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Nowadays it does not require a super high end PC to run beautiful games. It all comes down to how well the game developers optimize their engines for PC. A game that is a direct port from a console game will most definitely run poorly or re...quire the super hardware. There are some games from console that look pretty bad that still bring decent PC rigs to their knees. A good example of optimization is RE5. It was built ground up from an engine native to PC. It supported quad core on launch, but still ran maxed out with ~30fps on my ancient single core WXP system.
As with Crysis 1, it's graphics were brought about before its time. Yes they look spectacular, and they still do today, which is part of the problem with the CryEngine 2. It had all of these advance rendering techniques (tessellation, volumetric particles, high draw distance for dynamic shadows and HDR) back when everyone else (consumers and developers) were still in the stone age. Think about it, the game came out when most of everyone still ran DX9, and DX10 was too new to take over the majority. Even if they wanted to optimize Crysis 1 back then, they did not have a baseline of "high end" hardware to do it. Today, we have a big piece that wasn't present when Crysis 1 came out. There were maybe 2 people back then who ran quad core, and now almost every serious PC gamer does. From just that fact alone, plus the distance between the first DX10 architecture of video cards to today's DX11 architecture, Crysis 1 could be remade TODAY to be optimized with TODAY's hardware and have the same visual quality while running twice as fast. So, the same could be said of Crysis 2.
So in short, visual quality of games are coming to a cap real soon due to explosive hardware advancement. Whereas the current generation of consoles brought about HD gaming, the next leap in games will be 3D. Visual quality will be relatively the same, because rendering the 3D requires the hardware to output a tremendous amount of fps and have an insane refresh rate. Personally, I don't give a rat's ass about anything 3D related.
If you don't believe what I said about RE5, then