Hardware upgrade enthusiasts start your wallets -- Crysis, arguably the most anticipated PC first-person action game to come along in years, just went gold today, according to Electronic Arts and German-based developer Crytek. 1UP popped the news this evening, pointing to November 16 as the magic day you'll be able to officially buy a game so power-greedy it had to be time-warped back from a future where PCs can actually run it.
"We are extremely proud of what we have been able to accomplish with Crysis," said Crytek CEO Cevat Yerli. "We wanted to push the boundaries both visually and with open-ended, non-linear gameplay and we believe the end result delivers that vision."
Oh happy day, Crysis at the locked (but for you, unlocked!) highest detail settings runs like a dream on my DirectX 9 Windows XP "take-a-hike-Windows-Vista-ain't-gonna-miss-ya-dee-ex-10" PC.
What's he talking about? XP vs. Vista. Have the latter and you can run Crysis full bore; have the former and you can only crank the visual throttle up to three-quarter, tops.
Unless of course you simply copy and paste a few lines of text in a handful of game directory CFG files, at which point the ostensibly DX10-only 'very high' special effects for water, shadows, shaders, textures and more can be yours, sweetened by Windows XP's superior performance.
What's it do?
Turns out Crysis isn't as DX10-y as some might have you believe by making the 'very high' detail settings unusable unless you're running Vista. Crysis on XP is out of the gate locked at 'high', a significant visual downgrade from 'very high' in all instances.
While fiddling with the text file parameters for Crysis' configuration settings, someone figured out that by placing the 'very high' settings under 'high', the game not only (mis)reads them, they actually render. Sun rays, depth of field, advanced physics, particles, and volumetric effects -- all available, and apparently not DX10 effects. What's more, Crysis under XP runs dramatically (~10fps) faster on my system, setting for setting, be it 'low', 'medium', or 'high'.
"As good" looking on XP and faster? What's up with that?
The cynic will argue Crytek cordoned 'very high' off from XP users arbitrarily and merely to help Microsoft promote Vista. Look at Shadowrun, they'll say, a Vista-exclusive game that was shown to run identically under Windows XP.
The idealist will probably argue that there's still a DX10 component not parsing in the above tweak, i.e. Crysis on XP using 'very high' settings is still in some capacity (notable or no) at least technically inferior to Crysis under Vista. Cache logs suggests Shader 4.0 calls, which is a hardwired DX10-exclusive.
In any event, the truth is that Crysis does look appreciably better with the above tweaks running under XP, and there's no way Crytek or Microsoft are going to be able to pretend that it doesn't. But publicly ignore? Probably.
Let's just hope the powers that be don't "break" the tweak in the final version which just went gold and should hit store shelves Friday November 16.