First of all unless gamers have a supercomputer at home, they are not going to be "blown away" by the visuals. Now, if they do happen to own a rather powerful machine, the graphics will certainly impress them unlike any other game. If they can get a decent frame rate to enjoy it, that is.
Bottomline: Nice demo but Crytek really has more work to do if they really expect this game to do well. This is one of those instances when releasing a demo that has major performance issues may really hurt the bottom line. They may need to release another demo once they fix the optimization issues.
Setup; nForce650i, 8800GTS640, E6600. Playing at 1680*1050, no AA, all on High, Windows XP. Runs smoothly, got some framedrops when things get really nasty, but not that much...
So, i'm pretty satisfied :)
I have never expected so much from a demo and been so disappointed.
I played it on an 8800 GTS, DX9 on Windows XP. The graphics were subpar, the gunplay was horrible (almost broken), and it just wasn't any fun. At all.
I didn't even finish, just alt-f4'd it and went back to playing the COD4 demo.
8800GTS 640MB, E6600, 2GB 667MHz. It ran fine on my comp at 1280*1024. In both DX9 and DX10. It was soooo awesome.