Crysis: Bold, beautiful... before its time

[ADBjester]

I haven't seen anything on this forum yet about the newly released Crysis... so, here's my take.

I've been playing through it for 2-3 days now (not yet to the ice level), and think that it's so bleeding edge that few current systems will run it at performance serious gamers find acceptable. I have a system that is still dripping blood from the bleeding edge (not quite a QX9650 Penryn... but close), and cannot run the game with all graphics options cranked. I can get about 30 FPS on *HIGH* (not very high) settings on:

QX6700 OC 3.2 Ghz Quad Core
4 GB RAM
Vista Ultimate x64
8800 GTX 768 MB watercooled

I drop to the teens if I try to turn on "very high" (especially shaders), or any anti-aliasing.

Mind you, this is a gorgeous game even on "high" settings. The physics are stunning, and virtually every blade of grass is its own object. The water is fantastic.

I can't wait to see what this looks like on a next generation nVidia (9900, or whatever). Until then, today's hardware is just barely adequate for this year's # 2 game (#1 being BioShock).

Jester