I hate to break it to you, but some people actually hold the opinion that crysis graphics are superior to Supermario.
I hate to break it to you, but I played Crysis on my P4 3Ghz, X1950Pro rig at 1200x900, with Med Shaders, Shadows, Particles, and Max Textures, and got plenty playable frame rates. The res also looked fine on the 20" monitor I had at the time, minimal jaggies. The only thing I really turned down other than that was Post Processing. Most of the things that are resource hogs in that game (and many others) have more to do with effects you choose or not choose to use, vs actual sharpness of image quality.
Whether it be the blur and bloom of post processing, the heavy color washing haze of ambient occlusion on high shaders, the barely noticeable soft edges of shadows on high, or the slightly denser particle count of smoke/dust on high, a lot of settings in games have zero to do with actual texture res and sharpness. The only very slight tradeoffs were I didn't get HDR due to using Med vs High Shaders, but there are few scenes in Crysis where the HDR is noticeable enough to put up with the constant haze of the ambient occlusion lighting when it's set to High. Other than that, I didn't get God rays, but GRs in that game are sparse and overrated really.
I was using tweaks in Crysis that gave better than max texture quality and got plenty playable frame rates on all but two levels of the game, where I got noticeable lag, but mainly if I didn't use stealth. I used just 3 tweaks too. A couple were ones I found on TweakGuides, two I came up with on my own. One was to set Object Quality at Low but with the benefit of High draw distance, so there was no noticeable pop-in or blurred textures as with default Low OQ. Object Quality in that game has zero to do with quality of object textures. It mainly determines the number of some objects (like small beach rocks), LOD parameters (which I fixed with my tweak), and break-ability and movement of distant foliage, distant mind you.
I also came up with a way to adjust distance of detail textures on distant peaks to a minimal amount without the closer cliffs looking blurry as you approach them, yet the med distance peaks looked sharper than default just by turning texture streaming off. The two combined actually look better than default high textures, with less performance hit, and you only need a reasonable amount of RAM to disable texture streaming without performance loss.
Since buying a new rig I have tried pretty much all of the Crysis graphics features on higher settings and I settled on settings much closer to what I originally had on my prior rig than max. I did of course bump res up a bit, and I don't have to employ the tweaks anymore, but for the most part I still prefer sharper unwashed textures to all that effect garbage. Crysis is a game where they lumped too many graphics features together, vs allowing you to pick and choose each one piecemeal. Some won't even disable individually via their available command. For instance it doesn't actually work to set Shaders to High and turn AOL off via a command.
In short, you give FAR too much credit to developers to say all or even most games look best on max settings. Most of them, CryTek included, can't even make decent working commands to tweak them properly. Granted there are a lot of commands for Crysis, but many don't actually work. I could go on and on regarding the sad state of game development lately. Overuse of bloom and blur, frame drops even on high end rigs where certain shading and lighting is used, texture pop-ins, etc, etc. There's SO many poorly made/ported PC games anymore, and high end GPUs and max settings are no escape from it.
All it really takes to get what the OP is saying is a little ingenuity and common sense in picking settings and/or using tweaks, and acknowledgement of how poorly most PC games are made anymore. It's really bizarre to hear an ATI fanboy make an extremely exaggerated elitist comment like you did about Super Mario, because if anything, it's usually ATI fans that accuse Nvidia and their customers of being elitists. ATI aren't even the value leaders anymore. They used to have all these customers that bought into the simple mentality of cheap cards and lower settings and/or lesser features, or multiple cheap cards, despite Xfire not working consistently as well as SLI. Now some of them are desperately trying to be elitist snobs.
