the first Crysis demo was on 8800GTXs that were overclocked to retarded levels thanks to phase change. Now you tell me what they were running on since they had a Core 2 E6700 OCed to 5.7GHz.

They made the game that they as a company wanted to.  If it hurts them financially because their consumer base is small, so what?  It's their choice.  Why should it bother you that most PCs can't run it yet?

Up-to-date gaming PCs can run Crysis on acceptable levels, and future PCs will be able to run it on the max settings on acceptable levels...that's how they designed the game, and it's not that big of a deal.

The affordable hardware to run Crysis on its maxed settings does not exist. That's not really the developers fault, as the game is still good on regular settings. They made it a viable benchmark in gaming technology for now and the coming year, that's all.

I remember reading the same thingabout Messiah.

I imagine they're also running Crysis vanilla. There's a lot of tweaks that make it a hell of a lot smoother. There's always a lot more going on with PC performance besides just the game.

Here's 1 tweak (probably the single biggest one)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VaHS-y_mapQ

I've had to do a ton of fiddling with Crysis, but it runs very well at reasonably high settings on my computer.

 wait till the 9800GTX and 9800Pro. All that possible on very high. I hope Nvidia is smart and puts ddr4 in the video card.. will boost perfermance of any card 40%.

Well the devs did say that they wanted to make sure that it would be a game that you'd be able to reinstall on a new machine 3-4 years from now and see improvements.

I have a feeling they used Nvidia's GOD Graphics Card for their main dev card. And at 17k a pop that definitely would be a reason why the game will have some odd legs like Battlefield 2 did.

3 8800s in SLi =/= the combined power of 3 8800s. SLi is pretty inefficient, and is only useful if there are no better cards on the market yet. A nVidia 9800 or whatever is up next will probably be more powerful than two 8800s in SLi.

Also, the ram is probably another limitation.  They should probably up it to 4 gigs using Vista 64-bit.

Perfectly stated~

There are PCs that can play Crysis on very high with framerates in the 50-60 range. Can you get those computers for under $1.8k? Nope, especially if you want to waste time mucking around with Vista (and yes you can enable Very High in XP despite not having DX10).

You can also play it at high settings with a PC in the $700-800 range. In a few years mid-range cards will be playing it just fine and everybody will be happy.