No, the $2,500 Nvidia RTX Titan cannot run Crysis Remastered at 8K

Crysis Remastered is out now, and while it comes to the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One as well, there's only one platform we really want to play this on – PC.

Why? Because the original Crysis was a stunning game that set the benchmark for gaming graphics, and only the most powerful PCs at the time could play it at full settings.

With the remaster, Crytek has again pushed the envelope when it comes to graphics, and with ray-tracing support, and soon Nvidia DLSS compatibility, this is a game that's going to really shine on the best gaming PCs and gaming laptops.

But, we want to see just how much we can push both the game and our powerful 8K-ready PC, so we're going to see just how well Crysis Remastered plays at 8K (7,680 × 4,320) resolution.

Crysis Remastered 8K performance

After a spate of games that managed pretty impressive performance at 8K, such as Doom Eternal and Death Stranding, we were keen to see how Crysis Remastered coped at this resolution – especially considering its reputation.

Still, we didn't want to push things too far straight away, so we played the game at 'High' settings at 8K, and the results were... bad.

How bad? We had an average frame rate of 17.5FPS, far below what you'd consider playable. The game was jerky and laggy, and while it looked great, it was not fun to play. At one point, looking out at the water in the moonlight, it even dropped to 8.8FPS.

But what happened if we lowered the graphical settings? We tried it at 'Medium' and played through the same section, and this time we saw average frame rates of 30.4FPS.

That's more like it, and meant we could play the game reasonably well. Many console gamers are happy to play at 30FPS, which we'd say is the minimum acceptable FPS. But, it's a long way off from 60FPS, which is what we'd usually want to see at a minimum, especially when using the Nvidia RTX Titan graphics card, which costs $2,499 (around £2,000, AU$3,600).

But could we reach 60FPS at 8K with the RTX Titan? We tried putting the graphics on the lowest setting, and it still only managed 37.4FPS. Turning off Anti Aliasing and V-Sync as well let us hit a high of 48FPS for a few moments, but nowhere near that magical 60FPS. Also, playing on the lowest settings means the game starts to look its age.

So, can a $2,500 GPU play Crysis Remastered at 8K? Considering the hit on graphical effects to even get to a sort-of playable state, that's still well under 60FPS, we're going to have to say no.

How low can you go?

The fact that Crysis Remastered brought the $2,500 RTX Titan to its knees shows what a demanding game this is.

In fact, Crytek, the developer, embraced the challenge by including a 'Can it run Crysis' mode, which whacks all the settings to the very highest, including ray tracing.

So - of course - we had to give that a go at 8K. The results were like an admittedly very pretty slide show from someone's ultra-violent holiday. We saw the average frame rate plundge to just 12.4FPS, and the highest it ever got was 15.8FPS. Brutal.

Dropping the resolution down to 4K gave our test rig a much better change, and this time it managed an average of 27.2 fps, and even crept up to 33.8 fps at times.

Finally, we set the resolution at 1080p. This is still the most popular resolution for PC gamers, according to the latest Steam Hardware and Software Survey, at least, but it's a far cry from the 8K resolution we were going for.

But, this time we managed 58.7 fps on average, and even broke that magical 60 fps barrier!

So, when it comes to 'Can it run Crysis' -  the answer for our plucky rig is yes. It can. It only took at $2,500 GPU and running at 1080p to achieve it.

We'll be getting our hands on the Nvidia RTX 3090 soon, which Nvidia is pitching as an 8K gaming graphics card that is about $1,000 cheaper than the RTX Titan. We'll be putting it through its paces in a full review soon, and we'll definitely be trying out Crysis Remastered on it as well. Watch this space.

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