I see that Technology Review now publishes Chinese propaganda fluff pieces (complete with equally blatant and clumsy appeals to the “Global South”, one of Beijing’s latest global influence campaigns).
There’s not a single word in this “article” about the fact that this model is heavily censored.
Thanks for the PSA, I had kind of forgotten about this wretched DRM.
It’s based on the Xbox 360/PS3 console port of the game. People figured this out pretty quickly, because a VTOL flying mission that these consoles couldn’t handle was missing from the remaster as well (later added back in with a patch). Colors are oversaturated, texture, object and lighting quality are down- or sidegraded (many not worse on a purely technical level, but different without being better for no reason, as if the outsourced Russian devs had a quota of changed assets to fill), lots of smaller and larger physics interactions are gone, because they were never part of that old console port. AI (quite a bit selling factor on the original as well, on top of the graphics and physics) is simplified as well. The added sprinkles of ray-tracing features here and there, as well as some nicer water physics do not make up for the many visual and gameplay deficiencies. On top of that, there are game-breaking glitches that weren’t part of the original.
The biggest overall problem I have with it is that it just doesn’t look and feel like Crysis anymore and instead has the look of a generic tropical Unity Engine survival game. The original had a very distinct visual identity, a muted, realistic look, but with enough intentional artistic flourishes that made it more than just a groundbreaking attempt at photorealism. You can clearly see this if you compare the original hilltop sunrise to the remaster. Crysis also had an almost future-milsim-like approach to its gameplay that is now a shell of its former self.
I will admit that to the casual player, many of these differences are minor to unnoticeable. If you haven’t spent far too much time with the original, you’re unlikely to notice the vast majority of it and might just notice how ridiculously saturated everything looks.
At the very least you can still buy the original on PC. On gog, it’s easy to find, but on Steam, it’s hidden for some reason [insert speculation as to why here]: If you use Steam’s search function, only the remaster appears. You have to go to the store page of the stand-alone add-on Crysis Warhead (the only Crysis game that did not receive the remaster treatment, likely because it was never ported to console), which can be purchased in a bundle with the original as the Maximum Edition (this edition also does not appear in the search results): https://store.steampowered.com/sub/987/
I’m glad it’s based on the original game instead of the hideous remaster.
just bad game in general
You’ve never played anything with a metascore of less than 70, have you?
Are you seriously suggesting that in the age of rage-fueled campaigns against any game that even dares to show a non-male in a positive light or permits the player to change pronouns user scores are reliable?
You yourself are bringing this culture war bullshit up as if it was valid criticism, which means I have a hard time taking anything you’re writing even remotely seriously.
Opencritic average is 79 and Metacritic across all three platforms is 81. How is this a bad game?
Makes sense. I didn’t believe the claim for the article for a second that only the cloud-hosted version would be censored. In fact, they didn’t actually claim that “only” the cloud version was censored, but instead weaseled their way around saying that they only tested that version.
Is it able to generate text on Winnie the Pooh or how free Taiwan is without crashing though?
I know I wrote perhaps a bit too much, so it’s understandable that you glossed over it, but the thing with 4x DLSS 4 frame generation compared to what you’ve tried on your 4090 is that it should result in less felt latency.
Can we stop with the fake frame nonsense? They aren’t any less real than other frames created by your computer. This is no different from the countless other shortcuts games have been using for decades.
Also, input latency isn’t “sacrificed” for this. There is about 10 ms of overhang with 4x DLSS 4 frame gen, which however gets easily compensated for by the increase in frame rates.
The math is pretty simple on this: At 60 fps native, a new frame needs to be generated every 16.67 ms (1000 ms / 60). Leaving out latency from the rest of the hard- and software (since it varies a lot between different input and output devices and even from game to game, not to mention, there are many games where graphics and e.g. physics frame rate are different), this means that at three more frames generated per “non-fake” frame and we are seeing a new frame on screen every 4.17 ms (assuming the display can output 240 Hz). The system still accepts input and visibly moves the view port based on user input between “fake” frames using reprojection, a technique borrowed from VR (where older approaches are working exceptionally well already in my experience, even at otherwise unplayably low frame rates - but provided the game doesn’t freeze), which means that we arrive at 14.17 ms of latency with the overhang, but four times the amount of visual fluidity.
It’s even more striking at lower frame rates: Let’s assume a game is struggling to run at the desired settings and just about manages to achieve 30 fps (current example: Cyberpunk 2077 at RT Overdrive settings and 4K on a 5080). That’s one native frame every 33.33 ms. With three synthetic frames, we get one frame every 8.33 ms. Add 10 ms of input lag and we arrive at a total of 18.33 ms, close to the 16.67 ms input latency of native 60 fps. You can not tell me that this wouldn’t feel significantly more fluent to the player. I’m pretty certain you would actually prefer it over native 60 fps in a blind test, since the screen gets refreshed 120 times per second.
Keep in mind that the artifacts from previous generations of frame generation, like smearing and shimmering, are pretty much gone now, at least based on the footage I’ve seen, and frame pacing appears to be improved as well, so there really aren’t any downsides anymore.
Here’s the thing though: All of this remains optional. If you feel the need to be a purist about “real” and “fake frames”, nobody is stopping you from ignoring this setting in the options menu. Developers will however increasingly be using it, because it enables previously impossible to run higher settings on current hardware. No, that’s not laziness, it’s exploiting hardware and software capabilities, just like developers have always done it.
Obligatory disclaimer: My card is several generations behind (RTX 2080, which means I can’t use Nvidia’s frame gen at all, not even 2x, but I am benefiting from the new super resolution transformer and ray reconstruction) and I don’t plan on replacing it any time soon, since it’s more than powerful enough right now. I’ve been using a mix of Intel, AMD and Nvidia hardware for decades, depending on which suited my needs and budget at any given time, and I’ll continue to do use this vendor-agnostic approach. My current favorite combination is AMD for the CPU and Nvidia for the GPU, since I think it’s the best of both worlds right now, but this might change by the time I’m making the next substantial upgrade to my hardware.
Just because a far simpler type of interpolation has existed before, this doesn’t mean that this type is “decades old”. You know that.
Absolutely not. I would recommend reading into this further.
Speaking as one of three people who didn’t hate the game, the rather wholesome atmosphere this game ended up having was quite pleasant to experience. Exactly what I needed when it came out.
Have they tried subscriptions? I’ve heard it’s the next big deal after ads.
Good riddance. I hope the EU follows suit and soon. Von der Leyen has indicated that this is on the table:
https://www.politico.eu/article/tiktok-ban-in-eu-is-not-excluded-von-der-leyen-says/
In case people still think it’s just another social media app and that it’s only being banned, because “China bad”:
https://www.nullpt.rs/reverse-engineering-tiktok-vm-1
I have only ever seen this kind of obfuscation with malware before. This fits unconfirmed (but credible) reports that ByteDance will not permit any non-Chinese employees to even look at the backend in their foreign offices and instead fly in experts from China. That’s not normal.
With the latest version, it cannot.
Twitter and Facebook are full of American propaganda
I see the Whataboutism Olympics are off to a good start this year.
Why is this always the only defense people have when they bend over backwards to write apologia for dictatorships like China and Russia?
Maxwell came out in 2014, Pascal in 2016 and Volta in 2017. Pretty long run for Maxwell in particular.
I was curious about the AMD side of things: They reduced support for Polaris and Vega (both 2017) in September 2023 already.