Oct 29, 2007

The much anticipated Crysis single-player demo was released for download Friday night, and naturally we had to have a go at it. Most of us (PC editor excluded) lack any significant horsepower under our desks, so it’s DX9 and low settings or nothing. To our delight, our mediocre systems are at least capable of rendering Crysis’ intricate jungle setting well enough to play.

Our chugging machines, however, can’t produce anything akin to the quality of the low setting DX9 screen recently released by Crytek. We’re not implying any misdirection on Crytek’s part - low settings are going to look different on different machines. Ours just happen to be capable of producing the lowest of the low, which you can see in the comparison below.

Above: What you can’t see - low framerate, objects popping in and out of existence, and fun

Regardless, we’re just happy to be playing the game, and the ability to enable cloaking and sneak up on a casually urinating enemy (as illustrated on the next page) is worth suffering the atrociously low framerates.

Our screen was snapped with a 3 Ghz Pentium 4 with 1.5 GB RAM, and a 256 MB Radeon X600 on the video end. If you want to see how Crysis should look, check out our screenshot gallery. Alternatively, head to the next page to see a guy peeing off of a dock - it’s your call.