There's no nice way to say it: Crysis beats up our low-cost PC. For a menial 30 frames per second average, we need to lower our settings to high detail at 1024x768: Very high detail isn't a viable option at any resolution, unless you want to play at 800x600 or below. It is in the Crysis benchmark where we're likely to see some meaningful gaming differences between the low-cost PC and its mid-range and high-end counterparts.

It is important to note the following, however: These benchmarks only show the high and very high image quality settings for simplicity's sake. The low-cost PC can deliver silky smooth performance when playing Crysis at the 1920x1200 resolution at medium settings, which is still very attractive. In addition, it's our opinion that the great majority of Crysis' visual goodness lies in the 'Shader Quality' setting; with everything else set to medium, and Shader Quality set to 'high', the game looks very close to the high setting and is very playable at 1920x1200 on the low-cost system.

To summarize, while the low-cost system is no Crysis gaming behemoth, it's still a very viable gaming platform for this title.

Now that we've gotten to the tough stuff, let's move on to another game renowned for its ability to bring systems to their knees: Supreme Commander.