I heard an interesting thing regarding why crysis performed so crappy on the cards out at the time over at XS.
When crysis was in progress, the 8800gtx was just released. And usually the GPU market is fast moving, so the makers of crysis just saw this awesome card, the gtx, and they assumed that way way more powerful cards would be out by the time crysis was done.
Well we all know how long the 8800gtx was on top for, like 2 years? So, you can't really blame them for thinking that the 10800gtx would be out by then
. This theory is replaces the "zomg crysis is crappily coded" **** that flys around the interwebs.