Crysis Demo: How does it run on low end PCs?

Crysis has been the poster boy for DirectX 10 since it was unveiled a few years back. When I heard that not only was it compatible with DirectX 9 but also available as a free demo, a fire burned within me to try and see if I could play it on my less then stellar rig. It runs Windows XP SP2, It's got a 3.20GHz Intel Pentium D, 1GB of RAM and a Geforce 7500 LE. Yes that's right, a card that's really only intended for basic 3D acceleration and can barely run Half Life 2.

After downloading the demo off of Fileplanet, I noticed that Nvidia recommends installation of the Nvidia 169 Beta driver before playing the Crysis demo. After this quick and painless detour, I proceeded booting up Crysis. I was convinced it would overload my puny card. Surprisingly, it ran nearly perfectly. I played it on the optimal settings automatically chosen by the software. That basically meant that every setting was on low, including anti aliasing. It looked better then I hoped it would but, it wasn't the best looking game ever on these settings. Not as bad as the low settings for the Unreal Tournament III demo though. That game looks like blurry land on my PC. I was glad that it looked decent because if you've ever had to adjust setting sliders in a PC game then you know that it's basically the gaming equivalent of adjusting a old rabbit ears antenna. You don't want to move it too much in the wrong direction or else you'll lose the whole thing.

It's a fun game I enjoy the different powers and the real time equipment modification(More on that in my Demo review). The frame rate was solid nearly the whole way, even in large areas it still stayed at a fairly solid frame rate. It did drop slightly during cut scenes. Nothing that adversely affected gameplay though.

With the draw distance at minimum, trees and grass popped up throughout. There was one situation where I could see though a rock to an enemy standing behind it. I only noticed it in that one area. There wasn't any of the larger enemies like what I've seen in trailers so everything might get thrown out the window at that point.

So far, if the demo is any indication, the final version of Crysis won't be the resource hog I had thought it was. Then again this is a pre-release build and it could run better and it could run slower. I can't wait to find out.