14 DAY TRIAL // Just as we've finished talking about EA's newly announced Crysis demo (launching September 25th, coinciding with the release of Halo 3), I stumbled upon this Eurogamer.biz interview with Cevat Yerli, CEO of Crytek. The interview reveals that gamers shouldn't worry about not being able to play Crysis due to fancy requirements. According to Cevat Yerli, even "four year old PCs" will run Crysis just fine.
The interviewers ask: "There's a lot of hype about the visuals in Crysis. But what if you don't have Direct X10?"
Cevat Yerli replied: "As a PC game developer you have to make sure your game runs on two to three year old PCs. In fact, the current specification we're planning for is even four year old PCs.
If you're a gamer who bought a new gaming PC two or three years ago, you can play Crysis, and you will get visuals that will compete with visuals of that time. Of course you won't get the super Direct X10 graphics, but we are competitive."
So although Crysis won't look on your 4 year old PC as stunning as it would on a newer one, it will most certainly work. Hey, I'd say that's pretty fair! Of course now some of you may be wondering... WHY? Why are they making Crysis so accessible to users of older hardware? Don't worry, it's not that they feel pity for them, but there are some constraints. Read on:
The site asks: "During our visit you've been demoing the game with DirectX 9. Why is that?"
"For different reasons", answered Cevat Yerli. "We're still receiving drivers which are crashing, that's the main reason. We don't have a stable driver yet. We have drivers out there on the market but we are pushing the drivers so hard that we are getting all the time multi-core drivers, dual core drivers, or multi-threaded drivers essentially, with multi-threaded architecture.
Until we get it on Vista running on multi-threaded drivers we don't want to show any more, because we are getting performance impact on Vista. We don't want to make Vista look bad either, because it's not Vista's fault - it's the driver right now."
So if there was any doubt whether your PC was worthy of Crysis' superb visuals, now you know that there's nothing to worry about. Unless of course, you have a 5-year-old PC...