As games have begun differentiating themselves more and more through artistic direction rather than pure polygon count, it’s become harder and harder for players to measure performance gains brought by new computer upgrades. Now Crytek are bringing their previously console-only benchmarking tool to PC. Ryse: Son Of Rome renders crowd-filled action scenes and shiny helmets so gamers can tell how many extra frames per second they’re getting than before, and will be released later this year.

From the press release:

“We are bringing the Ryse experience to PC, with 4K resolution support,” says Carl Jones, Director of Business Development at Crytek. “4K gaming is another leap in graphics quality for PC gamers and Ryse is the perfect showcase for what’s now possible in high-end PC games. We’ve given our team the opportunity to show what CRYENGINE can really achieve, without compromising quality, thanks to the incredible hardware available now to PC gamers. Ryse will be a benchmark PC graphics showcase this year and probably for a long time in future. Our community asked for a Ryse PC version, and we have the means and technology to deliver this title with the highest quality possible.”

I’m not being flippant here. This is literally how they’re selling the game.

The PC version comes bundled with the DLC released for the console version of the game, including the Colosseum Pack, the Mars’ Chosen pack, Duel of Fates pack, and the Morituri pack. Each one introduced either new multiplayer modes or new maps for those modes.

The console version of Ryse: Son of Rome was called “blandly playable” by our cousins at Eurogamer. Meanwhile Alec thought that Crytek’s previous benchmarking tool, Crysis 3, looked pretty good.