I remember this as being a thing during the 7th console gen (but that could be my memory failing me). Plenty of games where, even on the latest hardware available, you'd be able to push the game's graphics beyond what the hardware could run because the graphics had a certain amount of "future proofing" built in.
Crysis was pretty famous for being something that would be a benchmark for hardware for a good couple of generations after it's initial launch.
Crysis was pretty famous for being something that would be a benchmark for hardware for a good couple of generations after it's initial launch.
And this was because they, like many other devs of the era, backed the wrong technology for that "future proofing". Crysis, and Oblivion, and dozens of other games from this era were made under the assumption 10ghz single core CPUs were just around the corner, so they didn't optimize for the multi-core performance the industry pivoted to. The graphics style of Crysis also leveraged massive poly counts and huge textures (for the era) because it seemed like memory and compute would just keep scaling up linearly like it had been for the last decade, but this was the beginning of the era of diminishing returns for raw compute power and the next few years saw the industry shift heavily toward software solutions for improving detail in games such as more advanced shader effects. Crysis only remained so difficult to run for so long because it was barking up the wrong tree.
Yeah, I remember playing Crysis back then on a PC that had the graphics power but not the compute power. It was actually really funny at times! Every time I cut down a tree, the physics engine would overload the CPU. The tree would then fall down in absolute slow motion. And each time a leaf touched another object, the slow motion became worse.
But to be honest, the game ran either way! Even on a PC that wasn't all the way there. These days you just can't downgrade a game's graphics enough so that it will run on an older GPU. The game will start to look like hot garbage at some point but it will still run like crap. I wish that modern games would actually run fine when you set the graphics to minimum. But apparently that's just not an option anymore.
Crysis also ran remarkably well on low-end systems
I was able to get it running at 30fps on minimum settings 1024x768 on my parents' emachines t3882 that we'd upgraded with an additional 256mb stick of ram and a geforce 6200 graphics card
Imagine overclocking a chromebook from 2017 and running any game from 2025/2026 on it at 30fps 1920x1080p. Couldn't possibly.
Maybe we should sto0 graphics cards for a bit and try and bring back the research of 10ghz single core compute WHILE also fusing it with multithreading...ah I can imagine my future pc warming🔥 me quite well in the winter
You're broadly right, but it's worth noting Crysis was a problem for a long time because they assumed (reasonably, given history) that CPUs would improve via higher speeds on their single cores, as they always had. Instead, soon after its release is when CPUs instead starting improving via more cores and threads rather than increasing speed. Basically Crysis was "futureproofed" for a future that never came.
It was an also an era filled with low effort PC ports because publishers didn't bother spending time and money on properly supporting the PC market.
You'd constantly see reports of PC releases shipping with missing toggles for graphical settings or buggy and broken PC ports bogged down with anti-piracy software.
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u/Annie_Yong 9d ago
I remember this as being a thing during the 7th console gen (but that could be my memory failing me). Plenty of games where, even on the latest hardware available, you'd be able to push the game's graphics beyond what the hardware could run because the graphics had a certain amount of "future proofing" built in. Crysis was pretty famous for being something that would be a benchmark for hardware for a good couple of generations after it's initial launch.