We’ve established that Nintendo Switch can, in fact, run Crysis – but what about PlayStation 4, Xbox One and their enhanced equivalents? At the tail end of last week, Crysis Remastered finally appeared – and it’s safe to say that we were not quite prepared for how unpolished the final code would look. Crytek told us to expect imminent patches and Xbox One at least did receive an update last night, but the reality is that the experience is still not good enough. In fact, the patch may have even made the situation worse.
From the outside looking in, it’s difficult to accept that a title that runs beyond expectation on Switch should under-perform on much more powerful consoles. There are several reasons for this, perhaps most notably that the Switch game was developed by Saber Interactive in Sweden – in fact, we understand it’s produced by the team that delivered the incredible port of The Witcher 3. All other versions were produced by a separate wing of Saber working with Crytek, and it is effectively a bespoke rendition of Crysis Remastered. The result is a version of the game which looks decidedly unlike any other – this is not just an upgraded Switch port here – there are significant differences.
As things stand, Crysis Remastered supports all variants of current generation consoles. On the enhanced machines, this means users have access to three distinct modes on each. Firstly, there’s the quality mode, aiming for a dynamic 4K on Xbox One X (with a 1080p minimum). The PS4 Pro equivalent there is a dynamic 1800p, with a 900p minimum – though I should stress that the minimums seem rather rare. Next up is the performance mode – this uncaps the frame-rate while reducing the maximum resolution to 1080p on both enhanced machines. Lastly, we have ray tracing mode. This enables Crytek’s impressive software-based ray tracing solution applied to select objects. In this case, on both machines, maximum resolution is dropped to 1080p while minimum is 900p. The vanilla consoles deliver the performance mode’s visual feature set with a 30fps cap – got it?
