Crysis Remastered is due to release for PC on September 18 fter a brief delay, and according to the recommended specs listed on the Epic Games website, it seems that some gamers will finally be able to experience the game on maximum settings without needing to have a fire extinguisher at the ready. The original Crysis has become something of a legend among the gaming community since its release in 2007 due to the difficulty that most computers experience when the games’ settings are dialed up, and it’s undoubtedly great news that the game will be receiving a remaster to bring it into the current day and age.
The actual reason that Crysis is so notoriously difficult to run at a consistent 60 frames per second is slightly more in-depth than the common misbelief that the game is just that hardware intensive. While developer Crytek was working on the title, they were doing so under the assumption that the future of computer gaming was in more powerful CPU cores rather than the multi-core CPUs that we have today. Because of this, Crysis relies heavily on one CPU core, although the game can technically take advantage of as many as four cores at a time. In other words, regardless of how powerful one’s CPU is (which is attained today primarily through using multiple cores), Crysis will almost always bottleneck itself because the game was simply not made to take full advantage of multiple cores.
With this context, it’s clear why the official Crysis Remastered website specifies that the game will have “remastered graphics optimized for a new generation of hardware.” The word “optimized” is the key word in this sentence, as many gamers believe that the game was poorly optimized. This is only half true; it’s not quite that Crysis was poorly optimized, but rather it was optimized for CPUs that the world has yet to create.
The page product mentions that the recommended processor for the remaster is an i5-7600k (or AMD Ryzen 5) or higher – which is particularly modest by today’s standards – and that the minimum graphics card is a GeForce GTX 1050 TI or AMD Radeon 470. The game will also run in 1080p with 4GB of graphics memory, with 8 GB required to play in 4K.
These specs are relatively easy to meet by today’s standards and show how far Crytek has come in terms of creating accessible titles. Although this is by no means the first time they are doing so, one cannot help but reminisce on the fact that the original Crysis was designed in a way that meant that very few computer owners would actually be able to run the game at a consistent frame rate. With Crysis Remastered less than two weeks away, many more gamers will soon be able to revisit or experience for the first time the masterpiece of Crysis without having to worry about their computers buckling under the pressure.
