Even $2000 of video cards won't max out Crysis and 1200W PSU

Without a doubt, CryTek's Crysis and CryENGINE2â€”the graphics engine Crysis is built onâ€”is the most graphically intensive engine to debut this holiday season. In the lead-up to the release of Crysis,many PC gamers were quaking in their boots, worrying that their gamingrigs would not handle the title. We have news for youâ€”it probably won't.

German PC gaming site PC Games Hardware, on the other hand, has a rig that will...for the most part. Combining three GeForce 8800Ultras in triple SLIthey were able to eek out playableâ€”though far fromastoundingâ€”framerates averaging 37.9 fps at Very High settings.
This is a testament to the built-in longevity of CryENGINE2. A majorpart of offsetting the expense of developing a new engine in-house arethe licensing fees charged to other developers who opt to license anengine for their own games. It's possible that after Epic's Unreal 3,Monolith's Lithtech, and Relic's Essence engines have ceased to bevaluable licensing options, CryENGINE2 will only just be hitting itsstride. (The Unreal Tournament 3/Unreal 3 engine scored 144.7 average fps, the FEAR/Lithtech engine scored 128 average fps, and the Company of Heroes/Essence engine scored 62 average fps on PCGH's rig.)
We foresee a long tour of duty for CryENGINE2.

PC Games Hardware magazine has finally done it. They got Crysis to runsmooth on very high with a Triple SLI video card setup. The cards alonecost over $1800. I didnâ€™t even know they made power supplies that couldoutput 1200W!

As you can see from this benchmark picture, it barely even gets 37.9FPS with this insane setup. How many years is it going to take consumerhardware before they can run Crysis the way it was mean to be run andat 60 FPS?
Check Out More Pictures Of The System

I don't know... I find these statistics somewhat wrong. My computer has a single core Athlon 64 2.4 GHz (3800+, socket 939), a 7900GT KO, and 2GB of RAM. I downloaded the Crysis demo and although they disabled very high detail settings, I was able to make the average detail settings at high. 2 were set to low, another 2 or 3 were set to medium, and the rest were set to high. My computer is crap compared to what these Germans had. I didn't check my framerate but it seemed to range from 20-45 FPS depending on the scene. DX10 and Vista I'm assuming is the fault in bad performance. Either that or the computers being used were some bad company like Dell, Acer, or HP with cheesy or illigitimate background software draining resources as much as Vista does.

Anyways, I would think that a 2.66 GHz dual core (Intel or AMD), 2GB of RAM, Windows XP, and ONE 8800GTX set to DX9 will give you plenty of great performance with all high and very high details (except water) and get a tolerable frame rate. The computer obviously would have to be custom built with no antivirus software.