At the bare minimum, gamers must sport an Intel Pentium 4 at 2.8GHz, an Intel Core at 2.0GHz, or an AMD Athlon 2800+--with the clock speeds upped to 3.2GHz, 2.2GHz, and 3200+ respectively for Vista users--and 1GB of RAM, or 1.5GB for Vista. Video cards must have 256MB of memory and be at least of the NVidia GeForce 6800 GT or ATI Radeon 9800 Pro chipsets, with Vista-owning ATI users requiring at least a Radeon X800 Pro. Finally, Crysis will consume 12GB of hard drive space.

Those who have played the Crysis multiplayer beta may find their minds boggled by the claims made by the above requirements; though admittedly not final software, the beta suggests that the listed requirements are, to say the least, impractical for playing Crysis.

As far as what Crytek recommends: an Intel Core 2 DUO at 2.2GHz or AMD Athlon 64 X2 4400+, 2GB of RAM, and an NVidia GeForce 8800 GTS/640; as Crytek is a technology partner with NVidia, no ATI equivalent was explicitly stated.

This January, Crysis lead designer Jack Mamais told Shacknews that Crysis would be "even more" scalable than the studio's Far Cry was at the time of its 2004 release. "A three year old graphics card should be pretty good," he said.

Indeed, today's announcement claims Crysis is "playable on gaming rigs up to 2-3 years old," which is likely to be more of a technical truism than an appraisal of the situation in practical terms for most gamers.

Crytek CEO Cevat Yerli acknowledged the game's demanding nature in today's announcement. "While these specs affect how Crysis will perform now, we have also optimized Crysis so that the game scales forward 1-2 years," he explained. "We want to make sure that Crysis' gameplay, visuals and performance improves as technology does."

In a matter of weeks, NVidia plans to detail a line of Crysis-capable, DirectX 10-compatible graphics cards spanning a range of budgets. Crytek is also expected to release a public demo of Crysis prior to the game's November 16 release date.