You make fair points dflynchimp but I have to respectfully disagree with some of them. Crysis could perhaps be better and more efficiently coded, that is true, I'm not denying it, but considering what the screen is displaying when rendering a scene, it truly is remarkable that it can run relatively smoothly at mid to high settings (which are still leaps and bounds ahead of any console game out).
Remember, the reason Crysis brings systems to their knees is in fact due to the impressive polygon count. There is a ton of data and information that needs to be processed for every piece of rendered image. It really isn't a very fair and accurate comparison when you bring a console game into the fray and attempt to compare the hardware demand between the two.
Crysis' polygon count allows for a multitude of visual information to be displayed at once, which is why, even at only high settings (not enthusiast), you can notice an unprecedented amount of detail in everything from the sand, trees, foliage, to the water and last but not least, the horizon. You have to factor into account that Crysis is a sandbox like game with a large draw distance. What you see a fair length away is actually being rendered at that moment, along with the surrounding environment.
Take a game like GTA IV for example. On consoles it's known to be fairly laggy and far from smooth due to the amount of physics and data that needs to be calculated at once for such a open ended environment. Port that to the PC and you get somewhat better (albeit marginal at times witha lack of a quad core CPU) gains.
Now apply all of the above factors and include higher detail in all objects appearing on screen, and it actually doesn't seem that they did too bad a job when you truly stop to think about it.
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