Its a photo. This reminds me of the "Half-Life 3" screenshots that turned put to be photographs from a Russian mine with some filters applied. Most people fell for it.
This is much less believable though, the Cryengine will have to go through at least two more iterations before it'll come close to that.

^ It's not a photo, just look at the tree, the surface looks like it is texture mapped.

I'm willing to believe it. Technology is moving so fast now, it's hard to believe.

A Russian mine lol?

Wait... Now I'm starting to doubt it. How did they make the trees look so irregular? And look at the ground, it has to be made up of polygons to look that good. Is that even possible?

If this is true footage, where are the enemies? where are your weapon?

lol@KungKras 

About time.

I could believe that this was a render from the engine that was going to run Crysis 2, but I would also expect that the game would not look like that when played on a system most people could afford ... If you took two state of the art graphics cards and had them render a static environment at (roughly) 720p @15fps you would be amazed at how realistic the images would be. The problem is that the static environment would have to be (dramatically) downgraded to be used in game that ran on fairly modest hardware that was a couple of years old.

Huh? What the hell are you talking about? I'm 100% right, here are a few pics from a modded Crysis 1:

They're all from Crysis 1. Now imagine how the potential with Crysis 2.

^ Those are fantastic and very life-like but they still dont depict a massively detailed scene from nature like the pic in the OP.

U would need a 500 times faster comp to run this scene in 3-D:




^Side by side comparison - there's a magnitude of at least 100 difference in computing power needed for these renders with a dynamic camera such as in a first person shooter like Crysis.

That's not really true at all ...

I would say that the graphical jump between those two images is proportional to the difference between Resident Evil 4 and Resident Evil 5, and being that these two games ran on hardware that had only 4 years between them it is entirely possible we could see a similar jump from Crysis to Crysis 2 if Crytek was willing to continue focusing on hardware that is beyond the means of typical gamers.