... What the "real" Crysis could look like:

All these vids show what could be achieved with the Cryengine 2.

For those who say explosions look better on Cryengine 3.


Or that the lighting is superior in Cryengine 3.





All these possibillities the CE2 offers get ignored by Crytek... they rather focus on console development and tweaking everything like hell to make games work on 4 year old hardware.

For those who say explosions look better on Cryengine 3.
Let me ask you something, does the engine generate the particle effects by its own ?!
it all depends on the FX artists, the explosion effects in >crysis2< were cpu friendly and dumped down for consoles.
I remember trying that xtremeFX mod and it was such a cpu hog it made the game unplayable in areas where there was lots of shooting.

Or that the lighting is superior in Cryengine 3.
Did you actually play crysis 2 ?
It IS superior, thanks to the deferred rendering approach , you can have dozens of light sources viewable at a time with small performance hit and all of them cast shadows, whereas in CE2 max 4 lights and it'll lag like hell (try the PineCityCarPark map for crysis 1).

I think it's quite funny you're showing some modded crysis 1 particles and a custom map and saying they look better than anything on the CE3 , when the only game on it is crysis 2 which was watered down for consoles.


Here is a quote from Cry-Styves, AKA the famous crysis 1 shader modder Xero, who was recently hired by crytek:
You'd be amazed by how bad C1 is in terms of optimizations. You'd also be amazed by how much merging shaders can help speed up the engine. CE2 was a huge waste of resources, it really was. Just.... trust me on that.

However, I hope you realize a lot of the shaders I wrote include several things that are in the new engine, such as linear lighting or consistent specular lighting. The lighting in CE3 is unarguably better and so the console versions of C1 will also benefit. Don't underestimate physically correct lighting and correct math.

I'm still not digging the night shots though.

Also: environment probes.

Anyway, tetxures, objects, LODs, all of these things were not well optimized for memory usage in CE2. With some correct optimizations they could easily get the game to run within the console
limits. Again, the game was actually horribly optimized, and everyone at Crytek knows it. Everything from the assets to the post-process pipeline wasn't given much thought as they were purely PC at the time. The move to consoles really opened their eyes to it. And now CE3 runs as smooth as butter.

Though obviously draw distance and texture res might suffer a bit more, but honestly the original game's textures were crap too. Most of them are just 512x512 (some are even 256x256!) with some detail-bump mapping applied. Most people have sugar-coated their memory of Crysis' textures. They were never that good.

@ darkchazz

Thanks for your reply:

Yes i own Crysis 2 and played it various times (with and without mods activated) and with 2 different grfxcards (Gtx 280 and Gtx 570 Phantom)
Yes it C2 is a watered down version of what the CE3 could bring... weve seen the max. in the Cryengine 3 for movies clip.
But lets ask ourselves.. why is Crysis 2 on PC even with the new fancy Patches not as stunning as Crysis 1?
Its also very embrassing for Crytek that layman made better high res versions of their game in a shorter amount of time.
Just look: http://www.crydev.net/viewtopic.php?f=308&t=71027.
The performancedrop between the mod + Dx11 and Dx11 alone is about 2-3 FPS for me. So optimization should lead to best results and not to something like... "you have to look very closely to see a difference".

Now to Crysis 1 and performance issues.
Adding rygels texture pack never cost me more than 3 or 4 frames... the biggest frameeater was msters high quality config.
I could run Crysis with rygels and msters modifications on 1680*1024 with 2x AA and get 25-34 FPS which is very acceptable if you keep the amazing grfx in mind you get out of that (with a GTX 280!).

As for the lightning... There are some scenes where i think Crysis 2 is clearly better (maybe because there are more scenes in the dark?) but i still get amazed when i play Crysis 1 assault with msters config...that lightning is just awesome. I didnt say Crysis surpasses Crysis 2 there.. but i think it can visually keep up with it when modded.

All in all its just that Crytek was very lazy creating stuff for the PC version of Crysis 2. It still suffers from the console development and that is not what the Cryengine 3 was advertised for. It sould be the exact opposite
And if Xero spoke the truth...then it is even more embarassing for Crytek what theyve delievered so far with Crysis 2 for the PC.