In mid-April, Crytek officially announced that it was getting ready to release a remaster of Crysis 1 for the PC, Xbox One, PlayStation 4, and Nintendo Switch. Due this summer, the classic futuristic FPS sandbox game would be wrapped up with remastered graphics and optimisations for a new generation of hardware co-developed on Cryengine with Saber Interactive. Crytek has just started to tease the arrival of the Official Gameplay Trailer Premiere of Crysis Remastered. It will go live tomorrow (1st July) at 5pm BST / 9am PT / 12pm ET, and the embedded video below will become active.
The remaster will bring back the original's single player campaigns with abundant extra graphical niceties such as; "high-quality textures and improved art assets, an HD texture pack, temporal anti-aliasing, SSDO, SVOGI, state-of-the-art depth fields, new light settings, motion blur, and parallax occlusion mapping, and particle effects". Additionally players can expect volumetric fog and shafts of light, software-based ray tracing, and screen space reflections to reinforce the major visual upgrade.
You will have probably noted that Crytek specifically refers to "software-based ray tracing," which will mean the widest possible compatibility for these lighting effects at launch. For an insight into Crytek's modern raytracing tech check out its Neon Noir demo and benchmark.
We don't know if the remaster will benefit from Nvidia RTX hardware raytracing acceleration, or whether it can use AMD RDNA 2 hardware to accelerate raytracing. It would be rather short-sighted of Crytek if RTX and RDNA 2 hardware accelerated raytracing were not supported, especially as we should have both available to consumers later this year.
Crysis was originally launched in 2007, published by EA, setting new standards for graphical flair and complexity. Its highest settings and resolutions were unfeasible to use for many when it first released, giving it a hardware melting reputation, and originating the well worn phrase "But can it run Crysis?"
