Crytek really do deserve praise for not only pushing their engine forward at every opportunity available, but more so for making these changes publicly available. They could quite easily slave away on these new features behind closed doors for future games or an expansion pack, but instead we are granted the gift of these extra features for free. We all love something for nothing, and this is a fantastic gesture to the community.

Of course, from a publicity point of view this patch certainly won't do Crytek any harm - It makes them the first high profile title with support for Shader Model 3.0, as well as ATIs Pixel Shader 2.0b, and perhaps more impressively they are the first to make use of the NV40s High Dynamic Range capabilities courtesy of a fully floating point pipeline and OpenEXR.

There is no getting away from the fact that the HDR effects on display in this game are stunning, and are honestly the kind of thing that makes you want to replay the game just so that you can bathe in the new eye candy. Having said that, the performance penalty is steep, and the loss of AA to use HDR is disappointed. Of course, none of this is Crytek's fault, all of these caveats are down to the NV4x architecture, but it does go to show why perhaps we haven't seen more titles using this particular level of HDR, particularly when there are some very good examples of HDR which don't rely on a fully floating point pipeline and allow for the use of multi-sampling. It'll be interesting to see how the usage of HDR in games develops, and what road most developers take when it comes to its use.

So, High Dynamic Range is the show-stopper, but we shouldn't forget to mention the impressive performance boosts available in the now-final 3.0 and 2.0b shader paths, which is most welcome. Normal map compression doesn't seem to offer a lot here at this point in time, but it's nice to see.