We have benchmarked no game more than Crysis 3. It took pride of place in our GPU and CPU testing for a colossal eight years – longer than any other title. And even today, the fully maxed Crysis 3 PC experience poses profound challenges to the most powerful PC components on the market. That's one reason why we're still playing the game, the other is – put simply – that we love it, and the good news is that the upcoming Nintendo Switch rendition of Crysis 3 Remastered is shaping up very, very nicely. The idea of this game running well on a 2015 mobile chipset – downclocked, no less – is mind-bending but there it is.
There are a couple of good reasons why Crysis 3 Remastered runs well on Switch and that starts with the scalability of the original game. Yes, Crytek's 2013 game is monstrously demanding at its highest settings, but knock back the quality presets and it turns out to be far more manageable on a wider range of kit – and let's not forget that there was a rendition of the game that ran on Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. Yes, it didn't run particularly well, but a foundation was there – and in actual fact, the Switch version is scaled up from those last, last-gen versions of the game. That leads us onto the second key reason why this project succeeds: the quality of the developer. The entire Crysis Remastered Trilogy on Switch was handled primarily by Saber Interactive's Swedish studio. It did a great job on the first Crysis Remastered, but its pedigree goes further than that – this is the studio that pulled off the impossible with the Switch conversion of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt.
The video content on this page demonstrates rather well how good the Switch port of Crysis 3 looks, but at the fundamental level, Saber takes the PS360 version, strips out the lacklustre post-process anti-aliasing of the period and replaces it with TAA – all but eliminating the pixel popping, jaggies and shimmering. This is just a first look, so we've not gone deep in terms of comparisons, but it's also clear that detail levels – particularly on grass – have improved tremendously. Quality upgrades are thinner on the ground compared to Crysis and Crysis 2 Remastered, but once again, SVOGI real-time global illumination is added – even on Switch.
