As far as gaming goes, there's none that make use of quad core. They are just starting to make use of duel core. I hear Supreme Commander does but I'm not sure. But even so, that's only one game. The time to go to quad core is when the gaming industry has embraced it. I don't think they've fully embraced duel core yet.

AMD's top duel core x2 6400+ is a real bargain at $208.00. That's what I'm going to do.

I'm holding out.

The rumor is next month the new nvidia 9xxx series is supposed to hit as well as a new ati line up. Looks like a xmas time battle of the video cards is in the making.

good luck. That's a thin budget starting out out from scratch.

I would hold off until next month. Bunch of new hardware is rumored to drop which could lower the price of the current hardware.

The thing to know about Cryis is that it's all about the shadows. Shadow calculations is very CPU intensive and your video card is almost rendering everything twice. The fact that almost everything is casting a shadow is amazing in itself and that the game runs at all. We'll appreciate it more when we upgrade out hardware.

For mid range systems, turn shadows to low. It may say low, but the shadows are off. Yeah, it doesn't look as good but now the game is very playable.

For high end systems, you may need to leave shadows to medium. I'm not sure there's a system right now that can have shadows set to hi and have an acceptable frame rate. If your can, good for you.

To squeeze out a few more fps, turn pixel shaders to low. From medium to low, I don't see any real difference.

Setting any of the other settings to low may squeeze an additional frame but for me it hasn't been worth it.

AMD 4000+
Radeon Sapphire AGP X1950 PRO 512

The game ran well on my totally lame system. I got very low frame rates, usually from 17 fps to 25 fps on average. But the odd thing for me was it handled the low frame rates rather well. It felt smoother then what low frame rates usually feel like in other games. I'm not sure how to describe it but the low frame rate didn't kill the experience as it usually does.

I didn't figure out how to use the suit until the demo was over. Looks like I'll need to play the demo again. Visually, it looks very real.

I'm a software engineer and that's what I do for a living... make games.

Tell me about your game idea and I'll help point you in the right direction.