Crytek releases PC update that should improve performance in Crysis Remastered

Crytek has released an update for the PC version of Crysis Remastered that should notably improve overall performance for high-performance systems. There are already reports that the frame rate is on average a lot higher after the update.

A community manager from Crytek has explained on Reddit what will change with PC update 1.3.0. These include the aforementioned performance improvements for high-performance systems, but also, for example, adjustments in the event of missing light effects and performance improvements if ray tracing is set to ‘very high’. Also fixed is an issue where artifacts could be visible during cutscenes, which could be the case if the game was started with HDR enabled.

Game reviewer John Linneman, of Digital Foundry fame, reports that the patch for the PC actually brought noticeable improvements. He says that the frame rate is now usually between 75 and 120fps, which he says plays fine in combination with G-Sync. He also cites an example of a specific viewpoint near a town in the game, with many trees and mountains in the distance. Previously, he had trouble getting there at 60fps, but now he achieves 80 frames per second there.

The performance in Crysis Remastered is a hot topic, partly because the original 13-year-old Crysis was known for pushing PCs to their limits. That’s where the ‘Can it run Crysis?’ Meme came from, which is also the name of the heaviest graphics mode on the current remaster, with all settings at maximum. From the review of Crysis Remastered, where an Intel Core i9 10900K was tested, the frame rates with an RTX 3090 video card at 4k and 1440 came out at 40 and 42.1fps, respectively. That poor performance is related to the problem that also occurred with the original: the game is still single-threaded and is therefore not able to use multiple cores of a processor. That is a constant bottleneck when it comes to performance.

Incidentally, this patch has not added the option to manually create save games. That was possible in the original for the PC, but it is probably missing, because Crysis Remastered is made based on the console version of the game. Only savepoints were available on consoles. It is not clear whether this option will eventually be added to the PC version.