Can AMD’s Ryzen Threadripper 3990X run Crysis without a GPU? Yes!

AMD’s Ryzen Threadripper 3990X is a beast. It has already achieved world record performance across most of HWBOT’s leading benchmarks and has delivered compelling performance levels for workloads which place a focus on pure CPU grunt, event at its $3990 price tag. But can it run Crysis? 

Linus Tech Tips has put AMD’s Threadripper 3990X through its paces across a wide range of workloads, including a test which runs Crytek’s original Crysis in software mode. Software mode? That means that Crysis is being played without the assistance of a graphics card, something which was previously considered impossible. 

While a graphics card was required to deliver a display output, that graphics card did nothing to help AMD’s Ryzen Threadripper 3990X run Crysis in real-time. At most it did some media encoding, just to showcase the Nvidia splash screen at the beginning of the game. 

Yes, AMD’s Ryzen Threadripper 3990X can run Crysis, but it isn’t playable by today’s standard. Is runs at fairly low framerates, has mini freezes and is inferior to running the game on a normal gaming setup. Even so, the game is playable on just a CPU, which is an amazing feat for AMD. It wasn’t too long ago when 3D gaming was considered smooth at 13 FPS, and if you don’t believe me, try replaying GoldenEye 007 on the N64: that game will likely not run as smooth as you remember. 

In the video below, Linus Tech Tips shows AMD’s Ryzen Threadripper 3990X running Crysis. The Crysis section of the video starts at 9:20.