So, as we all know Crysis is the whore of all whores in terms of PC hardware. So much so, most people have written the game off as a flop purely because it needs a top of the line system to get anything out of it.
Well, I have a solution for those with a moderately powerful PC. Crytek has actually produced one hell of a adjustable game - maybe the most adjustable game of all time. By creating a simple CVAR file you can change settings to anything that's already in the game, to varying degrees of intensity -- thus improving/customising your experience.
Where do you start? Well, first things first you have to create a autoexec.cfg file into the root folder and then adjusting variables from there.
Instead of me spending the next 3 hours explaining everything that I did, I found a nice little thread on the Crysis forums to help you tune the performance of the game.
Ultimate Tweak Guide
Read through that and you can get excellent results. I've managed to go from a decent looking game (comparable to many other games on 360 and PC) to:
And I managed to get that graphics fidelity at a very, very solid frame-rate (around 40fps) and with most DX10 features enabled. This even works in XP where no DX10 features are "allowed".
To get comparative DX10 settings in XP for DX9 (i.e. Very High settings on DX9) you just have to put in the autoexec.cfg:
Code:
sys_spec_GameEffects = 3
sys_spec_ObjectDetail = 3
sys_spec_Particles = 3
sys_spec_Physics = 3
sys_spec_PostProcessing = 3
sys_spec_Quality = 3
sys_spec_Shading = 3
sys_spec_Shadows = 3
sys_spec_Texture = 3
sys_spec_VolumetricEffects = 3
sys_spec_Water = 3
e_foliage_wind_activation_dist = 25
e_max_entity_lights = 16
e_obj_quality = 4
e_particles_max_emitter_draw_screen = 32
e_particles_quality = 4
e_shadows_cast_view_dist_ratio = 0.8
e_vegetation_sprites_distance_ratio = 1.5
e_view_dist_ratio_detail = 30
e_view_dist_ratio_vegetation = 45
e_water_ocean_fft = 1
e_water_tesselation_amount = 10
es_DebrisLifetimeScale = 1
g_battleDust_enable = 1
g_breakage_particles_limit = 250
g_ragdollDistance = 40
g_ragdollMinTime = 15
q_Renderer = 3
q_ShaderFX = 3
q_ShaderGeneral = 3
q_ShaderGlass = 3
q_ShaderHDR = 3
q_ShaderIce = 3
q_ShaderMetal = 3
q_ShaderPostProcess = 3
q_ShaderShadow = 3
q_ShaderSky = 3
q_ShaderTerrain = 3
q_ShaderVegetation = 3
q_ShaderWater = 3
r_BeamsDistFactor = .05
r_BeamsMaxSlices = 200
r_ColorGrading = 1
r_DepthOfField = 2
r_DetailNumLayers = 2
r_DynTexAtlasSpritesMaxSize = 32
r_MotionBlur = 4
r_ShadowJittering = 2.5
r_SSAO_quality = 2
r_SSAO_radius = 2
r_sunshafts = 1
r_TexAtlasSize = 2048
r_Usepom = 1
r_WaterReflectionsQuality = 3
r_WaterUpdateDistance = 0.2
Props go out to MadBoris on inCrysis forums for his work creating the guide that helped me fine tune some of my own settings.
As a reference, my own hardware is:
Intel Core 2 Duo E6300 @ 1.86Ghz
Corsair XMS2 2Gb PC2-6400
PowerColor ATI HD3850 Pro PCS Extreme 512Mb Overclocked @ 760Mhz core/ 1880 Mhz Memory
So apart from my graphics card which is a fast DX10 card, I have fairly standard specs in terms of CPU -- this game isn't CPU intensive.
Optimising Crysis *56k fatality* 
