But Can It Run Crysis 3?

MojoKid writes with Hot Hardware's summary of what it takes to run the newest Crysis: "We've been tracking Crysis 3 for a while, from the trailer a few months ago to the recent alpha multiplayer preview. The game is available for preorder and it will launch in February. Crytek has now listed the minimum system requirements for Crysis 3 and they're as follows: Windows Vista, Windows 7 or Windows 8, DirectX 11 graphics card with 1GB Video RAM, Dual core CPU, 2GB Memory (3GB on Vista). Those aren't particularly stringent parameters by any means, but as we all know, 'minimum requirements' rarely are. Crytek suggests upgrading to a quad-core CPU, 4GB of RAM, with examples of CPU/GPU combinations that include Intel Core i5-750/NVIDIA GTX 560 and AMD Phenom II X4 805/AMD Radeon HD5870."

Comments

Crysis 3 leaked some time ago

[anethema]

On private torrent sites at least. Can't find it on TPB.

Just download it yourself and see if you can run it.

IF I had pirated it and played about half the campaign already (which I haven't I'm too moral!), I would say it runs perfectly on my system. Quad core i5 2500k and Geforce 670, but that is fairly high end, no idea how it would run on a lower one. Or mine..since I haven't played it.

Re:Crysis 3 leaked some time ago

[K. S. Kyosuke]

Or mine..since I haven't played it.

So...what are your unopinions? Have you enjoyed not playing it? Could you non-tell us if the storyline is any good?

I nominate this thread title

[neminem]

Best use of Betteridge's Law of Headlines yet.

These really aren't much

[Dyinobal]

These really aren't much in the way of system requirements. Which just shows how this extended console generation has had an affect on PC graphics development. Though I'm not complaining it saves me money in the long run, and forces programmers to learn how to do more with less hardware which isn't a bad thing for the most part.

Re:These really aren't much

[edxwelch]

Yes it is. Only pretty high end GPUs have 1GB Video RAM. Not sure, but I don't think consoles have that much

Re:These really aren't much

[futuresheep]

Amazon has a GeForce 210 with 1GB RAM for 29.99. Not exactly high end.

http://www.amazon.com/EVGA-GeForce-Express-Graphics-01G-P3-1312-LR/dp/B00498305G/ref=sr_1_10?s=electronics&ie=UTF8&qid=1354638062&sr=1-10&keywords=geforce+1gb

Re:These really aren't much

[grenadeh]

It has only hurt if that's what you mean, but PC Graphics and abilities are still miles beyond console. All the current video game generation has done is stint and screw over the growth of PC hardware and practically destroyed the entire PC gaming market by only offering terrible, terrible second-hand ports of console games to PC, instead of the game being developed separately like used to be the case. Because of it you get utter crap in the way of customization in most PC ports - you get to "choose" high. There are very few PC intended or PC exclusive games that have driven PC hardware development - maybe Total War, that's about it. Nothing else is actually a PC exclusive - by nothing I mean so few games that who can even name them.

is the game worth it?

[alen]

it seems the game consists of walking/running around with only part of your weapon visible on the screen and shooting stuff with the object to save the planet or the galaxy or something else. anything different then all the FPS games over the last 20 some years?

or are people going to spend close to $1000 upgrading their computers just to be wowed by some extra graphical detail?

Re:is the game worth it?

[greg1104]

It's a game where you move around shooting. There's nothing different from all the games in the last 50 years, there's just more graphical detail.

Re:is the game worth it?

[tompaulco]

are people going to spend close to $1000 upgrading their computers just to be wowed by some extra graphical detail? My two year old machine is still better than the higher recommended specs. I just bought a $600 system for my kids that has better specs than the recommended specs. If I can get a whole system for $600, than it shouldn't cost that much.
Let's check Newegg:
Intel Core i5-750 - apparently there is no such thing, but the most expensive I5 is $250.
or
AMD Phenom II X4 805 - apparently there is no such thing, but the most expensive AMD Phenom II X4 is $85.

