Almost 9 years ago, in 2007, Crysis was released on PC. It left a mark on psyches of all tech enthusiast PC gamers for how demanding it was. Using the most advanced rendering techniques of its time, it required dual graphics cards in SLI or Crossfire just to get a playable framerate at the higher settings. Turning on the DirectX 10 renderer and turning up the settings brought even the best enthusiast system to its knees. For around half a decade afterward, the ability to run Crysis was a point of pride for enthusiasts. "Can it run Crysis?" was a common question for hardware manufacturers, system builders, and benchmarkers. It wasn't until 2012 when the first 28 nm graphics chips hit the market that we finally saw single cards start to hit a smooth 60 FPS with the settings maxed out at 1080p.
Some people weren't so keen on Crysis' performance requirements, though. I remember seeing criticisms that Crysis is just poorly optimized. And while I don't really think the development team can be blamed for that, as they were the first people using a lot of these features, it's hard to argue that Crysis is really an example of a superbly optimized game.
Time has passed and other PC games have brought innovations, new APIs. They've been demanding in their own right, but Crysis has always been the golden standard for system-crushing spectacle. Even its own sequels haven't quite left the mark the first did.
As you well know, one recent game that's gotten a lot of buzz is Doom, the venerable id Software's revival/reboot of the iconic series. Like Crysis, it's on the cutting edge of technology, using advanced features and having support for the new Vulkan API added in. Eurogamer's Digital Foundry column did a breakdown of much of the graphical features going on in Doom. What's striking about Doom is that...it doesn't murder PCs. The Doom programming team approached the game with the goal of making it both as good looking and as efficient as possible. This shows with things like the implementation of Temporal Super Sampling Antialiasing, AA that's cleaner than cheap FXAA but nowhere near as performance heavy as MSAA or full SSAA. The game has expansive levels, advanced particle and lighting effects, but it's all very easy to get running smoothly. There were some problems on AMD cards at first, but they were quickly ironed out on the driver side, and the added Vulkan support led to some tremendous gains for AMD. I can get the game running near 60 FPS on high settings on a stock Core 2 Quad Q6600/Radeon 270X system.
What I'm trying to get at is that Doom is the anti-Crysis. Technically proficient and cutting edge, but it applies that proficiency towards optimizing the game and ensuring it's running as smoothly as possible. Just as Crysis was held as the standard of a demanding game, Doom should be held as the standard of a well-optimized game. And that's all the more ironic, since Doom's lead rendering programmer Tiago Sousa was previously the lead graphics engineer at Crytek, having worked there since the days of the original Far Cry. Seems there was a philosophical shift on Sousa's part, and I hope the whole industry is going in that direction. We should expect and demand games with optimization like Doom's, moving forward.
Some people weren't so keen on Crysis' performance requirements, though. I remember seeing criticisms that Crysis is just poorly optimized. And while I don't really think the development team can be blamed for that, as they were the first people using a lot of these features, it's hard to argue that Crysis is really an example of a superbly optimized game.
Time has passed and other PC games have brought innovations, new APIs. They've been demanding in their own right, but Crysis has always been the golden standard for system-crushing spectacle. Even its own sequels haven't quite left the mark the first did.
As you well know, one recent game that's gotten a lot of buzz is Doom, the venerable id Software's revival/reboot of the iconic series. Like Crysis, it's on the cutting edge of technology, using advanced features and having support for the new Vulkan API added in. Eurogamer's Digital Foundry column did a breakdown of much of the graphical features going on in Doom. What's striking about Doom is that...it doesn't murder PCs. The Doom programming team approached the game with the goal of making it both as good looking and as efficient as possible. This shows with things like the implementation of Temporal Super Sampling Antialiasing, AA that's cleaner than cheap FXAA but nowhere near as performance heavy as MSAA or full SSAA. The game has expansive levels, advanced particle and lighting effects, but it's all very easy to get running smoothly. There were some problems on AMD cards at first, but they were quickly ironed out on the driver side, and the added Vulkan support led to some tremendous gains for AMD. I can get the game running near 60 FPS on high settings on a stock Core 2 Quad Q6600/Radeon 270X system.
What I'm trying to get at is that Doom is the anti-Crysis. Technically proficient and cutting edge, but it applies that proficiency towards optimizing the game and ensuring it's running as smoothly as possible. Just as Crysis was held as the standard of a demanding game, Doom should be held as the standard of a well-optimized game. And that's all the more ironic, since Doom's lead rendering programmer Tiago Sousa was previously the lead graphics engineer at Crytek, having worked there since the days of the original Far Cry. Seems there was a philosophical shift on Sousa's part, and I hope the whole industry is going in that direction. We should expect and demand games with optimization like Doom's, moving forward.