Turns out the devs behind Crysis made its highest settings so hard to run is because they were thinking about the PC you would own in 2010, not the one your were stuck with in 2007
Briefly

Crysis was intentionally designed to be future-proof, with graphics settings meant for hardware available in 2010+, thus allowing the game to look better over time.
Cevat Yerli, the game's director, mentioned that the Ultra mode and Very High settings were not created for user's immediate use when the game launched in 2007.
Despite the meme surrounding its difficulty to run, Yerli took the 'Can it run Crysis?' joke lightly, as it represented a mix of good and bad.
Yerli found humor in the meme culture, noting that even Nvidia highlighted their new GPUs' capability by referencing Crysis during a product launch.
Read at VG247
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