Great article by Alex, as usual. He's tough, but fair. Nails a lot of stuff less experienced technical writers get wrong. (No, the game isn't single threaded. It's more complex than that.)
Long story short, the game should not have shipped in this state. There's a lot of good in the remaster. A lot of work was put in, especially with them making an effort to cater to PC fans. This is not some lazy cash grab put together in a few months. Aspects of it are rushed, but they tried.
The issues it has are accumulative. A flaw here, a flaw there, all adding up to something annoying. Some are quite trivial to fix, in theory. Little oversights like wind/bend calculations being wrong, so trees don't sway as much as 2007. Others may be simple bugs, like explosions not affecting vegetation. The behavior to make vegetation vertex sway is in there. The physics being at half rate is an engine thing. Clearly not intentional, IMO. PS3/360 port didn't have that issue, it is very important to note. You shoot a palm tree branch on 360, and it sways at full speed.
Fans want a worthy replacement for Crysis 2007. They don't want a big asterisk.
Here's an example of a lack of attention to detail. The Scar model used in the remaster is actually a broken version from the OG game. It has a UV mapping problem that is glaring in hindsight. They used the wrong file somehow. This broken file is in the OG game. I think what happened is that they took the PS3/360 version and added the original PC weapon models. But they used the wrong file for the Scar. (The PS3/360 weapon models are actually quite nice, BTW. They should include them as an option.)
When the remaster came out on Switch, nobody noticed a lot of the oversights. But within a day of the PC version coming out, it has been scrutinized beyond belief. And that's to be expected. Crysis fans on PC love the game dearly, and that makes them... passionate, sometimes.
Over on the Discord, Crytek released a statement this evening, saying:
We hope you've been enjoying the release of Crysis Remastered! We'd like to thank all the players on each platform that are taking their time to make detailed bug reports to our Discord and other Social Media channels. Keep up the good work! We've already relayed a ton of these bugs to the Crytek and Saber interactive Dev teams. We should have more information about known issues, patches on all platforms, and the reintroduction of lost Crysis features in the coming future. We are listening to all the community feedback and are committed to making Lingshan island a place you are happy to call home (And a place you are happy to throw some barrels at enemies in your sick Nano Suit!)
Which is encouraging. As long as they're in this for the long haul, I think it'll work out. Some of the performance issues are due to the vegetation rendering being just too much. Bear in mind that Medium settings run pretty darn well. And it looks pretty damn good on Medium. But above Medium? Everything falls apart very quickly. There is no CPU on earth that can handle Very High and Can It Run Crysis settings related to vegetation, shadows, and ray tracing. (Plus HW acceleration of RT isn't activating automatically like it was supposed to.) They need to seriously re-evaluate those settings, and the game's performance as a whole on PC. Most Crysis fans would gladly take some visual downgrades if it meant that the higher settings made sense from a performance perspective. GPU performance is increasingly constantly. When CR is leaning on a small number of threads (AI/Logic+Render+Physics+Ray Tracing) without much wriggle room, CPU performance is not going to increase meaningfully in the next few years. This is a major, major issue.
The only reason the console versions run well (including 60fps modes on a Jaguar CPU) is because they have much less vegetation. Way, way less. Less than OG PC. The PC version of the remaster has dense vegetation, far eclipsing the OG in density and draw distance. They went overboard. A lot of people don't realise just how many trees and how much grass they jammed into this remaster on PC.
Other performance woes are caused by bugs. You change settings and sometimes the performance goes berserk.
For example, this 970 benchmark shows the game locked at 72fps with random drops, even on Low.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9-bFC87i0k8 The game has gone apeshit, and most people aren't gonna realize that something is really wrong. Issues like this REALLY need fixing because they make a contentious performance situation so much worse.
You run in windowed mode, and sometimes it starts ******** itself for no apparent reason. Did I mention this game boots in borderless windowed mode even though you selected fullscreen? Classic CryEngine nosense. It's Crysis 2 all over again.
