In a nutshell,I set the graphics on extreme,they look amazing.
Then after dying and loading my last checkpoint,the game reverts my graphics back to low/medium.
I noticed it on the first level when you walk outside for the first time and light rays shine in your eyes,the first time I walked around in the Nano-Suit next to Prophet indoors,and looked at the trees outside,all the real time lighting and dynamic shadows were working fine,but after dying and loading a checkpoint,all the shadows "turned off" and it was like I was playing Crysis 1 on low,where nothing really uses shaders anymore and no objects cast or receive shadows.

I try switching my graphics to high,very high and extreme,and none of them change anything in the game,it's as if the graphics go into "safe-mode" or something?
Anyone fixed this?
I had this problem with the 160 nvidia drivers,but then I updated to the 166,and I've even rolled back a few to see if it fixed anything,and nothing.
My pc is up to the job,it's a quad-core with a 460gtx,and I'm in DX9 mode.

None of this happened before the patch,so I'm going to blame the patch,anyone know what part of the patch would have caused it?

I'm having the same problem.

I'm not. by the way, why on earth are you using the 166 drivers? those are pretty old. I'm using the 266.66 drivers.

Well common sense tells you if I said 166,that it's safe to assume 266.

*Bump because it's still happening*

I worked out why it wasn't resetting back to low.

Apparently when using the Crysis 2 Advanced Graphic Options program,if you turn on "no intro" it doesn't give the cryengine3 enough time to load on startup,the engine loads about 50% and then because there are no intro fmvs,it's not being given enough time to pre-cache (or whatever it needs to do) the engine features.

Basically,don't take off the intro fmv's,they seem to give the engine a little longer to startup.