Crysis....wow, really?

To this day, even with a 390X, I STILL cannot achieve 60fps, with or without AA. It sticks around 25-30. What a unoptimized piece of crap. I remember feeling bad about dropping $1300 on my old rig back in 2007 with an 8800GTX, Core 2 Duo E6750 with 2 gigs of DDR2-800 and only being able to achieve 20 to 25FPS at all very high settings at 1680x1050 res. Now I know it was just a shoddily made game on a badly designed engine.

I can play Crysis at 1080p max 60FPS with SSAA. However there are some parts in the game which will send you into the 30s regardless of settings so ya in that way it's unoptimized.

But I wouldn't criticize the greatest technological marvel in the history of gaming. It was so ahead of its time that some parts are just not well optimized so it's okay. Give me Crysis level graphical breakthrough again and I'll happily accept 30-40FPS. :)

Even on this rig, I was seeing frames into low teens in some parts of the game. Like the part where you infiltrate that village. But yeah, it was absolutely stunning back in 07. And showed what PC gaming was made of. I just wish that Cryengine 2 had been as well optimized as UE4 or Frostbite Engine 3.

Such a overrated (by some) game, it was a tech demo and a poor one at that as most were able to play it as a slide show at best.

As I have gotten used to the gameplay style of Crysis, I find it far more fun than I used to. It was mainly a tech demo, but I never considered it a good one since it was so poorly optimized, it didn't make for a good benchmarking tool. You'd get 26FPS on an 8800GTX, but than get like....29FPS on a GTX 280 at the same res and settings... yeah it was a crappy benchmarking tool.

Show some screenshots so we can see exactly where.

Well it's mostly during fire fights. I don't really see the need to post screens, since the game is old, and I don't really care about trying to fix it lol. It's a horribly optimized game.

In my case......

One thing about Crysis is even when the framerates were in the mid-20's with my 2009 PC (Phenom II X3 720BE, Radeon HD 5770), the game felt light on feel. There were no problems spinning around 360 degrees unlike with say, ES: Oblivion. I can get 40-50 fps with Oblivion and yet, I could feel the "heft" of the game compared to Crysis at 26 fps.

If I didn't have a frame counter, I would have sworn Oblivion had the lower framerates. I quit worrying about the Crysis framerates.

I know exactly what you're talking about. Crysis feels "hefty", the framerate was low, but still felt really stable, and smooth. And yeah, Oblivion...yeah.

Crysis feels light to me. I have STALKER: Call of Pripyat which often get framerates of 60+ and even 100+. Yet, Crysis at 45 fps feels lighter on the mouse. I don't know why. It only happens with Crysis and Warhead. Most other games feel heavier as the framerates get lower.

All the above were on my almost 4-year old PC (AMD FX-8350, 4 GB GTX 770).

This does not sound right. What exactly is your resolution and AA with the 390X? Are you using VSync?

Crysis was indeed a struggle with my 8800GTS and then the GTS 250 but I was fairly satisfied with it when I got the 7850 2GB. I did not finish the game with the 1070 so I dunno how the later parts of the game fare as they were the most demanding. I did drop into the 30s at one point where I thought SSAA was the reason but turning it off did exactly nothing which means there is an obvious limitation somewhere else.

@AlexKidd5000: By the look of it, R9 290X runs it at 75fps, your 390X should run it about 5-10fps more. Make sure you have drivers updated.

Actually, Relic was the worst because of the late afternoon setting and long shadows (I think). The later levels were smaller with higher framerates.

With my GTX 560 Ti:

Ha Ha! The strange thing was, it was playable. The Witcher 3 with this framerate would be a stuttery mess. With the GTX 770, I don't worry even if the framerates are in the 40's (lower screenshot). I know it's more than playable.

I bought it when it came out. I didn't even have a gaming PC back then. I had to play on all low settings at low resolution and it looked like absolute HELL. I still beat it and had fun though. Oh how far I've come...

I remember playing Crysis again a couple of years ago and did not have any major issues with performance. There is something wrong with your rig. What is your GPU and CPU usage at when getting those low frame rates?

2560x1440, and doesn't matter what AA I use, or if v sync is on. My monitor is 144Hz anyways.

