For about a year, Crytek has offered universities a free license to its CryEngine 3, the guts of this month's big release, Crysis 2. Since it made the offer more than 250 universities have asked for the code, the studio reports.
That's a pretty significant indicator of the mainstream utility of gaming code in a college classroom, if not of the mainstream presence of games design in their curricula.
"From its very first days, Crytek aimed to strongly support students and educators by sharing the CryEngine tools with universities," Avni Yerli, managing director at Crytek, said in a statement. "Thousands of students now have access to the same cutting-edge technology that the world's best developers are using for their ongoing projects. With our CryEngine 3 educational SDK we want to enable them to achieve their vision and create their very own innovation to become the next generation of developers."
You don't have to be a university department head or a bigtime developer to get your hands on Crysis' development tools. A modkit will release to all users sometime in early summer, Crytek has said.
Over 250 Universities Worldwide Signed Up For CryEngine 3 Educational License [Gamasutra]
A new splashpage at
In the week of Portal 2′s release, it seems apt that Valve’s games should dominate the mod scene’s output. While the range of titles you can mod these days is impressive, and so many of the tools are easy to learn, I’ve still yet to come across a moddable engine that’s quite as intuitive and flexible as Source. I can’t wait to see what people can do with Portal 2 when we’re able to mod that. It’s going to be very interesting to see the results. Onwards, then…
This is Crash Bandicoot Return, the closest we'll get to the classic PlayStation platformer looking as good as a Crysis game. This Crash Bandicoot game is actually running on the Crysis engine, because it's a fan-made mod that pays homage to Naughty Dog's 15-year-old series.
Crash Bandicoot Return is a Crysis mod from Anonym-Art Productions, which only recently announced the game's existence. In the above video, featuring very early gameplay, we see the oldest of Crash levels, N. Sanity Beach from the original PlayStation game. It may not have the polish of a complete Crash game at this stage, but it's already one of the prettiest games to star a bandicoot that we've seen.
Read more about the mod at ModDB, but hope that the people who hold onto those Crash Bandicoot rights—you know who—let this PC mod enjoy its fan-made, fan-loved existence.
Crash Bandicoot Return [ModDB]
Crytek took it in the shorts from PC loyalists who felt Crysis 2 was handled in a way that catered more to console users than to PC gamers. In an interview, the studio's graphics engineer said Microsoft and Sony have way underweight RAM configurations, and whatever they build next needs 8 GB of RAM, minimum.
"My finger-pointing at Microsoft/Sony would really be on the memory side," Tiago Sousa told Eurogamer. "It's way too low, and the biggest crippling factor from a visual perspective.
Naturally, the outfit that gave us Crysis, a profoundly demanding game for PC architecture when it was released in 2007, wants 16 times the current generation's memory. That's right, remember, the PS3 and the 360 both have just 512 MB of RAM. While that is aptly described as "nowhere near enough," the things were built going on five years ago now. Still, I don't see Sony or Microsoft packing their next consoles with 8 GB of RAM unless we truly are talking about 10 year plans for the current hardware.
Tiago Sousa, Crytek's top man in graphics, did praise Sony and Microsoft for their developer support, saying Crysis 2 was only possible on those consoles thanks to toolkits that allowed Crytek to wring "as much performance as possible from the fixed architecture."
The Making of Crysis 2 [Eurogamer]
After a couple of weeks of web-wide worrying and shouting and bickering and excellently
Details are basically non-existent, but Crytek has officially announced that there will be a DirectX 11 patch for Crysis 2 to take full advantage of modern PC gaming hardware. [MyCrysis.com] (Thanks, Kyle!)
YouTube user MikeX1978 likes to post videos of video games playing in slow motion. His latest, for example, shows that when you're not running around shooting at things, Crysis 2 can sure get pretty.
It's an interesting choice of music backing it up (LCD Soundsystem's "New York, I Love You But You're Bringing Me Down"). Why? I actually finished playing it yesterday, and thought the New York aspect of the game was actually under-played somewhat. Only occasionally do you ever feel like you're actually on Manhattan, like when you recognise a building you've seen or a street you've walked past. Or when you find the head of the Statue of Liberty sitting in a park.
Other times it's just a city of corridors with obstacles and cover points scattered all over it, indistinguishable from any other destroyed urban centre you've ever fought your way across. Which is a bit of a shame, really!
Crytek and EA unleashed the highly anticipated sequel to Crysis last week. While waiting for it to become available Down Under, I found myself reading numerous reviews about the game. Most were highly positive, while informal observations from bloggers and PC gamers noted that Crysis 2 has departed from some of its predecessor's gameplay essentials and feels closer to a Call of Duty-style shooter.
