I hope Crytek does what GSC Game World has done for STALKER; releasing patches that add more support for extra CPU cores. We should not worry since Cevat Yerli said he recommends Quad-core CPU's over faster clocked Dual-cores. Lets just wait for a few patches to come before we despair or start to yell at him. ;)

I just got the game today at my local EB Games but to make you folks feel better I will not install it just yet. If AMD's Phenom X4 9700 @ 2.4ghz is equal or better then Intel's Core 2 Q6600 then ( will buy it and an Nvidia chipset. Should there be no Nvidia chipset at launch I will wait until there is some. If Phenom really is significantly slower in Crysis then Core 2 or is slower in more then 50% of games I will wait and buy a Penryn. I currently have an Athlon 64 4000+ @ 2.4ghz 2gb DDR400 2.5 CAS ram an 8800GTX graphics card and an X-Fi Xtreme Music sound card. I use Textures low (appears high in demo) Objects medium, Physics medium, Shaders high, Volumetric medium, Game Effects medium, Water low, Post Processing low, Particles medium, Shadows medium and finally Sound high. Using these settings on my rig with no AA or AF at my LCD monitors native 1280x1024 I get playable frame rates probably in the mid 20s to low 30s in the entire demo. I want to run this game on high settings and I do not want to lose my saved games so I will install this game only when I have upgraded my PC. I hope this post helps you people optimize your game! :D

I hope that when the game is released Gamespot compares single, dual and quad-core CPU's to see what kind of multi-threaded performance this game has. :P There is a huge difference in water quality between high and very high settings. In the high setting the water looks blue much more blue then in very high which is slivery. The shadows are much darker and crisp in very high mode. Last major thing I noticed is in the third last image high mode lack the land reflection on the water seen through the window. Also seeing more trees and slightly sharper ground textures in very high settings and that is where I am going to leave it.

I won't be touching Vista for at least a year maybe never. Halo for the the PC was an unoptimised piece of crap that lacked one of the most important PC FPS features, quick save and quick loading! Vista I doomed in my view Dell recently caved in and is now offering XP on its PCs. When a company like Dell does something like that Vista screams failure. Didn't windows Millennium Edition bomb too?