Crytek has shared an image of the new Crysis Remastered running at the maximum settings and we were able to compare it against the vanilla version (thanks to Isaac Clarke), giving an idea of the sheer number of enhancements. Here’s the comparison:
Right off the bat, you can see that the textures have been re-created with scratch with much more detail. The second most obvious upgrade is in terms of lighting. Notice how the trees are lit much more accurately and the higher LOD of the shadows and ambient occlusion.
The vegetation is much denser and detailed as well, as part of the LOD bump.
This should increase the CPU load as well as GPU load. Proper optimizations such as the use of mesh shaders and batch draw-calls to the CPU can more or less mitigate this though.
If you look in the distance, the mountains are also significantly more detailed, thanks to the use of advanced geometry and tessellation. Overall, the scene is much less “monotonous” due to the use of SVOGI (voxel-based GI). This along with ray-tracing will be the most obvious enhancements to the remaster. A refresher on graphics technologies used in games:
