The Omnia isn’t running the game, of course. Instead, its being processed remotely and streamed via OTOY, an upcoming server-side rendering service that’ll let you play high-end 3D games on low-powered machines.

In this video, Crysis is being played through the Omnia’s browser with no additional plug-ins and is being controlled wirelessly with an Xbox 360 controller.

It’ll be interesting to see how many people take advantage of this when it officially launches. [TechCrunch]

Except for the RAM, I’m actually fairly impressed with the components Maximum PC picked out: an ATI Radeon HD 4870 at $US175, $US71 Intel Pentium E5200 2.5GHz Wolfdale, $US90 MSI Neo3-F LGA 775 motherboard, $US21 2GB DDR2-800 RAM (with a rebate, you can go up to 4GB of RAM for $US7 more, which I’d recommend), $US25 optical drive and $US50 320GB hard drive (for $US10 more, you can go up to 500GB). Finally, for the case and power supply, a Rosewill TU-155 II 500 Black, which is a good pick since Rosewill makes decent power supplies (I also like Seasonic, which is what I rock in my PC) and it’s only $US75 for the whole package. After rebates, that’s just $US479, although that doesn’t include Photoshop or Geek Squad visits.

A good 22-inch monitor can be had for $US150 easy, and obviously a keyboard and mouse can be found for under $US10 a pop if you really wanna scrimp. For the OS, Windows 7 beta is freeeee. Or you can find a copy of XP lying around somewhere, I’m sure.

Depending on the resolution you wanna roll with, at 1280×1024, Maximum PC got an average framerate of 44.42FPS, and at 1900×1200, a still respectable 36.22FPS.

If you’ve never ever built a computer before, check out Lifehacker’s first-timer’s guide to building your own PC. It’s a pretty excellent Saturday activity. And obviously a PC can do way more than play Crysis. [Maximum PC]

I’ll grant that OnLive—the streaming game service that its makers claim will bring high-end games to virtually any PC or TV—borders on implausible, but you gotta beliiieevve! For the haters, here’s a demo video.

Plenty is discussed here, and it’s worth watching all the way through if you were at all intrigued by yesterday’s announcement. The genuine boner moment is at around 15:00, when a lowly Dell Studio 15 plays Crysis without even flinching. The presenters discussed latency and did their best to demonstrate that OnLive does provide the same experience as a proper gaming machine, but until the service rolls out it’ll be impossible to tell if this is true. If the games feel even slightly laggy it’ll be a huge blow—OnLive will live or die by a few milliseconds. [Gamespot]

Their test rig used a Core i7 with 3GB of triple-channel memory running Vista vs. Windows 7 beta build 7000 (the one you’re probably running). The cards tested were Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 285 and GeForce 9800 GTX+ and ATI’s Radeon HD 4870 X2 and Radeon HD 4850. And they checked out a whole bunch of games, from Crysis to Left 4 Dead.

Medium-length answer short: It’s pretty much the same! Sometimes Vista wins, sometimes Windows 7 will squeak out an extra frame per second over Vista. Overall, across all of the games tested, higher end two-in-one cards seem to eke out most of their wins in Windows 7 though, especially with the ATI cards.

It bodes pretty well. You definitely won’t lose any performance moving to Windows 7, and it’s likely going to get even better as we move to the final OS and Nvidia and ATI keep cranking out drivers. So maybe not today, but one day, Windows 7 it seems like will run Crysis (and most any other game) faster than Vista. Check out all the benchmarks for every game over there: [Extremetech]

In a nutshell, ray tracing works by tracing rays (ta da!) or lines of light from a certain point through pixels in an image plane. It’s hard to do, because it takes a lot of processing juju, with a fast processor that has a ton of cache memory.

Nvidia and AMD are working on a approach that uses ray-tracing and rasterization (their current technique). Which makes sense in context of what Intel chief Craig Barrett told me at CES: “Everybody’s kind of looking at the same thing, which is, ‘How do I mix and match a CPU- and a GPU-type core, or six of these and two of those, and how do you have the software solution to go hand-in-hand?’”

Right now, Caustic says they have a hardware and software setup that can zoomify ray-tracing 20x over today’s hardware, and that by 2010, they’ll have goods that’ll do it 200x faster. Sadly, they’re not moving into the gaming space first, instead focusing on architects and animators, meaning we’ll have to wait for like Crysis 4 to see if Caustic can… well, you know the rest. [NYT]

These results from DirectX 9 testing speak well for Windows 7, topping Vista on the lower and higher spec systems while, much of the time, just about keeping pace with XP. In fact, with Intel’s i7 quad core processor, we actually see a brief moment of performance gains over XP. Blasphemy!

Crysis DirectX 10 testing did not go over as well for 7, which got pretty trounced by Vista (though 7 won a DirectX 10 round later with Far Cry 2). We chalk these inconsistencies not only to different games but to the fact that both Windows 7 and its graphics drivers are still in beta. Overall, early performance testing of Windows 7 gaming leaves us optimistic, even if there’s still plenty of room to grow. [Firing Squad via Kotaku]

Cnet says that the Falcon Northwest Mach V has the latest and bestest combination of components there is, which is what makes it the fastest thing on chips:

• 3.79GHz Intel Core i7 965 Extreme Edition.
• An Intel X58 chipset.
• 12GB of 1,066MHz DDR3 SDRAM.
• 2 x 1GB ATI Radeon HD 4870 X2
• 1TB 7,200RPM Hitachi hard drive.
• 80GB Intel X-25M solid-state drive.

All this comes at a pretty hefty $US8,028 price tag, including the Ferrari red paint job, which is a $US500 option. Unfortunately, the automotive-class red paint job reportedly helps you get at least three extra frames per second in Crysis. Fortunately, there’s a potential DIY fix to save those $US500: Apply a few adhesive flames to the chassis, and Bob’s your uncle. [Cnet]

The “cool stuff” will take about three weeks to get up and running, with the more visual demos coming at the tail-end of that. The one benchmark they currently have is that it hits 768 Gigaflops, which they hope to bump over 800 with some fine-tuning. Moving from Nvidia’s Quadro 4600 to their newer Tesla cards should give the system a jolt as well, since they’re explicitly designed for parallel computing applications, like what the CX1 is designed for.

The CX1 can hold up to eight computing blades—though the storage and visual blade each take up two slots, so the model they were showing had four computing blades, and one of each. While each blade is highly customizable, the cheapest one they had configured was about $US4,000, and a fully spec’d out CX1 goes for about $US85,000 (slightly higher than they originally announced). While it’s not actually designed for gaming at all, for that much I’d want it to burn Crysis directly into my brain. [Cray]

Fearing that the system came as a bag of components, they were relieved to hear that it was actually a fully built and tested system. Fearing a white-box scenario where you have to add on your own OS, they again were happy to hear it comes with Windows XP Pro installed with the latest service pack—though it doesn’t appear the game comes in the bundle. Ultra claims that the Optimised PC will run Crysis Warhead at the highest DX9 setting, at 30 frames per second, and that the game was actually “fine tuned” to work with Nvidia 9800 GT video card.

Pre-orders at TigerDirect.com start next week. Sounds like a sweet deal to me—even if you still have to buy the game and a monitor and speakers—but give me your thoughts… You buyin’ this? [GameCyte]