So Crysis was a game from 2007 that was kind of created as a tech demo for CryTek's new engine, CryEngine 2.

Like, it was a full game, but it was made to show off what their cool new toy could do.

And it does look very impressive. And, rather famously, was extremely demanding on the computer running it.

Only top-end machines could run it at all, and even those couldn't run it at maximum settings.

And...that is still the case to this day!

So what is it about Crysis that makes it to impossible to run, almsot 20 years later?

Well, the team at CryTek made a unique decision during development. They wanted to future-proof their game, so that it would still look good 3-5 years into the future.

So they actually targeted hardware that did not yet exist.

They projected what CPU clock speeds would look like in the coming years and made that the target hardware.

But here's the problem: those CPUs never got made.

we pivoted to multi-cores instead, right

Because around this time, CPU manufacturers started hitting the limits of what they could put onto a single chip.

There's only so small you can make transistors, and so much heat you can remove from the system with conventional cooling methods. Making CPUs faster was rapidly becoming a dead-end. So, as QUinn said, manufacturers switched to adding more CPUs instead. 2-core machines, then 4-cores, and so on.

This allowed for the total amount of computational power to continue increasing. But!

If your software isn't written to take advantage of the existence of these extra cores, it's all going to be running single-threaded on one core, not taking advantage of the existence of the other cores. And that core is not any faster than a CPU from 2007.

So because CryTek made a bad assumption about the future of computer hardware, Crysis remains unplayable without a HEAVILY overclocked rig.

You know what I was actually considering getting Crysis

thinking "I bet my computer could run Crysis now"

I bet it can't

Not on maximum settings

ngl the tech historian in me LOVES this