Explained: "But can it run Crysis?" Still melting PCs a decade on (Video)

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https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2018-why-crysis-still-melts-the-fastest-gaming-pcs-10-years-later

It's been ten years since Crysis first released on PC. In 2007, it pushed real time rendering to new heights and spawned the memetic phrase, "but can it run Crysis?". Never had a game released that pushed hardware and engine technology so much, and never has one since. In fact, combine the latest and greatest Intel Core i7 8700K overclocked to 5.0GHz with an Nvidia Titan Xp and there'll still be areas of the game that drop beneath 60fps - even at 1080p. For its own very specific reasons, Crysis is still more than capable of melting the most modern, top-end PCs, but regardless, it remains a phenomenal technological achievement.

In the video below, I play through the first level of the game, highlighting the strengths and weaknesses of its rendering - and it's this initial stage that was our first glimpse of the game back in 2007.
-https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PcYA-H3qpTI

Image: Not a trick, not an illusion. Yes, this 2007 game is running at under 40fps on the fastest CPUs money can buy.

Crysis also hails from an era where the future of CPU technology was heading in a very different direction than Crytek may have originally envisaged. It is multi-core aware to a certain extent - gaming workloads can be seen across four threads - but the expectation for PC computing, especially from Intel with its Netburst architecture, was that the real increase in speed in computing would happen from massive increases in clock speed, with the expectations of anything up to 8GHz Pentiums in the future. It never happened, of course, and that's the key reason why it is impossible to run Crysis at 60fps, even on a Core i7 8700K overclocked to 5GHz.

Read full post: Why Crysis still melts the fastest gaming PCs a decade after release