Our experiment in modding Crysis to replicate the console look also suggests that PC owners have little to worry about. While Crysis 2 may be console-focused by financial necessity, it's fair to assume that the PC version will benefit from higher-quality artwork, and will receive an enormous visual upgrade by default simply by scaling up many of the powerful environmental variables built into the engine by design.
It's also fair to say that PC owners should be able to get performance that far outstrips the 720p30 we can realistically expect from the PS3 and Xbox 360. The scalability of CryEngine3, along with the existence of those higher-quality assets designed for PC, also means that CryTek could conceivably release a supremely impressive version of Crysis 2 for the next-gen consoles when they materialise in the expected 2011/2012 time-frame. The developer is already on the record as saying that CE3 has been designed to scale up to accommodate the next generation of console platforms.
Another factor computer owners should consider is that the optimisation work required to get CryEngine working on console will inevitably lead to significant performance boosts when rolled back across to PC, a point of view expressed in this GDC presentation from Valve, which discusses in depth the challenges of moving from a pure PC development environment to multi-format. There was a useful performance bump between Crysis and Warhead, but both games still targeted a dual-core CPU for optimum performance. Bearing in mind the six hardware threads available in the Xenon CPU, plus the six available Cell SPUs, CryTek would have been hard at work in scaling their engine to work across many more processors. The best gaming CPUs on PC right now are quad-cores, so those efforts will transition across back to PC very nicely.
