Crysis Remastered's 8K tech trailer shows off "Can It Run Crysis?" mode

Crytek have released a new 8K tech trailer for Crysis Remastered, comparing the game's 2007 visuals with all of its new graphical bells and whistles at a whopping 7680x4320 resolution. It's effectively a fuller version of the tech preview trailer they showed off last month, giving us a closer look at their software-driven ray tracing effects, pretty real-time reflections and its aptly-named "Can It Run Crysis?" 8K graphics setting.

Yes, there's a quality setting called "Can It Run Crysis?" in Crysis Remastered, referencing the age-old joke about the original's steep PC requirements - but more on that in a minute.

As you can see in the trailer below, Crysis Remastered brings a number of visual upgrades to Crytek's 2007 classic, including a fancy new global illumination system for more realistic lighting, enhanced explosions and particle effects, rippling caustics for the game's lovely oceans, and loads more. I'm particularly looking forward to trying out its software-driven ray tracing effects, as these don't require you to own a ray tracing capable graphics card. Instead, Crytek's sophisticated SVOGI tech (which stands for "sparse voxel octree global illumination") does it all in-engine.

As for that 8K, almost certainly PC-melting "Can It Run Crysis?" mode, though, it will probably be several years until we've got the hardware to even attempt running that at a playable frame rate. Speaking to Crysis Remastered's project lead Steffen Halbig earlier this week, he told me that he reckoned even the new crop of Nvidia Ampere GPUs, including the RTX 3080 and RTX 3090, will struggle to run this mode at 4K, let alone 8K.

"I can tell you already in 4K, it will be hard," Halbig told me. "I'm not aware of the performance of the new [RTX 30-series] graphics cards, but from what I've seen on the internet, it will also be hard for these graphics cards to run at 4K smoothly with the 'Can It Run Crysis?' mode."

Indeed, I was surprised by just how manageable Crysis Remastered's PC requirements were when they got released on the Epic Games Store just the other week, but Halbig said "these are only for Medium and High specs, and Low specs. So once you start to go into Very High and Can It Run Crysis mode, erm... no chance with these systems!"

As for those of you who do want to check out the Can It Run Crysis? mode, Halbig tells me "you really need an RTX 2080 Super or RTX 2080 Ti" at the moment, and even then you'll have to make do with a resolution of 1920x1080 if you want a playable frame rate. "At 4K, it's not possible."

Crysis Remastered will launch this Friday, September 18th on the Epic Games Store, and I'll be posting more of my chat with Halbig over the next few days.