By now, you've probably heard one of the hardest-to-run titles in the history of video games is getting a remaster on the Nintendo Switch and multiple other platforms this Summer. Obviously, we're referring to the upcoming release Crysis Remastered.
If you're wondering how Crytek has been able to get its CryEngine powered game up and running on Nintendo's hybrid platform, it's because it has had some help from the well-known Switch port specialist, Saber Interactive. It's also assisting with every other version of the game as well. As you might recall, this is the same team that achieved the impossible, when it released The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt - Complete Edition on the Switch last year.
The good news is this isn't even the most challenging project Saber currently has on its plate. Just yesterday, it was revealed the same company would be bringing its own cooperative third-person shooter World War Z to the Switch. Speaking to IGN, studio CEO Matt Karch said it was "the hardest thing" the team has done so far.
Here's what players can expect from the single-player remaster of Crysis, although it's unclear how much of it will be in the Switch release:
Crysis Remastered will focus on the original game’s single-player campaigns and is slated to contain high-quality textures and improved art assets, an HD texture pack, temporal anti-aliasing, SSDO, SVOGI, state-of-the-art depth fields, new light settings, motion blur, and parallax occlusion mapping, particle effects will also be added where applicable. Further additions such as volumetric fog and shafts of light, software-based ray tracing, and screen space reflections provide the game with a major visual upgrade.
How do you feel knowing the Switch version is in the capable hands of Saber? Leave a comment down below.
[source press.crytek.com, via twitter.com]
Comments 70
If it's ported by Saber, Feral or Aspyr it's always in save hands.
Sweet. Does software based ray-tracing mean that it will actually exist on the Switch? Ray-tracing that is.
Of all the remasters on Nintendo Switch, this is possibly the most compelling one. Why? Take a look at this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PcYA-H3qpTI
This game still looks phenomenal today, and this will be really interesting to me to look on, especially since Saber Interactive is helping
Saber Interactive do great work (unlike Versus Evil) looking forward to seeing how they pull this off.
@SSGodLink I wouldn't count on it, but maybe we will be pleasantly surprised.
I trust Saber to do the best they possibly can with this. They did great on Witcher 3 and their post launch support was also spot on with the additional graphics options and steam/gog cloud save sync
I’m excited to see how this turns out. I’ll probably get it for the PS4, but if it handles well on the Switch I’ll double dip.
just because it's saber i might want to look into this one. i usually don't play 30fps shooters on switch but this one might be an exception. They did really well with the witcher 3.
Awesome!! Keep it coming!! If Nintendo reads these post then look>>>>> nearly all cable outlets broadcast 1080p and it is more than crisp, apple Iphone as small as it is can do at least 1080p recording, the ability to fit such power into such a small box is doable...give us at least 1080p to keep these ports coming.
@SSGodLink Ray-tracing is a hardware feature developed by NVidia which can only be used in their newest line of cards (the RTX series). It can't exist on the Switch but the right developer with the right tools may be able to emulate it.
@Varkster Crytek have implemented their own software accelerated ray tracing within the latest CryEngine, it runs independently of any dedicated hardware. How well it runs on low powered hardware though is another matter, but it will technically ‘run’ on switch as it is all handled in software via the game engine itself.
@rjc-32 Right, Crytek's ray tracing doesn't rely on RTX hardware. It can run on regular old shader cores.
Btw, here is their demo...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1nqhkDm2_Tw
@ncb1397 it will be interesting to see how well optimised their implementation is when running it on standard shaders. DXR runs awful on 10 series GTX cards, supported but unusable. I imagine most of the ray tracing goodness will be PC exclusive for now.
@rjc-32 This blurb was leaked on a crysis website before being taken down:
"“Crysis Remastered brings new graphic features, high-quality textures, and the CRYENGINE’s native hardware- and API-agnostic ray tracing solution for PC, PlayStation, Xbox, and – for the very first time – Nintendo Switch.”"
I guess they don't say Playstation 4 and Xbox One (so they might mean next generation consoles).
@Varkster oh, so Nvidia also helped Pixar with Ray-Tracing? As far as I know, Ray-Tracing has been used in cinema for a long time. Nvidia only made it partially available for the video game industry
@ncb1397 It should theoretically ‘run’ on any hardware due to it being part of the game engine itself. What I imagine they will do is reduce quality settings accordingly based on the performance on each platform. DXR works on 10 series GTX cards which don’t have the RT cores, but as DXR is not part of the individual game engines it is horribly taxing to run without dedicated hardware. Take Control on PC, it uses all the 3 forms of DXR effects (lighting, reflections and global illumination), when all are activated at ultra the 2080 ti can only get consistently above 60fps if resolution is 1080p.
