Development

Official System Requirements

	Minimum	Recommended
Microsoft Windows
Operating System	Windows XP or Windows Vista
CPU	2.8 GHz or faster for XP, 3.2 GHz or faster for Vista	Intel Core 2 DuoAMD Anthlon 64 X2 4400+ @ 2.2GHz, or
Memory	1 GB RAM for XP, 1.5 GB RAM for Vista	2 GB RAM
Hard Drive Space	12 GB of free space
Graphics Hardware	256 MB video memory, NVIDIAATI Radeon 9800 Pro (Radeon X800 Pro for Vista) or greater GeForce 6800 GT/	NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTS 640 MB, or similar
Sound Hardware	DirectX 9.0c compliant card

Game engine

Main article: cryENGINE2

The Crysis Sandbox Editor.

Crysis uses a new engine—the CryENGINE2—that is the successor to Far Cry's CryENGINE2. CryENGINE2 is among the first engines to use the DirectX3D 10(DirectX 10) framework of Windows Vista, but can also run using DirectX 9, both on Vista and Windows XP.

Roy Taylor, Vice President of Content Relations at NVIDIA, has spoken on the subject of the engine's complexity, stating that Crysis has over a million lines of code, 1GB of texture data, and 85,000 shaders.

Sandbox editor

Crysis contains a Sandbox Editor, much like Far Cry's, in which new levels can be created and edited. Such levels will have full support in all multiplayer modes. This will allow the player to easily build their own levels, seeing everything in real time within the editor. The player can also jump into the map they are working on at any time to test it. The editor will be the same one that was used by Crytek to create the game.

As stated in the readme file accompanying Sandbox, Windows XP Professional x64 Edition or Windows Vista x64 are the only officially supported OS's for running the editor. According to Crytek, using a 32-bit OS can lead to instabilities with production size levels due to the low amount of virtual memory available and is therefore not supported.

Demo

On August 27, 2007, Crytek announced a single-player demo would be released on September 25, however, the date was pushed back to October 26. The demo featured the entire first level, Contact, as well as the sand box editor. On October 26, Crytek announced that the demo would be postponed for at least one more day and was released to the public on October 27. Although, on many sites it was provided a day early, and an oversight allowed people to grab the file directly off an EA server earlier than intended.

Shortly after the demo's release some enthusiasts found that, by manipulating the configuration files, most of the “very high” graphics settings (normally reserved for DX10) could be activated under DX9. The "very high" DX9 graphics mode looks more or less identical to the DX10 mode, with the benefit of providing better performance. This has caused many to question if DX10 brings any real advantage to the game, in contrast to official developer statements.

After the demo release an image was posted by on a forum which suggested there were big difference between pre-release alpha screenshots distributed by developers and real in-game graphics, especially in lighting quality. However, another picture was later posted which suggested that the quality may be equal or better than pre-release screenshots, and that the earlier screenshot may have been a fake.