TBH, I really think Crysis is poor grounds for comparison. There are way to many issues on ATI's side thanks to nVidia optimizations within Crysis that tilt the scale way to far in their favor - much moreso than with most other "optimized" titles. I really think, also, perhaps these massive optimizations also have a little something to do with how hyped the game was months and months before release.
exectily what i have said a few hundred times to people, i have an nvidia card, 8800gt infact, guess what, crysis runs like ass, the game needs optmized, and im SURE that crytek is working on that, along side fixing buggs in the MP and SP game as well. eventuly im sure it will become a good/great game, for now its not a game to use to compair hardware, maby compare driver sets for quility/buggs and crysis only performance, but not to compair diffrent cards/brands.
do i need to bring up doom3 again?
when doom3 came out it had this lovely little optimization in it that crippled ati cards, BUT had positive effects on nvidia cards, now Id could have made doom3 see that "hey this is an ATI card i can run pure math shaders not constant texture compair lookups" but insted they made it so that ati users had to edit a file in the game to change the shader code to the math equivlant, once you did that ati cards got the same of better perf in most cases as nvidia cards.
http://www.tweakguides.com/Doom3_10.html
the 1-2fps thing he says is false, it was true if u moded the game AFTER the drivers already had the tweak built in tho.
i saw about a 12-18 fps boost from the tweak on my x800xt pe at 1280x1024 everything maxed out(not ultra mode as the card i had only had 256mb texture ram and 512 is requiered to use true ultra mode)
i wouldnt be suprised if a few months from now crysis is running ALOT better even on older hardware, it just takes time to optimize a game, specly one as complex as crysis that was, lets all be honest, rushed out due to demand caused by alot of hype.