Game:

Far Cry (2004)

Duration: 0:00

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13

REAL HARDWARE CAPTURE IN 4:3 ASPECT RATIO.

PRE-ALPHA / PROTOTYPE / TECH DEMO by Crytek, E3 2002
800x600 pixels (default) is the only baseline resolution that works correctly with the sniper scope.

Crytek sure made a lot of progress with their love-child CryEngine in the early 2000s, with its humble (yet also highly advanced) beginning as a benchmark application called X-Isle in September 2000 (to coincide with ECTS that year) to the E3 2002 demo shown in this video. Honestly, this isn’t far from how the retail version plays. Crytek could have thrown together some vaguely compelling levels throughout 2002 and sold it as a product by the end of the year and no one would have complained. OK, that’s maybe too optimistic a scenario but this is still really cool stuff!

There are some obvious traits of a work-in-progress build to be seen in this demo, many of which are also graphical rendering quirks. I used drivers old enough to pre-date the E3 2002 demo but after also testing it with newer drivers I can confirm that these anomalies are not driver-related.

There is supposed to be a crashing and exploding plane in the E3 demo level but I wasn’t aware of it when I captured the footage. Rest assured that it will probably slow down as horribly as the helicopter crash, if not more so, due to the inferno of fire near the crash site.

- SYSTEM SPECIFICATIONS - -
Operating system used: Microsoft Windows XP SP3.
Drivers used for GeForce4 Ti4600: nVidia Detonator 28.32 (March 2002).
Drivers used for Sound Blaster Audigy: original retail CD-ROM drivers (July 2001).

This footage and audio was captured from the following computer:
Intel D850MV motherboard and chipset (board manufactured week 6 2002; has "D850MV/D850EMV2" silk-screened on it)
Intel Pentium 4 2.4 GHz processor; Northwood, 400 MHz FSB (S-spec: SL65R, manufactured week 4 2002 according to heatspreader)
nVidia GeForce 4 Ti4600 (128 MB) display adapter/graphics card (board manufactured week 7 2002)
Creative Labs Sound Blaster Audigy (SB0090) sound card; early variant that has "Creative Audigy" sticker on the EMU10K2 integrated circuit (manufactured around August 2001)
1024 MBs (1 GB) Samsung PC800-45 800 MHz Rambus DRAM (RDRAM) (4x256MB; one pair manufactured week 44 2001, the other week 10 2002)

The capturing was done with VCS (which can be found on the Internet Archive) and OBS Studio using a Datapath VisionRGB-E1S PCI-Express capture card. A DVI cable is connected between the source computer and the Datapath capture card to enable video capturing. Audio capture was done by feeding a 3.5mm stereo jack cable from the sound card of the vintage computer to the capture system’s on-board line in connector. Resizing/upscaling of the raw original 800x600 capture to 3200x2400 was done using VirtualDub2.

TIMESTAMPS
0:00 - Start-up/Settings
0:10 - Loading time demonstration
0:27 - Flyby
2:11 - Gameplay

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