Ah, Crysis. One of the most unique PC FPS experiences back in 2007. Crytek’s masterpiece was way ahead of its time visually, and came with some truly great gameplay mechanics. Its level design, its enemy AI, its nanosuit abilities; everything felt great. And since today it’s its 10th anniversary, we’ve decided to share with you the best graphics mods you can use for it.
Let’s start with the mod that every gamer must use; POM + AF. When Crysis game out, PC gamers had to choices. They could either enjoy Parallax Occlusion Mapping, or force/enable Anisotropic Filtering. Due to engine limitations, Crysis did not support both of them. Thankfully, this mod allows you to enable both of them. This will immediately increase the graphical fidelity of the game. Therefore, you should download it even if you are not interested in any of the other mods.
Blackfire is our second mod of choice. This is a stunning and completely customizable Lighting Mod that changes the look of all levels of the singleplayer campaign of Crysis. According to the modders, the goal was not to bring a more reliastic lighting, but to bring more life to the game, and encourage people to replay the game, with an innovative look.
On the other hand, Maximum Immersion is a graphics mod that aims to get the best out of the graphics of this classic game. Contrary to Blackfire, Maximum Immersion targets a more natural and realistic look. This means that overprocessed shaders were not added to it. The mod contains all of the best available textures and a unique System.cfg, optimized for 2,5K and 4K downsampling. It also contains a tweak guide and adds hotkeys to the nanosuit functions.
Crysis Tod Texture Mod is a collection of mods for Crysis. It comes with numerous custom weapons, CRYZENX’s Shaders, Xtreme Particle Effects Chaos, and Tire POM. This collection also features the high-resolution textures from Rygel, Silent and Slicer91. Below you can find a video showcasing the mod in action.
Crysis Expanded MOD is a mod we featured in the past. This mod comes with new AI, new areas map, new textures, new watershaders, real time water reflections and a tweak menu.
Last but not least, Crysis “HD Textures Pack 2016” is mainly a high-resolution Texture Pack for Crysis. This pack does not bring any TOD changes, so this can be used by almost all PC gamers who wish to experience Crysis in its vanilla setting. According to its creator, this pack features textures that were specially chosen so that there is no drastic artistic change. Everything was done in order to maintain the original “atmosphere” of the 2007 version, but with higher quality textures.
Have fun everyone!
John is the founder and Editor in Chief at DSOGaming. He is a PC gaming fan and highly supports the modding and indie communities. Before creating DSOGaming, John worked on numerous gaming websites. While he is a die-hard PC gamer, his gaming roots can be found on consoles. John loved – and still does – the 16-bit consoles, and considers SNES to be one of the best consoles. Still, the PC platform won him over consoles. That was mainly due to 3DFX and its iconic dedicated 3D accelerator graphics card, Voodoo 2. John has also written a higher degree thesis on the “The Evolution of PC graphics cards.”
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Crysis still looks better than 90-95% of “AAA” games 10 years later.
Honestly, what other good game made by crytek except crysis and crysis warhead?
yes, but I truly meant what other good game made by Crytek after crysis and crysis warhead?
Old far cry game. Fix
Thanks for this article. According to your experiences, which mod combination, from ones mentioned here, are you recommending (including their installation order)? I am expecting, that install them all will not be good solution.
I’m a long time Crysis modder. And I’d recommend to go with the following mods:
Textures: Maximum Immersion
Shaders: Xzero’s or CryZenX’s modified Xzero shaders
Water: Starwasters or the alternative version hosted on mega by me.
Misc: POM + AF
Misc 2: Lamarr’s High-res nanosuit (yes, it looks better than Chrome’s Ultra nanosuit)
Misc 3: Reli2 by Hawkeye-Puppy (cry-puppy)
My Crysis Ultra config
My Crysis SweetFX preset
Imo those mods together looks great, not overdone or extreme like the Blackfire, Expanded or any of CryZenX’s mods. It’s just enough of everything, natural and beautiful.
By the way you can download several of those from my mega archive, including my config and reshade preset. 🙂 Feel free to brows it:
mega(dot)nz/#F!wVIDxYIC!BZGEm4TwKxzt3b9WSZIbcw
Hi. Thanks a lot. I try these mods in one of following days. In what order they should be installed? Or it does not matter?
Crysis is an excellent game to date on the PC
The console version that came many years later does not even comes at the foot of the PC version.
Crysis 2 was the beginning of the extreme downgrade, because Crytek started to launch the PC version along with the consoles version and the game was extremely limited, the physics much praised in the first game was extremely reduced in Crysis 2, We could not cut any trees anymore by shooting at them like Crysis 1, the interaction with the scenarios was greatly diminished, the scenarios were not extensive and had invisible walls on all sides, and many more defects Crysis 2 presented because of the crap of the limited consoles.
This is all true, but Crysis 2 also had some nice features: Better gunplay, better controls, better suit controls, a more fleshed out narrative, and a few other little things.
If they could merge Crysis 1 and 2 into something special that would be amazing.
Crysis 1 was like Far Cry 1 with better GFX.
Crysis 2 was like Call of Duty with better GFX.
