Can The RTX 3080 FE Master Crysis Remastered?

A Better Question Is Should You Even Bother?

Crysis Remastered has arrived, for better or worse, and is being used to push the new RTX 3080 FE to generate interesting benchmarks.  The lacklustre remake may not replicate what happened when it was first released and enthusiasts were desperately trying to find hardware powerful enough to show off the graphics which were, at that time, unbelievably beautiful.   For most of us, while the game was still beautiful at lower settings, we were hoping for hardware to arrive that would let us play at maximum.

The remastered edition tries to bring back that feeling, and in a way it does, though not in the way that was intended.  The game does not graphically shine as bright as the original, as many reviews of the game have described in great detail however it does punish modern hardware.  That is what makes The FPS Review’s look at the performance somewhat interesting, as it reveals what current hardware can and cannot do.

Like the original, with a decent GPU installed it is the CPU that is your bottleneck, and again it is due to the gamer engine.  While the first was limited to one core this version will, at most, make use of four cores.  How this relates is going to be an interesting investigation into how unoptimized ray tracing and high resolutions affects the CPU and GPU.  For instance, enabling Ray Tracing at any resolution drops framerates by a large amount; however that amount is the same regardless if you are using Performance TR or Can It Play Crysis RT!   If you start cranking up visual effects plus ray tracing, you can replicate the slideshow of yesteryear.

That Crysis Remastered is better as a benchmark to highlight the need, in many cases, to pair a powerful CPU with a powerful GPU may not be what Crytek intended but it does seem to be what has happened.  Of course, this is all because of the old engine, and would not occur on Vulkan or DX12 but it is still interesting data.  Check out the other interesting findings if you are also intrigued.