Some days ago, the software rasterizer Swiftshader from Transgaming was released as a demo. It's way than the software rasterizer from Microsoft itself. Currently, Swiftshader supports Shader Model 2.0 which means that a lot of DX9 games work solely on the main processor. The CPU does all the computation in this case like pixel shading, texture filtering and transform and lighting.
German website PCGH.de did some benchmarks (3DMark, Crysis) and shows the visual difference when rendered with the CPU compared to the GPU. So maybe this is a trend like raytracing? Who knows...
In honour of PlayStation's 30th birthday yesterday in the US, data company Circana has dug out figures showing the top 20 best-selling PlayStation video games ever (date-range Jan 1995 to July 2025). Don't get too excited.
This is a great reminder of how game sales have become more concentrated in a smaller number of games/series over time. In the PS1/PS2 era a game was a success if it sold a million or a few million copies. The GTA games (3/Vice City/San Andreas) were pretty big outliers in selling as much as they did during the PS2 era. So in the minds of a lot of gamers something like FF VII feels like it was as big of a PS1 game as God of War 2018 was for PS4, but in reality far fewer people bought it (though it has obviously reached additional people through remasters, etc.).
What this says to me is, not many people are buying a PS to play PS exclusives. Like so many false narratives, like Xbox gamers don't buy games! It seems Playstation as a default system is a vanilla system to play call of duty, Minecraft, GTA games and a sports games.
if you look back into the PS history, it has always been the 3rd parties who sells the most games. it was just that the PS1 and PS2 were so dominant that many of those 3rd party games were exclusives. so, back during the PS1 and PS2 days, the strategy was "to sell as many consoles as possible in order to sell more 1st party exclusives" to ride on that wave. The strategy to push many 1st party exclusives to sell consoles only started with the PS3 when many of those prior 3rd party exclusives went multiplat but more accurately, it started with the PSP.
Sony saw with the PSP, which was being trounced in sales by the DS, that 3rd party exclusives are hard to come by if you're not dominating the market. So they started building more 1st party games and when the PS3 were facing difficulties in sales, they knew they had to rely on their own to differentiate the PS3 from the 360. So the strategy back then changed to "release more 1st party exclusives in order to sell more consoles".
the only manufacturer that is still consistently selling their hardware to play 1st party exclusives, is Nintendo, and that was because they gave up the armrace for power thus they can't rely on 3rd parties anymore as all multiplats play better on competing consoles. AND that's also why they are the most ominous in going after emulators and also patent trolling!
so, you're not wrong there, but not an "aha!" moment or anything. it has been this way since the last, at least, 15 years for Playstation.
@zerobalance
So... what this tells you is that Call of duty, being the absolute check writer that it is, has been outsold by Last of us, God of war, 2 Spider man games..... Saying Playstation exclusives doesn't sell is like saying call of duty doesn't sell because they have outsold some of iterations. Does that make sense to you?
Holger Frydrych has just released a cool VR Mod for the 2007 version of Crytek's first-person shooter, Crysis.
Playing it right now looks amazing! :D
so much fun, i hope they make a vr mod for crysis 2 / 3 too!
This is amazing. This is the direction VR should go in to boost adoption. Since I have beaten every Crysis except 1, this is now a good excuse to correct that problem.
According to Crytek CEO Cervat Yerli, "I want[ed] to make sure Crysis does not age, that [it] is future proofed, meaning that if I played it three years from now, it should look better than today." Yerli and the team designed Crysis' highest graphical settings for the PC hardware of 2010 and beyond.
While Crytek has officially announced Crysis 4 is in development, nothing new has surfaced. For now, gamers' only way to scratch that itch is to play the Crysis Remastered Trilogy available on PC and consoles.
OG 2007 Crysis (not the remastered weirdo), is & will forever be a legend amongst the PC community.
This video will always be impressive to me, even for years to come. Some things here are better than games we have today, OG crysis is the best version!
https://youtu.be/SVg63_aNr-...
I'm still shocked that it looks as good as it does today, puts some modern games to shame.
I thought the remaster was fine tbh some rough edges at launch but after some patches it's decent
I mean the lighting and physics still hold up extremely well. I still revisit it from time to time.
Yeah unfortunately Crystek's decision to bet on the linear progression of clock speed in CPUs was derailed by the unforseen shift towards multicore CPUs. It just wasn't built with that in mind because that wasn't even in the conversation at the moment
I remember when I tried to play Crysis with my Intel Pentium Dual core E2200 @2.2GHz , 4GB ram and GeForce 9400gt. I was a kid back then and that was the best I could do. I would get about 15 to 20 fps. When I over clocked the CPU to 2.8GHz I would get about 40fps. The experience wasn't good at all and it was the only PC game I could not run back then unless and put the settings on low. At that point the game went from cutting edge graphics to PS2 graphics. To this day I haven't completed the OG Crysis. I was able to complete Crysis 2 and 3 after building a new PC when I got my first job.
Worth a try just because it's the only game that lets you pick up a turtle on the beach and throw it at enemy soldiers that should have been a back of the box feature.
But nah seriously unless you're nostalgic for it I'm not sure if it will hold up
better in the top images.
Can someone explain to me how this works,
i'm not a big techie.
GPU seems to be the best- you can tell from the lighting
GPU seems to be the better, though CPU rendering comes close. Anyway, those Crysis shots look like its running on medium settings.
does that mean i can now run these on my computer? it can do everything except shaders (it has 00) so i dont know, not really i wiz on pc gaming. can someone please explain?
Is this all hardware?
This is great! Imagine the fastest CPU working with a top of the line graphics card at the same time. Graphics would be dramatically superior from consoles. I'd get serious with PC gaming all over again.