Crysis Director Explained Reason Behind Its High Requirements

The tech world has been evolving rapidly, with NVIDIA's RTX 5090, RTX 5080, RTX 5070 Ti, and RTX 5070 representing the company's latest performance achievements, but the question stands: can these modern GPUs handle Crysis?

The "Can it run Crysis?" meme has been around since the game's release in 2007, growing from its surprisingly demanding hardware requirements, and Crysis's director and Crytek founder Cevat Yerli has explained why it asked for so much.

"I want[ed] to make sure Crysis does not age, that [it] is future proofed, meaning that if I played it three years from now, it should look better than today," Yerli told PC Gamer.

According to him, the game's highest graphics settings were designed for the hardware of 2010 and beyond. "A lot of people tried to maximize Crysis immediately," he said. "And I’m like, 'Oh, that’s not why we built the Ultra mode, or Very High.'"

While the technology has taken a huge step forward since then, Crysis will forever stay a benchmark of its time, immortalized in its own catchphrase.

"It was this ambivalent kind of meme that was good and bad, but I actually enjoyed it," Yerli shared. "Last year, Jensen [Huang] for NVIDIA announced a new GPU, and they said, 'Yes, and it can run Crysis.'"

The reason behind the game's demanding nature was that, as the developers joked, "One tree has more technology built in than the entire algorithm for rendering Far Cry." Crytek wanted to implement dynamic lighting and subsurface scattering to make the lush greenery especially beautiful.

"Subsurface scattering was a technology that existed already in engines, but was super slow," Yerli said. "Nobody had done it at scale."

Moreover, the studio's work on facial animations and rendering also added a couple of notches to hardware requirements. For example, Crysis characters could blush: "We went over bonkers on this one," said Yerli.

Perhaps now your PC is finally ready for Crysis, so if you haven't played it before, it's time. Subscribe to PC Gamer's print magazine and join our 80 Level Talent platform and our new Discord server, follow us on Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Telegram, TikTok, and Threads, where we share breakdowns, the latest news, awesome artworks, and more.