You obviously can't remember when Farcry first came out. The top end cards for its day were the Nvidia 5800/5900 series and ATi 9800 series. The Nvidia cards couldn't do DX9 without serious problems, so that's already a vast majority of the PC gaming populance who couldn't run Farcry smoothly at all. The lucky 9800 owners still saw a lot of dropped frames. You're just looking through rose tinted glasses. Farcry was nowhere near as demanding on the top hardware for its time as Crysis is, but it was still a game that needed a colossal beast of a computer to run, and it wasn't until the eventual release of the 6800 and X800 series of cards that we could play the game smoothly on maximum settings.