Q: Besides my lame, IDE hard drive. Is my msi 8800gts 320mb overclocked edition the only bottleneck in my system? well not really bottleneck but limitation from it being top of the line? my specs are the following. core 2 quad 2.4ghz Q6600 1066mhz fsb asus p5k-e wifi-ap edition standard ship bios rev.806 (i think?) 2x 1gb ddr2 800 sticks of g-skill 2x 1gb ddr2 800 sticks of ogz platinum edition running those in dual channel btw. dram 400mhz 2:3 ratio 500w power supply. and again my MSI geForce 8800gts 320mb ram oc edition. I figured my system would run Crysis perfectly but apparently not. I still get some depressing frame rates (about 20fps or lower unless standing idle in open area then i get maybe a high of 29fps) anyways any help/suggestions is appreciated. I also know my motherboard supports crossfire with ati cards. if it is my Gfx card that's limiting me what would you say I get (ati wise) that would put up with Crysis's unkind standards. I want to play the game on ultra high settings with good fps which will hopefully allow me to play other future releases as well. thanks again.
A: Actually, SnipeBx has it backwards. Most framerate bottlenecks are GPU-based, not CPU. Far more people have fast Dual and Quad-core processors with subpar graphics cards or even integrated video, than people with high-end graphics cards and low-end processors. Very few people have systems with powerful enough graphics cards that changing from an Q6600 to a Q9450 would improve their fps. But I do agree that in this case it's your 8800GTS 320mb... That design is now known as the 9600GSO (the current G92-based 8800GTS is much faster) and you need something beefier like a Radeon 4870 or Geforce 9800GTX+ to play Crysis well on high settings- as already mentioned, dual-gpu setups are generally required for ultra-high...