3 on PS3 and Xbox 360, when the next-gen consoles launch there'll be everything to play for.
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-crysis-console?page=1