NVIDIA GTX 560 - The most expensive of these is about $250, but they can be had for less than $200.
AMD Radeon HD5870 - No longer available, but faster cards are available for less than $100.
4GB Memory? $50, assuming your computer doesn't already have that much RAM. It is not easy to find a computer these days with less than 4 GB.

Re:is the game worth it?

[sl4shd0rk]

are people going to spend close to $1000 upgrading their computers just to be wowed by some extra graphical detail?

Yes. Because running Crysis 3 is the 13 yr old equivalent of a 40 yr old purchasing a Dodge RAM 2500 Quadcab +Hemi +Dualies +Stacks.

Re:is the game worth it?

[JazzLad]

If you had said Unreal Tournament, you may have had a point, because UT was quite a bit ahead of Quake (new equipment like translocator & new gameplay options like CTF & a multitude of fan-made maps). Well, then later versions added vehicles, always fun to get a little road-rage out, this is a gameplay advance. Oh, and there are awesome co-op games like L4D, quite a bit ahead of Quake. Come to think of it, you're full of ****. There have been several significant forward movements since Quake, you just got old and didn't like getting your *** handed to you by the kids.


Disclaimer: I started playing FPS on Wolfenstein 3D and while I have played pretty much everything since then, I too have gotten old and disliked getting p0wned by children that weren't alive when I started playing FPS, but I have gotten over it & typically stick to games with people I know that are old like me.

Re:is the game worth it?

[timeOday]

Games aren't necessarily about novelty, just as real sports are not.

Re:is the game worth it?

[dywolf]

thats gross oversimplification and you damn well know it. lets take daikatana and half life. based on what you say, theyre the same game....

but in reality, and to quote a much used and very true phrase, the devil is in the details. lots of little things add up, either to a giant steaming mess or a classic bestselling game.

Crysis fell into the latter category though combination of storytelling, techinical and graphical wowness, and good gameplay. the tank level is one of those moments in gaming that i'll never forget. the level itself was massive, the largest i'd ever seen (technical points), and the freaking mountain seveal miles off fell apart, with physics, revealing aliens, and you eventually drive up to that SAME mountain that was miles off. the sheer scale of that map was amaing, both from a gaming standpoint, and a technical one. (and why they abandoned the massive outdoor environments for the sequel i dont understand)

Crysis demanded a lot of a computer. And the experience is vastly different between even a low end machine and mid range.

Just merely more graphical detail? Please. You dont have a clue.
That's like saying my kids fingerpainting and the Mona Lisa are the same thing, one's just more detailed than the other. And just as ignorant.

Re:is the game worth it?

[Kelbear]

The Mona Lisa is not highly regarded because it is detailed. There are many similarly detailed paintings, and many far more detailed paintings. A high-resolution photograph of a sitting woman would be far far more detailed than any of those paintings. That's not what adds value.

There comes a point of diminishing returns where increasing levels of realism adds less to the experience. Artistic touches go a long way in defining a distinctive and memorable look for a game. Battlefield 3, Call of Duty Modern Warfare ___, Medal of Honor, they are all working off the same modern-day source material and have only minor visual details to distinguish one from another. Kane & Lynch 2 : Dog Days, which had terrible reviews (deservingly so), and Splinter cell: Conviction are two other games also set in the modern day but have taken effort to add stylistic touches. KL2: DD for all of it's flaws implemented a distinctive "caught-on-camera" perspective throughout the game, as though the viewer was watching the protagonists by chasing them with a camcorder, shaking as they run, static distortion in the camera when explosions go off, and film bleeding effects for emphasis on the sleazy scraped-from-the gutter atmosphere they sought to achieve. They put thought into the game's visuals, not just time. Splintercell conviction projects objectives, text, and video of events happening elsewhere onto surfaces in the world that the protagonist moves through the environment, and mapped the timing and positioning of each of these to coincide with the player's likely orientation and pacing through that environment. Both games identified a theme to differentiate themselves, even if they only wanted a subtle touch, and made efforts to maintain thematic consistency throughout the game. This is very different than a simplistic dogged adherence to replicating what already exists in the real-world.