CPU and GPU usage are pretty moderate most of the time.

What CPU do you have? It seems to run pretty well here.

An FX-8320

That's your problem.

It most likely is, Crysis only uses two threads and is very cpu intensive on those threads.

When it launched I couldn't max it but I had all the settings on high and the game was totally playable at 1680x1050. Very smooth so I'm guessing it was hitting 40-50fps. I can only imagine how well it would run now with my current hardware.

And just barley 2 threads, and not very well.

such an underrated game by most. This is why the following Crysis games were so much worse than Crysis 1, and why Crysis 1 stands as one of the better FPS games ever made, and one of the most underrated games of all time.

Honestly, the only crime Crytek made when making Crysis was assuming gamers had half an ounce of imagination. They said "Hey, how about instead of hand-holding them down corridor after corridor, how about we give them this suit that allows them to play any way they want, give the semi-sandbox levels full of a variety of options for solutions, and see what happens?"

And what do we get? A bunch of lowest common denominators playing the game like its a generic shooter (read: just running down the road shooting enemies) and complaining it's a tech demo.

I've said it before and I've said it again: Crysis is a a well-stocked pantry, and Crytek said "Bake us a cake!". Some of us say "Oh boy!" and take that creative liberty for what it's worth and make a grand, towering cake full of wonderful fillings, moist and delicate cake, and beautiful decorated fondant. We seize every opportunity to use stealth mode, sneak up on patrols, use strength to toss explosive barrels, turn on armor mode when things go south, zip away when we need to reassess, and play the game for all the fun it is worth.

Others? Others just whisk some flour and milk together, throw it in a sheet pan, and hope something good comes from it. If all you did was turn on armor mode and march into bases guns blazing and did not have fun, well, you have only yourself to blame.

Damn this really has me wanting to play Crysis again!!! That says a lot considering I just finished Titanfall 2, CoD: IW, and Dishonored 2.

The problem is that Crysis only uses two threads which means that the other 6 cores of your FX8350 is useless. Also FX8350 performance per clock isnt much better than AMD's Phenom 2 era cpus. So your literally cpu and gpu limited trying to feed that 390x. If you had haswell+ intel dual core or better you would see 2x the minimum fps vs the FX8350 with same gpu.

nothing is wrong with the game or the game engine it was designed to be future proof, its only just now showing its age but that is only because advances in graphic effects such as ambient occlusion, parallax occlusion mapping etc.

you need better hardware

All of this. Yes. I still replay Crysis at least once a year because it's that good, and that much better than most other shooters.

Anyway, on the topic at hand, yeah, that doesn't sound right. I mean, Crysis was difficult to play at high settings, even with high end hardware, like 8 years ago (which was by design), but it's not that bad anymore. I assembled a PC for a friend about 4 years ago, and used Crysis to test it. I don't remember exactly what his hardware was, but I'm pretty sure it was a quad core i5, with an nVidia GPU that cost like $250-$300ish at the time (2012). We ran Crysis on that thing at all very high settings, at 1080p, and it was just fine. Not a constant 60fps, but the dips only got down into the 40s. Might have dropped into the 30s during that final fight, on the aircraft carrier, with the rain effects and lighting and explosions and action and whatnot. But comfortably playable throughout.

It's interesting you say that because when I played it I couldn't find any interesting way to play it. It felt more like I'd been given a handful of stale ingredients and told to make do.

But, that said, I felt the same way about MGSV and its tool-driven sandbox for a long time before things finally clicked and I found my groove (though in MGS you have far more/more diverse tools than in Crysis) so maybe I just need to spend more time acclimatising.

I might try it again one day, but what I played presented no creative challenge to me. I'm not entirely sure how someone is even supposed to approach it creatively, to be perfectly honest.

Yeah Crysis and MGSV are the same game in a lot of ways; the developer basically said "here you go!" and dropped you off in this wonderful world with a bunch of capabilities and let you solve the problems on your own.

MGSV did a better job I think; modern game design and the developer both were able to allow the game and gamer to do more, but Crysis was still a pretty open game as far as the possibilities go. It was still a shooter, mind you, so you didn't have that much to do.