Crytek CEO Cevat Yerli tells Next-Gen that new technology will allow the upcoming Crysis to run on gaming rigs up to three years old; developer also talks about going "Vista-only" and the transition to DX10, Vista and multi-core processors.
Yerli explains how Frankfurt-based Crytek plans to make the sharp-looking FPS Crysis accessible to a wide audience of PC gamers. "We developed almost all effects to be very scalable for different hardware specs," he says. "Fortunately this is much easier now that we can rely on the existence of hardware shaders. We believe clearly that Crysis will be enjoyed by a large audience that dates back to gamers with two- to three-year-old gaming rigs."
Although Yerli is confident that Crysis will run on older setups, he suggests that if you can only play the game on DX9, try not to view the game running in the superior DX10. "We work hard to give everyone a great experience," he states. "You should not miss anything when [only] playing it on DX9, but if you get a chance to play it on DX10 you might [miss the fidelity when going back to DX9].
He adds that close ties with software and hardware partners have helped Crytek overcome the complicated transition to Vista, DX10 and multi-core processors. Yerli says, "Working with early DX10 hardware was challenging, but our strong connections with Nvidia, Intel and Microsoft have helped a lot. We rarely had crashes, blue screens or rebooting machines."
He elaborates, "For DX10, we had to make bigger changes in our renderer. To utilize multi-core machines we identified good candidates, [such as] particle system and physics, and made them multi-threaded. It"s normal development, but bugs are harder to track, performance is less predictable and there is no benefit for single core processors. So not to sacrifice single core performance, [development] needs to be done carefully and [performance] benchmarked often."