In order to have these effects running within a software environment, with no dedicated hardware to help, will either take massive brute force or an extremely well optimised implementation of the ray tracing feature.
I’m betting that they will have this working, to some effect, across all formats they release on. No one will know for sure until it can be tested though.
Can’t wait to play it again, loved it all those years ago on PC, I remember playing it on SLI GTX 280s, barely 40fps at 1080p haha!
@ncb1397 thank you for sharing! It's really good. No wonder why the game will have that feature on the Switch. Using technical routes, Crytek has made possible that Ray Tracing can bro available in an PC and game console without needing to buy expensive graphic cards.
With the amazing job Saber Interactive did with The Witcher III on Switch, it’s no wonder why Crysis will have those features on the Switch as well. Can’t wait to play it!
@Edu23XWiiU Nvidia were the first to create hardware that can render ray traced frames in real time, at acceptable frame rates. Pixar ray traced scenes created for cinema are rendered individually with dedicated render farms. The resulting films are then simply played back, not rendered in real time. They could’ve taken months to create an equivalent scene when compared with RTX, dependent on how long ago the film was created.
This will be good then and I'll more than likely buy it.
Is Crysis still worth it today? I’m not trying to troll. Most people I know who have played it cite the graphics, not gameplay.
Plot twist: our version's a port of the original.
Not that that's a bad thing, mind you...
I wonder if this is a testing ground for that rumored work EA was doing porting Cryengine over to Switch? Who better to assist with Cryengine optimization than Saber or Shin'en?
Yeap day one buy for me now, going to be the best double dip I'll take even though I got the entire Crysis trilogy on Steam already.
Oh wow, I hadn’t heard. I’m sure Saber Interactive will do a great job with it. How exciting!
I am buying both Crysis and World War Z on Switch, Saber is quickly becoming a top developer on Switch.
@Low Its still a really fun, fps sandbox.
@retro_player_77 Yeah, but the first doesnt run anymore on newer windows, and has really bad performance on the os it does run on. Mainly because this version of the engine was geared towards single core performance. It's why I'm so interested in this.
@PhilKenSebben My main PC has Windows 10 but I got two older laptops that are still in Windows 7 and 8 so I could still run the game. The one with Windows 7 may be on its last legs though, a lot of the key buttons struggle to function on that one.
The battle between Crysis and Doom Eternal (Saber and Panic Button) will be glorious.
@Varkster raytracing is neither exclusive or created by Nvidia. They however are the first to introduce consumer grade hardware accelerated Ray tracing. It can be done without the rtx hardware, even on older Nvidia gpus, and on the next gen consoles through it's own hardware acceleration.
I actually just installed the Neon Noir ray tracing demo on my pc with a Ryzen 3 2200G and 8 GB of shared ram. It ran at about 19-30 fps with raytraying set to "very high"(the lowest setting) and 800 x 600 resolution. It had some cool looking visuals even at that resolution. On paper, the pc is a bit more powerful than the switch (~1 teraflop compute compared to 400 gflops, more ram, etc.). Possibly with console level optimization and without the PC overhead, you could get similar results out of Crysis Remastered? Who knows.
@Edu23XWiiU @pepsilover2008 As far as I'm aware NVidia has developed the first graphics cards which can optimally run ray tracing in real time at a stable framerate. Other GPUs have a much different focus on where their technology excels. Hell, even my RTX 2070 still probably isn't great at running intensive games with RayT enabled, let alone the Switch.
I was specifically talking about real time gaming and not pre-rendered Pixar films. I didn't make myself very clear, my bad.
@PhilKenSebben If you look around it is possible to get it running on Windows 10, but as you said I'm happy to have a multi threaded version of crysis 1 that isn't on ps3 and 360.
@Varkster it's all good and as far as I know it's the only consumer grade gpu with raytracing as a hardware feature, but the amd solutions are coming in the form of next gen consoles. It should be a relatively easy transition for them as Nvidia use directx and opengl API for raytracing along with older techniques that were used for raytracing prior to rtx. I don't think amd have introduced a PC gpu with dedicated raytracing hardware though.
