Crysis 3 preview

The deposed king has taken back his iron throne!

Back in 2007, one game became the benchmark to determine if you have built great gaming system. Crysis.
Even with highest end hardware you can purchase, ultra settings is pretty much beyond the reach of any mortal. In fact it took me 2 upgrades from 7900GT to 8800GT, then HD5850 to play this game at max setting and decent AA. In fact, it became a tongue in cheek where people would ask " but can it run crisis?" Because before the arrival of next generation hardware, nothing could run it at max.
Crysis 2 is rather lackluster due to their sudden focus in console and the PC released is marred by bugs and mediocre visual quality. It looks decent and runs very smooth but it's not a improvement over its predecessor.
Here come's the fourth game and third overhaul of the engine. And boy, it impresses. Without a doubt its the best looking game currently out now. Due to time constraint as a final year graduate student, I have yet to complete its single player.
But its confirmed. It brings current generation single GPU to its knee. And it churn out some of the most photorealistic image ever seen in real time. perform on a HD7950 is rather depressing. Using the default settings offered at startup which is very high for all and high for texture, I got 20fps at the first mission.
The game offer a lot of options to tweak, especially AA. It is noticed that aliasing is very prominent in this game. Shimmering of the aliasing is very common in many places. The only complain of this game visuals is its aliasing, spoiling the sense of realism. MSAA, my favorite AA mode seems to do a really bad job in removing them. SMAA is also offered and I find 2TX offering noticeable AA but it consume too much resources for that little benefit yielded. Eventually I settled for FXAA instead that is a post processing filter but may blur text and texture. This is due to its light performance impact and lack of much text in game that FXAA may blur.
Object setting is also set to high to reduce the tessellation amount and have gained me the most significant amount of performance. Motion blur is also reduce to low to prevent that annoying blur triggered with every minor movement. The rest of the settings is set to very high with 4x AF with vsync off. Texture is also set to very high and seems to have very little impact in performance on my card. FPS now varies between 25fps to 35fps. Indoor scenes usually runs above 40fps.
Another minor complain is the water physics requiring additional tweaking. It forms ripple on some wrong places and the ripple feels unnatural. The reflection and animation of the water however, is top notch. It is a great step forward compared to other engines due to the use of tessellation but its far from perfect.
In my short play through, the story seems to be more coherent and the characters are more fleshed out. Nothing compared to half life but still a great improvement over previous games.  The sandbox seems to have expanded greatly compared to the linear Crysis 2 but haven't experienced any level rivaling the starting levels of Crysis.