Crysis 2 DirectX 11 Patch Analysis

Texture Detail

Below, you can see two sets of screenshots. The first set (upper) show our original texture analysis images from Crysis 2 v1.0 (left to right: High, Very High and Extreme, Ultra with DirectX 11 and high resolution texures). The second set (lower) show Crysis 2 v1.9 with DirectX 11 features and high resolution textures on and off (left to right: on, off).

The interesting thing to note about these images is that, actually, the high resolution texture pack doesn't have as much an impact on the graphical detail as the DirectX 11 images. The increase in texture resolution is still apparent, especially if you look at the plank of wood on the right-hand side of the first set of images, but DirectX 11's improved tessellation functions offer more dramatic improvements. Look at the uneven brickwork edges in the DirectX 11 images to see tessellation at work.


The improvements offered by tessellation show up in the second set of images too, making the cobbles seem to stand up more than they do when DirectX 11 is disabled. The benefits of the texture pack, however, are mainly only evident when it comes to incidental details, such as piles of rubble and planks of wood. This makes sense in a way; Crysis 2 even in its vanilla incarnation still has impressive textures on most noteworthy objects.

Water Detail

Outside of a few scripted events, such as when players are in a flooded building in the latter stages of the game, water is mostly absent from Crysis 2. It shows up in a few areas certainly, but New York isn't exactly known for its wide canals and beautiful lakes, is it?


It's not hugely surprising then that, when we looked at altering the water detail setting in v1.9 of Crysis 2, we saw the same as when we did so in Crysis v1.0 - absolutely no visible change. This is in spite of Crytek's work to offer dynamically tessellated water meshes.

One area where we did see a change, however, was when it came to the reactivity of water in Crysis 2 - which we've demonstrating by shooting it. According to Nvidia, water reactions in Crysis 2 now support sub-surface scattering and wave crest foam approximation, all of which is done in the domain shader. The overall effect is simply that the water looks much prettier when you splash about in it.