You guys in the comment are nuts, ray tracing was used in 3D program since the early 1990s (3D Studio by Autodesk). It's not a new thing, all gaming visual technology came from professional and visual effects that were used in films for decades. It's only now that hardware is faster that it's possible to do ray-tracing, GI, Depth-of Field, etc in real-time. They are not new tech.
YES! Fantastic news
To think that a game that used to be a PC choking benchmark for years is now going to run on a tiny Nintendo machine (and in a "Remastered" version no less) is mind boggling to me.
People have been saying that Crysis was just a game that looked good, but it's actually a really brilliant sandbox shooter. The open levels, range of weapons, and cool abilities, makes for a lot of ways to approach combat. Imagine the enemy bases in Far Cry 3 on steroids. I remember it very fondly and will 100% be picking this up (not on Switch if we're still in lockdown though, PS4 Pro is too tempting).
I’ll be turning motion blur off!
@SSGodLink no, it is not the real raytracing system
Let's net forget that Crytek was planning to release Crysis 3 (!) on Tegra X1+Android platform so porting to Tegra is not unfamiliar to them.
@KitsuneNight Don’t forget Panic Button!
looks at Vampyr on Switch erm possibly not guys.
Easy skip for me. Waiting on metroid4
@Savino i hate it. It gives me a headache 🤕😆
@Ulysses According to a Polygon article, it appears EA isn’t involved with this release. I knew there was trouble between CryTek and EA years ago. Don’t think EA used the Cry-Engine in any of their games, which is the Frostbite engine in the majority of their titles.
@progx
Oh goodness, I got Frostbite and Cryengine completely flip flopped in my mind. My mistake!
@rjc-32 what RTX does in real time is very limited, that’s why their focus right now is only on lighting effects. Yes, what we see in movies is a reproduction that’s not on real time, but it takes weeks to render those movies with Ray tracing, and the do that with two floors full of super computers. Try to put more weight on RTX card while playing a game, it becomes unplayable
@the_beaver if Saber makes it like they did with Witcher 3 (after last patch), then Panic Button will not have a chance.
Crysis with mostly sharp graphics vs Doom with mostly blurry graphics.
@Varkster no worries. I saw some Ray Tracing videos, and it seems that it’s technology is still at its infancy. But it’s weird to know now that Crytek made Ray tracing available with their engine a year ago. They posted this video showcasing it:
https://youtu.be/1nqhkDm2_Tw
It looks impressive, and it’s just by using their engine. I can’t wait to see what they do with Crysis!
@graysoncharles The Sonic Boom fiasco had much more to do with the inability of the developers, and/or the indecisiveness of certain people involved. The CryEngine has run just fine on many games and on various consoles. All of the Crysis games ran fine on last gen hardware, both on Xbox 360 and PS3, and plenty of other games that used the engine ran just fine as well.
Heck, even the Wii U could run the CryEngine just fine:
https://www.nintendolife.com/news/2012/06/cryengine_3_runs_beautifully_on_wii_u
CryTek was even quite far with getting Crysis 3 to run on the Wii U, but those jerks at EA pulled the plug (or rather: they just let it die, due to their "unprecedented partnership" with Nintendo):
https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2013-03-04-crytek-crysis-3-on-wii-u-had-to-die
And there was yet another game in development for the Wii U, that used CryEngine 3, but ultimately, it was just never officially released...
(in case you're wondering: that game was Shadow of the Eternals, the never released sequel to Eternal Darkness)
@NoTinderLife Yes, ray tracing did already exist, heck I even used it in design programs on my Commodore Amiga A1200, but there's a BIG difference between that kind of ray tracing and the current kind.
Long story short: the old ray tracing is static, with baked light sources, and the current method of ray tracing is dynamic and real-time, which makes ALL the difference in bringing more realism to game environments and representations of human characters/features into games.
If you comment on something, at least read up on it first, so you'll actually know what you're talking about...
@KitsuneNight you forgot panic button.
@ThanosReXXX "current method of ray tracing is dynamic and real-time"
Of course it's real-time, it's in a game engine.
The existing professional ray-tracing is pre-rendered and required 64 bit floating point precision, the ray tracing used in real-time engine is only 16 bit floating point, the same with Global Illumination. Real time ray-tracing like Nvidia's RTX is not accurate, they don't have the precision of those used in professional app.
@NoTinderLife Real-time AND dynamic. That part is new. The point is that you can't compare 90s ray tracing to the current version of it.