Stepping outside of the realm of modern-day game settings. Katamari Damacy or Okami has a tiny fraction of the budget spent on graphics that these other games do. But both have a far more memorable visual experience. One glance at a screenshot of these games and there's no mistaking what you're looking at. I'd rate the visuals of these 2 games above all others mentioned here, despite less technically complex.

Re:is the game worth it?

[Cinder6]

Well, I enjoyed Crysis 2. It was nothing too special, but I got it on a Steam sale for somewhere under $10, so it was worth it. It actually had a decent gameplay mechanism for allowing multiple different kinds of approaches to areas, from stealth to brute force, and the level design facilitated this aspect. I'll get Crysis 3...but not until it's on sale for $20 or less. Given how quickly PC games drop in price, I'm expecting that to be only a couple months after release (or sooner! Some games have steep discounts if you preorder them).

Re:is the game worth it?

[4pins]

AMD Radeon HD5870 - No longer available, but faster cards are available for less than $100.

Oh you poor saps, Apple will still sell me an AMD Radeon HD 5870 for my Mac Pro for $449.00.

Feel free to cry for me.

recommended?

[The Grim Reefer]

Crytek suggests upgrading to a quad-core CPU, 4GB of RAM, with examples of CPU/GPU combinations that include Intel Core i5-750/NVIDIA GTX 560 and AMD Phenom II X4 805/AMD Radeon HD5870.

Those seems like pretty low recommendations to me. Certainly relative to what was needed for the original Crysis when compared to the hardware at the time. I haven't replaced my entire system (bumped my ram up from 4 GB to 8 GB two years ago) in several years and haven't had any difficulty with games at all, not that I have time to play them often these days. I have a GTX 250 that I put in the system when I originally built it and still haven't had the time (or need actually) to put in the GTX 465; that's been sitting on my desk for close to two years now.

My guess is that due to the need to run on laptops, most game manufacturers are not pushing the limits of bleeding edge hardware anymore. No one is going to replace their entire laptop every year just to play the latest and greatest game.

Re:Wil it run under Wine?

[jones_supa]

Crispy winter night, glass of cabernet sauvignon, and Crysis 3. Ahh...

There was a Crysis 2?

[TheSkepticalOptimist]

Yeah, PC gaming ain't dead.

PC gaming should be using ray-tracing by now, all these 1000 core GPU's and multi-card colutions should be able to process ray tracing calculations, yet there are no ray traced games out showing that there has been little innovation in PC gaming for the last 10 years. Who cares if you can run a game at 300 fps on a 2560 x 1600 screen?

I would return to PC gaming in a heart-beat if they started using ray-tracing in games and created some truly stunning and realistic graphics. You know, create a platform that game consoles can't touch. We really don't need Linux based Steam boxes playing Diablo clones and HL2 in the living room. I want to be excited about buying a $600 liquid cooled video card again. But when a $300 game console gives mostly the same graphics quality and performance as PC games, meh.

Re:There was a Crysis 2?

[ifrag]

PC gaming should be using ray-tracing by now, all these 1000 core GPU's and multi-card [solutions] should be able to process ray tracing calculations, yet there are no ray traced games out showing that there has been little innovation in PC gaming for the last 10 years.

No, wrong, Carmack has explained the issues involved with ray-tracing at least a dozen times. But clearly since you've worked out a better solution, maybe you should sell it and get rich?

Re:There was a Crysis 2?

[Desler]

Yes, but it was not running on a consumer PC. It was "cloud rendered" . Maybe you need to have read the whole story?

Hardware Setup
For this project four “server” machines have been used to represent the cloud. The relevant components of each machine are:
  Motherboard: Intel® DX58SO (code name Smackover)
  CPU: Intel® CoreTM i7-980x processor (6 cores, 2 threads per core, 3.33 GHz)
  Intel code name Knights Ferry PCIe card (32 cores, 4 threads per core)
  Gigabit Ethernet

Dumbass...