As you've probably come to expect from our performance reviews, we'll leave you to judge the gameplay and concentrate on how the game runs on a variety of hardware instead.
Still relevant to our discussion however is the absence of DirectX 11 support at launch. As PC gamers ourselves, we can't help feeling a bit disappointed by Crytek's exclusive use of DirectX 9 rendering, especially considering that the original game did support DX10.
After some backlash from PC users last year, Crytek responded with the claim that Crysis 2 on the PC would have superior graphics to console versions. This was taken as a sign that the company would remain faithful to its PC roots. But then came the demo fiasco, with EA/Crytek releasing a Crysis 2 demo exclusively on the Xbox 360. Nothing was announced for the PC until a few weeks later when a last minute PC multiplayer demo surfaced.
Adding insult to injury, when the PC demo finally arrived, it carried many Xbox 360 leftovers such as the prompt to "press start to begin" or to "adjust your TV settings" when configuring the game brightness.
The game's launch wasn't entirely smooth either unfortunately. Crysis 2 saw a number of technical problems appear which prompted the release of a day one patch. Various graphics related bugs remain unaddressed, such as flickering screens and multi-GPU issues. Some users have also been experiencing activation troubles, though we understand the developer has been pretty responsive about these.
As things stand today, Crysis 2 on the PC does offer better textures, but that's about it other than the higher resolutions and frame rates usually offered by PC titles. DX11 effects are expected to be added in a future patch, but in the meantime don't misinterpret us, the game looks gorgeous regardless.
Clearly it's not exactly what we expected, but Crysis 2 does appear to be quite a lot of fun nonetheless. Now the question that remains to be answered is how demanding Crysis 2 is on PC hardware? Despite its shortcomings, can it bring the most power hungry rigs to their knees as the original game did? Today we plan to find out as we run a wide range of processors and graphics cards through the gauntlet.
Click the bottom right of each image to enlarge.
High
Very High
Extreme
The difference between quality settings is quite apparent. Shadows are considerably more realistic when using the extreme settings over very high — they're not only smoother but also softer in certain places where objects are not casting such a harsh shadow. Extreme settings also offer more realistic lighting effects and objects such as rubbish bags have more definition.
We see the same variations between the very high and high quality presets as well. The high quality settings make use of even more crude looking shadows that feature less detail. You'll also spot another big change in the polygon count as you can see objects such as the arched windows are much more jagged now.
High
Very High
Extreme
The differences between each quality setting are more subtle but they are still present in this next series of screenshots. Once again, the extreme setting offers more detail and softer shadows over the very high and high presets. The tree's shadow looks much more realistic, the tree trunk has more definition, and the shrubs around the tree are only seen with extreme quality.
When comparing the very high and high presets the biggest difference is the loss of detail. Most of the grass under the tree is gone while the mud in front of the tree and on the road is virtually gone.
Click the bottom right of each image to enlarge.
1680x1050 resolution
Using the extreme quality preset at 1680x1050 shows that Crysis 2 is every bit as demanding as the original. At this relatively low resolution, the GeForce GTX 580 barely cracked the 60fps barrier with an average of 64fps. The Radeon HD 6970 on the other hand averaged 49fps while the dual-GPU Radeon HD 6990 was just a fraction faster averaging 56fps.
The dual-GPU GeForce GTX 590 sailed along without any problems averaging 95fps, proving that SLI is working fine. We found that the single-player portion of the game requires an average of at least 40fps for smooth playable performance. Most of the graphics cards tested will provide satisfactory performance at 1680x1050.
However for perfectly smooth gameplay 50fps+ on average is warranted, which means you will need a very high-end graphics card.
1920x1200 Resolution
Increasing the resolution to 1920x1200 pushed most cards below an average of 50fps, leaving just the GeForce GTX 580 and GTX 590 with ideal frame rates. The GeForce GTX 560 Ti averaged 40fps while the Radeon HD 6970 was only a fraction faster with 42fps and the GTX 570 jumped up another notch to 44fps.
2560x1600 Resolution
At the massive resolution of 2560x1600, only the GeForce GTX 590 could deliver playable performance as even the GTX 580 fell below an average of 40fps.
Testing Notes & Methodology
Benchmarks: Very High Performance
Benchmarks: High Performance
CPU Scaling - Core i7 2600K
CPU Performance
Final Thoughts
Republished with permission.
Steven Walton is a writer at TechSpot. TechSpot is a computer technology publication serving PC enthusiasts, gamers and IT pros since 1998.