Nvidia's New RTX 3080 Can Barely Run Crysis: Remastered at 4K

What happens when you have a copy of Crysis: Remastered and Nvidia’s new RTX 3080 graphics card in your possession? You see if the RTX 3080 can run it, naturally. One of my hopes for Crysis: Remastered was that it would be just as punishing on PCs today as it was when originally released in 2007. Now that the game has been redone with new lighting, updated assets, ray traced reflections, 8K textures, and a bunch of other things that add a much more real and detailed look to the entire world—oh yeah, Crysis: Remastered is still the beast it was 13 years ago.

During a recent interview with PC Gamer, the game’s project lead Steffen Halbig said that “in 4K, there is no card out there which can run it in ‘Can it Run Crysis’ mode at 30 fps.” I tested that claim out for myself with the same test bench I used to review the RTX 3080: Intel i9-10900K,  Asus ROG Maximus XII, 16 GB (8 GB x 2) G.Skill Trident Z Royal 2133 Mhz, Samsung 970 Evo 500 GB M.2 PCIe SSD, Corsair H150i Pro RGB 360mm AIO cooler, and Seasonic 1000W PSU. While running the game with every graphics setting cranked to the max will still net you just above 30 fps, that frame rate is by no means consistent. Like the Metro Exodus and Control ray tracing 4K tests I did for my RTX 3080 review, Crysis: Remastered will also cycle between stutters, freezes, and smooth frame rates. But gosh it looks so pretty!

‘Can it Run Crysis?’ is a special graphics setting that pushes the player’s PC to the max. Think of it like the ‘ultra’ setting on a lot of games. This setting cranks up the quality of objects, shadows, and other texture and lighting affects to push the limitations of your GPU. Halbig wasn’t exaggerating. Maybe the RTX 3090 will be able to run it, but the RTX 3080 struggled. It performed as well as Control did at 4K on ultra with ray tracing turned on, which wasn’t exactly playable.

If you want to get over 60 fps with all the graphical settings maxed out, dropping the resolution down to 1080p will do the trick. The game runs at a smooth 70 fps at 1080p. But it struggles at 1440p too, netting just 48 fps. Given the 15-20 fps lead the RTX 3080 has over the RTX 2080 Ti with ray tracing turned on, don’t even bother trying to get this game to run on anything lower than an RTX 3080 if you max out the settings.

On medium settings, the RTX 3080 gets an average of 110 fps on 4K and 60 fps on high at 4K, which is the minimum setting required to activate all the ray tracing effects. That would put the RTX 2080 Ti somewhere around 90 fps and 40 fps on the same settings.

So, there still are PCs with a RTX 2080 Ti or lower that will be able to run the game, but players will have to compromise between higher frame rates and lower graphics settings or lower resolutions. One thing’s for sure—Crysis: Remastered is in a good position to make its way back into every reviewer’s list of benchmarks. I have a few fun benchmarking tests planned, so stay tuned.