Well, we have good news and bad news: Crysis 3's visuals have far exceeded our expectations, but you won't be able to enjoy them on max without investing in some serious hardware. For starters, you'll definitely want a quad-core processor, preferably a recent Core i5/i7 or the FX-8350. Assuming you clear that hurdle, you'll likely want dual GTX 680s or HD 7970 GHz Editions to play on very high at 1920x1200 or more.

In other words, you'll need at least $800 worth of graphics crunching prowess in your chassis if you want to experience Crysis 3 at its finest. If you can't foot that bill, you may be stuck with medium quality, which still requires at least a GTX 680/670 or the HD 7970 GHz Edition for 60fps at 1920x1200, though you can get by with something more affordable like the HD 7870 if you're comfortable with the low 40s.

t's worth noting that we only tested the stock presets, so you should be able to achieve better results by tweaking certain settings. Furthermore, we stuck with SMAA, which was only set to 1x (low), as this appeared to be the default setting for the game. FXAA should allow for better performance, though we didn't like the image quality as much. Of course, you can disable AA entirely if you don't mind jaggies.

In our opinion, for the typical gamer, the best graphics card for playing Crysis 3 right now is the GTX 660 Ti, as a single card can deliver an average of 40fps at 1920x1200 using the high quality preset, which is more frames than the HD 7970 and the old GTX 580. Better still, two of them in SLI allow for a solid 60fps at 1920x1200 on very high quality, which seems like the very definition of a sweet spot to us.