Crysis 2 Xbox 360 vs PC comparison

Crysis 2 Xbox 360 vs PC Comparison

Read our Crysis 2 review

We’re still knee-deep in Crytek’s latest shooter, Crysis 2, with our copy of the PC version having only just unlocked for us to play through – which was why we had to do a Crysis 2 Xbox 360 review first. Still, when we booted up the PC version of Crysis 2 this morning we couldn’t help but notice how much better the game looked on PC than console.

As such, while we’ll have a full PC review and graphics analysis done soon, we wanted to share some comparative screenshots we’ve taken on both platforms, to provide the best idea of how the game looks. This is an apples-to-apples comparison, free from publisher-released images.


The Xbox 360 images were captured with an Avermedia 727 HD Capture card. The PC screenshots were taken on a Scan 3XS Scorpion-X, which packs a 4.8GHz Intel Core i7-2600K CPU, 8GB of DDR3 RAM and an overclocked Nvidia GeForce GTX 590 3GB graphics card. The Scorpion-X was more than capable of running Crysis 2 on all of the three graphics presets (High, Very High and Extreme), never dropping below 60fps. At least one PC definitely can run Crysis 2...


It is strange that Crytek has named the three graphics options in this way, rather than the usual High, Medium and Low. It’s also strange that you're limited only to using these presets too, rather than tweaking settings individually. While a fan-made advanced graphics tweaker is available, we found it unreliable and prone to introducing new graphics errors.


One difference which does bear pointing out is that while we used the same screen for the the PC and Xbox 360 version of the game, the two hardware platforms delivered images to the screen a very different manner. The PC ran Crysis 2 at 2,560 x 1,600 – the native resolution of the 30in Dell 3007WFP screen we were using – while the Xbox 360 upscales from a resolution below 720p (1,440 x 720). This heavily affects the image quality, obviously.

We’ll bring further analysis on Crysis 2’s graphics options in a later article, but from these screenshots we’ve noticed that the Xbox 360 version of the game has dramatically poorer texture quality, fewer light sources and no advanced light effects, such as bloom and HDR. There are also fewer objects in the Xbox 360 version, evidenced by the trees and clutter that are visible on the PC screens, but not Xbox 360 ones.

We’ll have a more detailed graphics analysis of the Crysis 2 on PC early next week, but until then take a look at the screenshots above and let us know your thoughts in the forums.