I have been playing Crysis for a while now and it got me into hardware. One thing I have noticed is that no matter what I do it lags badly below around 60 fps. I used to have tri-sli GTX 260s and it lagged badly at below 60ish. I sold 2 and ran 1 GTX 260 but it still lagged. I figured that it may be a problem with my GPU but didn't really worry about it. I recently upgraded to a XFX 5970 Black Edition and the damn game still lags! My specs are the 5970, i7 930 @ 4.2GHz, 6GB 1600Mhz Corsair Dominator, 2xIntel x25-e in RAID, and a 1200W PSU I have messed with configs and it only slightly helps. My cooling is sufficient for sure. My GPU is also heavily OCed to 1000/1300 (this is not the issue either).

I have an example of the lag in this video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qQxjYOkcxrg . The camera doesn't capture that many fps so you must pay attention the the video to see it. It is quite obvious something is wrong. Here is another example of 20fps on my computer, this was recorded with wegame http://www.wegame.com/watch/crysis-lag/ . The lag is a bit more obvious because wegame was actually recording. I noticed that even though the FPS was less than half the game played just about the same. Something is not right... 50fps feels like 20. These are both crysis maxed setting 8xAA.

I have done most of the general "fixes" but nothing has worked. Any suggestions?

Lower the aa and see if it lags, also get the info text thingy that's in a console command and see if you get any big fps drops...

Laz0r, this is driver or game problem. All who have GTX260-GTX275 videocards have freezes in Crysis Multiplayer and Crysis Wars with high or very high shadows settings when use drivers from 190.38 to 258.96.

Since you've tried various cards you can rule out a driver issue. It's hard to tell from the vid but it looks like it only lags when u turn quickly, consequence of the motion blur. Lowering it should help. Have you tried different texture streaming? ie: r_TexturesStreaming=0-1

Turn off AA. In any new game it screws with the smoothness a lot.

Turning it off will get you about 60fps, and it will feel like 60fps.

Crysis + AA = bad things.

I could run 4xAA on my 4870X2 without a frame rate hit

It all depends on how CPU vs GPU limited you are.

I turned AA off and the horrible lag went away, though my FPS does go to about 50+ . I can turn AA with a small frame hit it just lags like hell. There is also no way I am CPU limited, I have and i7 930 @ 4.2. I am going to try to reformatting today and see what happens. I will try with only installing GPU drivers and then installing everything else if that doesn't work.

Do you see that kind of lag when other games are at 45fps? Maybe your eyes just refresh the image in your head quicker than most other people, making it look like it's lagging when the frames don't refresh quick enough.

A while back I wasn't all that great at Crysis mp... I was playing with sub 60ish fps on mp. I was playing on med/high. One day I turned everything on low of I played sooo much better because the input lag feeling was gone and I could not see the lag. This is an example of the situation.

I got the same problem with Crysis and Warhead I got a HD5870 and got evrytrhing maxed out.
But in Crysis wars thers no such lag but I play it at very high too. (8AA)

I have a different prob.
I use the mster and rygels and just as i start secondary objectives, it gets laggy as hell! BUT ONLY WHEN IAM TAKING ON SEK. OBJ??!?!?
WTF`??!?
IT DROPS FROM 34 - 40 to under 5 FPS!!!
Anyone else with that prob?

I reinstalled everything and the lag has improved, I am going to mess with ATI tray tools when I get home to see if I can reduce the horrendous input lag (laggy mouse feeling).

Get rid of the AA. Instead type this in your console; r_UseEdgeAA 2. Trees look much better

I have the same problem, getting spuratic freezes/stuttering but my FPS is anywhere from 35-50 FPS on GTX 280. I took Aposteriori's suggestion and installed 186.18 drivers and I have no more of the stutter/freeze.
Is this a well documented problem with the newer drivers? Kinda svcks if you ask me