PS3

[tepples]

According to Wikipedia, Crysis 3 has a low-res texture mode that only needs 256 MB of VRAM. It's called "the PlayStation 3 version".

I have a PC with

[Jafafa Hots]

those suggested specs.. not the minimum, but the suggested ones... and I can't even play all the way through Crysis 2.

Everything bogs down to an eventual halt during the massive alien attack on the aircraft carrier.

Re:I have a PC with

[hairyfeet]

Dude its the level, its coded for shit. I have a hexacore with 8gb of RAM and an HD4850 OCed and it'll still bog when it gets to that ONE level, while everything else runs perfectly. Compare this to something like Just Cause II where i can set charges all over a compound and do my own "cool guys don't look at explosions" with smokestacks falling and fuel tanks blowing and fireballs that block out the sky and it still don't chug.

But go onto any forum and mention the carrier level and watch all the pissed off rants you get, I have yet to see anybody render that thing 100% chug free.

Re:Well that eliminates a popular build

[gl4ss]

just buy a graphics card, sheesh.

Too much power needed for GPU these days...

[trims]

The bad part is the "recommended" graphics card is now the upper level of the mid-range, the Nvidia 560 or 660, and the ATI 5870.

This is becoming a real big issue for Graphics cards, far more than video RAM or any other part of the system.

The problem is that the upper-mid-range cards now require *very* significant power. The 560/660 and 5870 above really require TWO 6-pin supplemental power connectors, since they're now pulling 200W under load. The problem there is that this means a 500W+ power supply, and ONLY high-end workstations or custom gaming rigs have those, so you're inherently cutting out the section of the population which games, has a pretty beefy rig, but got a pre-made system from HP/Dell/whomever, none of which have more than a 400W (and usually a 300W) power supply.

I'm a excellent example: I happen to have a HP Z210 workstation - that's a Xeon E3-1200-class CPU (which kicks the crap out of everything consumer-class, including the i7 series), 16GB of RAM, and an SSD. Yet, it was only designed with a 400W power supply, as it was targeted for mid-level pro graphics. I've been looking, and the absolutely fastest GPU I can use is the Nvidia 650 Ti; everything else draws too much power. Consumer PCs are in an even worse situation, since they might have a high-end i5 Ivy bridge CPU, but they've only got 350W power supplies, which probably can't even drive my 650 Ti, let alone a 660. So, you're looking at having to buy a system for $1500 (sans graphics card) rather than $500 to play these games.

Realistically, game makers need to target the lower-mid-range cards - at least, they have to be able to play very well at around 1680x1050 or 1440x900 on one of those lower-power-draw cards (e.g. Nvidia 650 or AMD 7850).

Frankly, I think this is going to be a *big* drag on the PC Gaming industry, since unless they can convince Nvidia/AMD to cut down on the power-draw requirements, or somehow get PC makers to beef up their PS more, new games won't be able to run reasonably on ANYTHING not a custom gaming rig. And that's a *tiny* portion of the market.

-Erik

Re:Too much power needed for GPU these days...

[Doogie5526]

at least, they have to be able to play very well at around 1680x1050 or 1440x900 on one of those lower-power-draw cards (e.g. Nvidia 650 or AMD 7850).

I'm not sure what your desktop resolution is (I'm guessing it's around there). I feel like that's a bit much to expect a computer speced to run a desktop operating system (when using the 3d portion it's only doing basic texturing/compositing) being asked to run modern 3d game at full resolution. Commodity desktop computers have always lagged behind even mainstream modern games. Quake 1 required a floating-point math co-processor I didn't have, then games required 3d cards. There was usually a transition (software rendering mode when 3d cards were needed, PCI 3d cards when AGP started getting popular), but generally they had to be played at a significantly lower resolution and frame rate if they could play at all.

If this model wasn't profitable, they wouldn't be doing it. While there's obviously a market for games like The Sims and Myst (they're some of the top-selling PC games of all time), that's not the same market Crysis 3 is going after.