Now that you mention it, that (demo) ran much better on mine too. Partially due to the range of adjustments you can make in it compared to Cryo, but still it's a big difference and still looked good.
I think the games coming out are really good in concept, gameplay and creativity, but they don't have the best graphical optimization. Maybe that takes more time/money. Crysis had a pretty good budget and sizable team to make it work (and it still required too many resources IMO).

Considering some of the maps, and how much things that actually have applied physics to them during gameplay, I think Crysis both looks good and performs very well.
It's a lot different from Cryostasis, where you're walking inside a ship pretty much all the time, though it both looks and plays very differently.

I admit I don't know all that much about what goes on in the background, since I only played the demo (I didn't like it), and it's true that it's rendering a large area at any given time.
Which makes me question all the more what the hell Cryostasis is doing...
I heard that it can't utilize multiple CPU cores, so I'm sure that doesn't help.

Have you tried disabling PhysX? I had the same problem, and once I disabled that, it ran very smoothly.

Yeah, I noticed that on Mirror's Edge. I could play it just fine on full graphics, completely smooth and high FPS. Then I turned on PhysX, and the game ran like a slug in a blizzard.

Yeah, it didn't make any difference. I have an ATI card, so PhysX doesn't do anything anyway, but it ran the same with the option turned on or off.

What's it play like? I saw some gameplay footage and it looked vaguely reminiscent of Condemned. Is it more of a FPS or an adventure/horror game?

FPS/Adventure/Horror. LOL
What I've read about it reminded me of an old Xbox game called Cold Fear.
Really like the idea and the environment. Just wish I could run it.

I also heard this. Which is a shame, because I loved the demo, and went in search of the reason it performed so poorly before shelling out for the full version.
If they fix this issue, if it can even be done, I'll buy the game in a heartbeat.

It's a pure FPS-game, but it does share Condemned's "slowness". I also found it very atmospheric at times.

Hmmmm, some of my favourite games of all times are made be European studios - Stalker - Ukraine, Wticher - Poland, Mafia - Czechia..recently I played Cryostasis (runs well on gtx280) and it was one of the most memorable game experiences ever.Then there is Pathologic, The Void...yeah, Europe rocks and US sucks (though there are exceptions like Obsidian : )).

The Europeans and Russians, imo, are more risk-averse than their US counterparts. They seem to be more willing to break the mold and create games that are less mainstream. Which is a good thing, except their QA is often questionable.
I tend to liken Troika, Black Isle, Broderbund and ex great companies to European and RU devs, in the types of games they produce. These days I tend to look more forward to what the Russians offer, more so than US devs.

It appears that most of the games I wind up buying in sales off GamersGate are Russian. And while there was a time that I would steer clear of anything (bar Tetris) that came from that country, those days have long since ended. If they could just stump up the cash for decent translators (and more importantly, checkers) then their games would be even more attractive.
You Are Empty is a strange one, only some of it is partially translated into English yet I feel it works best that way. Although the way the enemy pop up right behind you with no warning still can scare the shit out of me. Which is why I haven't played it much -- and I'm usually fine with the horror genre =/

I played only one Nival-made game, HoMaM 5 and it was utter crap, not to mention their failed patching (every patched added some new bugs).