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Crysis Remastered’s ‘Can it run Crysis?’ mode is “heavy, but it’s what people want”

"On PC, we made sure to go all out"

Carrie Talbot

Published:

Crysis Remastered 

Crysis Remastered, the classic FPS game’s new visual overhaul, hits PC today. The remaster features, among other visual upgrades, a meme-inspired ultra graphics setting option called ‘Can it run Crysis?‘, which is “designed to demand every last bit of your hardware with unlimited settings”. We spoke to project lead Steffen Halbig about the setting, who told us it’s “heavy, but it’s what people want”.

“Crysis was known, of course, for the visuals,” Halbig tells us, “so we totally focussed on the visuals. Because that’s what people want of Crysis – visual upgrades. The gameplay mechanics are still great, with the nanosuits – we’re really not touching [them], but from a visuals point of view, we’ve touched everything.” Discussing the various upgrades to the shooter, such as its software-based ray tracing, Halbig says “on PC, we made sure to go all out”.

Part of going “all out” is a range of options for graphical scalability – for example, switching reflections’ resolution up or down based on the might of your rig – and these naturally include that ‘Can it run Crysis?’ mode. “It’s something that pushes your hardware to the limits,” he says.

While he explains he’s “not aware” about some of the latest high-end graphics cards’ numbers, Halbig says: “What I can tell you now is even high-end graphics cards have no chance in 4K to run this mode”. But, he adds, “we think people want to have it”.

“What do you connect with Crysis? Visuals. For this reason we said, ‘Ok – here’s a ‘Can it run Crysis?’ mode, with unlimited view distances, LoD you can see everywhere, not popping up anymore, everything being loaded instantly into a level. Of course, it’s heavy, but it’s what people want. And it’s a future-proof graphic mode we think people will like to use in the future.”

If you’re tempted to give the new mode a go or yourself, check out our best graphics card or best gaming CPU guides, which you might find handy.

Can I run it? Check the Crysis Remastered system requirements.

Carrie is an RPG and open-world game fanatic, with more hours in Skyrim, The Witcher 3, and Divinity: Original Sin II than she'd care to admit. She's also pledged her soul to the Fable gods to make Fable 4 arrive quicker. A former PCGamesN news editor, she's off pursuing independent writing projects.