The Crysis development team was tasked with creating a PC that was capable of running Crysis Warhead at high settings (A feat in-on itself), but to top it off the price-tag had to be under $800.

Seems feasible right?

I spoke with Crysis franchise producer Bernd Diemer, who explained the history behind the machine. ”When we started working on Warhead, we decided performance was a big issue,” he said. “So we said, ‘Guys, we’re going to build a PC which has a maximum price of six or seven hundred dollars, and it has to run Warhead in high spec at an average framerate of 30.’ We built that PC—Crytek in the Budapest office [where Warhead was developed]—and we put it in the middle of the studio, and every review was on that machine. All the milestone presentations we did for EA, for the Yerlies [founding brothers Cevat, Avni, and Faruk], for the team, all the new prototypes, we showed on that machine.”

Eventually, they began referring to it as “the Warhead PC,” and used it as a way to force efficiency and optimization: if frames were dropping on the Warhead PC on a high graphics level, the team would tweak the game to better scale to the hardware. (I can attest to the results, having played through a full level today and being impressed by the consistent framerate and visuals, before being told it was a “Warhead PC.”)

Though I don’t have every nitty gritty hardware detail, I did get the machine’s most important specs:

- CPU: Intel Core Duo e7300 (@2.66GHz)
- Video card: Nvidia 9800GT
- RAM: 2GB

Deathsythe via gamesetwatch.com »