For comparison, here's what computers could do outside the browser, two years ago: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ACQW8iVCbhY

Why do our expectations drop so drastically just because something is downloaded from the web and run in a browser? Not that there's anything wrong with that, but accessing something via web and running things naively aren't necessarily mutually exclusive.

Anyone know what specs are needed to run Crysis at the performance as in the video? My impression is that you still can't do it with mainstream hardware.

I was thinking pedantically that there are more powerful "computers" available than a high-end PC and they would be able to do even better than this example, but then it occurred me that it's also possible that game engines are the most sophisticated physics/graphics engines... worldwide, they probably have more attention and money focussed on them than even the US military could afford (guessing).

You can play Crysis just fine on a at 1600 x 1200 on a 700$ gaming system today. 90% of what you see is done by the graphics card, and for $180 you can get a GTX 260 which plays crisis just fine. Leaving 500$ for the rest of the system which is still ok. (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814150...)

http://www.gamespot.com/pages/forums/show_msgs.php?topic_id=... for an actual gamers review w GTX 260.

thanks, but most of those gamers are noting low frame rates, less than 50 fps... while still playable, it's not as smooth as the '07 demo.

That demo is also at a lower resolution than 1600 x 1200.

However, the average frame rate is almost useless, it's the minimum that's important and an absolute minimum of 24FPS on the most demanding demo is perfectly playable. Mostly when you play the game it's far higher than that, but in the middle of a huge firefight when vegetation is being chopped to bit's it's still playable.

PS: I wish most reviewers would note the worst frame rate instead of letting 100FPS in some areas cover for sub 30FPS in others. EX: http://www.guru3d.com/article/palit-geforce-gtx-260-sp216-so...

Good point about min. frame rate.

But is that demo lower than 1600x1200? The Youtube video is; but I don't know about the demo.

If you're going into plugin route, then Java applets can already do OpenGL without any hacks, and will blow away anything that Flash can do. Quake 2 has already been ported, for example (http://download.java.net/javadesktop/plugin2/jake2/).

But that's not really the point, is it?

For comparison http://www.quakelive.com/

I really hope that id release an sdk.

Incredible stuff. Do you know if this is using anything intrinsically Flash-only, other than a fast VM? It looks like a software rasterizer - is there anything preventing a port to some kind of Javascript/HTML setup?

It is software rasterizing, written in haXe. I know the author from his posts on the haXe compiler ML, so I have a few details about the engine. haXe itself compiles to JS/C++/PHP/etc., however the only way that engine could possibly be fast enough is to make use of haXe's Flash-specific "Memory" API, which uses opcodes from Adobe Alchemy to manipulate a flat memory space at the byte-level.

While it could definitely be ported, you'd have to change the part of the implementation that makes it fast to do so. If JS got a similar ability to do byte-level manipulations, it wouldn't be out of reach, but right now it looks like JS implementations are avoiding these kinds of proprietary extensions.

I think this version doesn't use the "Memory" API. I have two versions, one that uses it and one that doesn't and the difference is very minimal - not worth to drop the Flash 9 support at least.

I'm not sure if RF2 can be done in regular JavaScript though. Maybe in Chrome 3, which about twice as fast in my 3D canvas benchmark test (this one: http://gimme.badsectoracula.com/canvas3dbenchtest.html ). But Flash works 'equally' in almost all browsers while JS+Canvas is very browser specific when it comes to performance.

That doesn't work on my 64-bit Linux :(