Yup. I knew something was wrong when they released parallax textures after launch. And FarCry andd Crysis both had that moment where you walk from an enclosed area into this impressive, wide open area; Crysis 2 had that moment, except it was so underwhelming by comparison.
I hope we get another PC-exclusive Crysis one day, although I won’t hold my breath. At least one for the PC, PS4 Pro and Xbox One X, so it’s not held back by the PS4 and, especially, the Xbox One.
this is one of the first game i bought . and i still remember how it almote killed me when i saw max 10 FPS on my trash pc . it good old memoryes
Man i remember back when i first got into PC gaming i was going to “upgrade” to a 6200 PCI yes PCI not PCI-E card. I of course never did since i found out that would be dumb lol but i bought a new PC with a 4800+ in it and Nvidia 6150 integrated graphics i could play crysis at the lowest resolution and visual settings at probably 20fps or lower then i finally did it i got a 9500GT DDR3 card and i could play Crysis at low-medium settings at 30fps i never went back to console gaming sense.
Sold my 360 just to afford a 9500GT and a Antec earth watt 380 PSU.
The best mod IMHO is to go thru all the settings on the config file and max it out, if you have a 8GB or bigger memory, i don’t see many doing it. I really recommend playing it at minimum of 4k and going 8k if possible to put an end on the aliasing. Some of the texture packs are nice, most of lighting mods are off.
Yeah the game is stunning in 4K. I would suggest using Sparse Grid SuperSampling using Nvidia Inspector together with 4K ingame resolution, it completely rids the game of any aliasing and makes everything on screen “pop”
On my 980TI I get around 30 FPS with all the greatest graphics mods, 4K, 4x SGSSAA and a custom config that goes beyond the Very High ingame preset.
Here’s some screenshots I recently captured:
http://abload.de/img/15pox5.jpg
http://abload.de/img/2ocpng.jpg
http://abload.de/img/3geqh8.jpg
http://abload.de/img/4g4o5z.jpg
http://abload.de/img/5uso4d.jpg
http://abload.de/img/69eocy.jpg
Yes, this is what i’m talking about, not sure why there is a magenta cast in some shots, but to me this is more like it!
Glad you like em. The magenta tint, well I’m playing around with lots of different Technicolor and DPX settings via ceejay’s shaders (reshade), those screenshots doesn’t all have the exact same settings I suppose. It’s easily tweakable though. Something I’ve been struggling with lately is to tone down the IMO oversaturated green channel for the vegetation in Crysis, I kinda ended up with something that worked 🙂 But red’s can be a little weird/strong as a side effect, which I also tried to counter. It’s a back and forth battle for balance.
Oh ok, i thought they were non edited ones.
Thank you for showing them, it even solidifies my POV about the matter.
Oscar… My old nemesis… Nice screen shots:) I’ll have to try our your suggestions when I get home.
Thanks buddy! No hard feelings here 🙂 Sure thing chief! Oh and by the way, check further below for my list of recommended mods.
Really the game is almost legendary. It killed the FPS on almost everyone’s rig. For years afterwards people would say “but can it run Crysis ?” whenever a new GPU came out. The graphics were utterly amazing back then. Some people called it “just a demo” for Crytek’s engine but the game was good imo.
I was running a 8800 GT when it came out and that was nowhere near enough GPU except on low settings. It was years later when I got a GTX 580 that I was really able to appreciate just how great this game looked. It still does look great.
The game stuttered even when playing it on my rather new PC. I think it’s a problem with the engine at this point.
Crytek really has gone downhill over the years. I would not be surprised at all if the company closes shop. They have already shut down some of their studios and several times didn’t have the money to pay some of their employees for months.
Well I don’t know if this is true. But I heard recently (some time ago) that Crytek would shift focus on the “core strength of Crytek” go back to their roots and continue with what made them great from the start. I sincerely hope that means no more console focus, no more VR, no more BS.
I loved this game, I even played the 360 version :p
The odd thing about Crysis is that it doesn’t have anisotropic filtering option.
I am using the total immersion mod right now. Can I use any of these other mods with it or will it jank everything up? If it will are there any other graphics mods I can pair with total immersion? I guess it feels like my FPS is too high since I used to barely be able to hit 60 with everything on low
Back in 2007 to get good fps on my trash GT 6200 i had to edit all maps in CryEngine 2 SDK and remove 60% of grass and trees 😉 It was worth it XD
The GOAT
They started chasing the money after Crysis. Cross-platform Crysis 2 resulted in a worse game than its predecessor, pretty sure they decided at one point to only make F2P games, and then the VR stuff more recently. Wouldn’t be surprised if Ryse was just intended as a tech demo to sell their engine. I have a soft-spot for them, but perhaps the success of FarCry and Crysis was pure luck… maybe they’re only good at making shooters in a tropical environment.
Still waiting on the real Crysis 2 to come out.
Can I recommend using Microsoft Office Word when writing these articles? It highlights spelling and grammar errors and offers corrections to them. Grammar and spelling aren’t so important in general as long as the point drives home, however, being that this is a publishing platform for textual formats, it might prove useful -in terms of acquiring an audience- to be sharp, clear and concise.
This is less criticism and more friendly advice.