Crysis 2 being re-designed for GTX580? Expect delays

Having the world's fastest car is no fun unless you have the right racetrack. If that track does not exist, then you will need to build it. For cars, that means splashing out on a Nürburgring or something similar. With graphic cards, it means having a triple A title that pushes everything you do well, to the absolute limit. Enter EA.

With the GTX480, nVidia had a massive lead in graphics processing techniques like tessellation. Unfortunately, there were almost no games in the market that utilised that additional processing power. Aliens Vs Predator included tessellation – but just enough to allow AMD and nVidia to compete on a similar playing field. Great for gamers, not so good for nVidia. Millions have been paid to create a Fermi processor with butt-mastering tessellation capability, which isn't being utilised by game developers. What a quandary. How to fix it?

Enter Crysis 2 and a $2m spend from nVidia's marketing team.

Looking at the GTX580 specifications revealed by KitGuru here, this card has a very specific profile. To justify a price tag of almost £450 it will need to do some very special stuff. It will need to pull clear ahead of AMD's best GPU in a series of top games.

It's likely that Crysis 2 will become a major benchmark for 2011.

In recent months, in development labs across the region, Crytek experts have been busy beavering to get the game into stores on 25th March 2011. This date has been set in stone on sites across Europe for many months. We're betting that it will change. By quite a bit.

One of KitGuru's cohorts was at the Multiplay i29 event on 24th November 2006 when several people involved in Crysis, including Sebastian Spatzek were asked a ton of questions about the (then) new game.

Just prior to the main onstage demo, the question was asked “Why the delays and why does the game now seem so slow on normal hardware compared to the earlier builds that beta-ed their way into the market. Anything to do with recent sponsorship deals?”. The reply was a wry smile and a gentle shrug of the shoulders. Not sure that you can read anything definitive into that, except to say that the game did come out long after it was expected and it ran like a pig on most set-ups. Strangely, with Zardon's Tri-SLi nVidia uber-rig it worked fine. Coincidence?

KitGuru says: There are lots of reasons why a company would spend $2m sponsoring a game so close to launch. Whatever the reason, it's hard to ignore the possibility that it is being re-styled for the GTX580 and GTX590 cards with an absolute ton of additional tessellation IQ. For those that can afford a GTX580 going into Xmas, we believe that your Crysis 2 experience when it launches (several months after March) will be as good as it gets.

Nano blast below, BFG in the KitGuru forums.

Become a Patron!