And comparing it to professional setups is pointless, since we can't have consoles costing thousands of dollars, now can we?
The process as is used, is new and innovative for consoles, and it will add to the experience for gamers, and THAT is ultimately all that matters..
Well, after seeing how the Switch runs Doom 3, which was amazing on pc back in the day, I'm really interested in this. These are the games I remember being blown away by when playing them on a friends' pc while I ws alwaays more of a console gamer (handheld even, mostly).
@Edu23XWiiU I think CryTek in general focuses mostly on beefing their expensive engine because when it comes to their games they are well..quite bland.
Honestly I would like to see them make an original concept instead and be experimental with it. To me, they're like a much larger Shin'en.
@ozwally They seem to think so, given the message in the last article about this.
I said it before, I'll say it again... shouldn't they be busy with cyberpunk 2077? ☺️
Seriously, crisis was just a benchmark of yesteryear and mainly a means for the pc master race to compensate. Technically a milestone, but little else.
"the same team that achieved the impossible, when it released The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt - Complete Edition on the Switch"
I'm getting really tired of Nintendo Life repeating this this untruth.
Nothing about porting Witcher 3 (or other games) is or was impossible.
Never played these games- were they any good? Hopefully we get all 3 games if successful.
@shani I find it amusing how you have no real clue what you’re talking about. 😂
Lol for all we know the switch may just get higher textures, even that may even be doubtful. Calling it now, switch will look like the vanilla release with muddier textures.
@tameshiyaku Crysis is on of the best FPS games ever made. The main body of gamers who say it was nothing more than a technical milestone have never played it. 🤓
@Casual_Gamer95 How noble of you. Nothing wrong with 30fps and Crysis isn't a popcorn, light weight, corridor peashooter.
I was playing Forza Horzon 4 yesterday, switched between it's 30 and 60fps modes - couldn't feel the difference, both played excellent and run super smooth, super responsive, and looked super smooth - The difference being 4K and the details pushed out further in 30fps mode. Anyways the framerate difference was completely imperceptible.
I think what people have become caught up on now is framerate stability or uneven frames - in single player titles 30fps should never be an issue.
In the Wild West super competitive PC world multiplayer with infinite hardware possibilities, using framerate and dropping the res and settings has always been a method in trying to gain an advantage over other players.
@ThanosReXXX You don't understand what I am saying: ray-tracing is not a new tech, it's the same thing that was used in tradition professional 3d rendering for decades.
It's dynamic because it's real-time, and can be done now because hardware is getting faster - but hardware is still not fast enough to generate professional quality because it's not accurate (but good enough for games). Or else video games will look the same as the Marvel Movies you see in the movies.
Pro-grade Ray-tracing needs 64bit double precision floating point. Nvidia RTX is using 16 bit which makes it possible to do in real-time at the expense of quality (even then is still too slow for many games when enabled.) It's the same with depth of field, motion blur and global illumination - it's not new tech, you can do it in real-time now but the tech is watered down from professional 3d industry. Current 3d tech in real-time just can't matched the existing ones that required thousands of computers to generate every frame.
@liveswired I played the trilogy on psplus, they were definitely not bad games. Might have been FPS oversaturated at the time. Far cry 3, Killzone and the first black ops had me more exited back then.
@NoTinderLife I understand perfectly fine, and I know that it's been around for decades, as I already explained in my initial reply to you, but that was not the point. The whole point is that the dynamic, real-time version of it is now available and implemented for home consoles, so regardless of how long ray tracing has been around, it's still a new way of upgrading games on consoles, so all the rest of it is completely irrelevant to the discussion, seeing as we won't be using multiple thousand dollar rigs at home...
@Varkster I always wanted to play Crysis because of it’s physics. It was pretty crazy back in the day, watching the videos of this game, and see everything getting destroyed. And I think if Crysis remastered comes with what they already said it will have in Switch, it will push the boundaries of what you can do with the console even more. I haven’t played Fast RMX, but I did play the Wii U version, and it looked and felt phenomenal.
Great to see its in safe hands... The Switch really is getting some good support. I enjoy hearing the technicalities of such a title releasing on the Switch....
In a basic understanding, third party games sell less on Switch... But because Switch has sold so well it's still worthwhile releasing the title on the Switch...
E.G Only 5% purchase rate on a much larger install base is still worthwhile....
It's basic maths which ensures we get Crysis on the Switch, providing it's good we need to purchase this to thank the developers...
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