Agreed the level "assault" looks incredible and is a big improvement over the vanilla one, it's the first level I'm very unsatisfied with and the unnaturally lively water, which especially looks unrealistic and silly at shallow waters though incredible at longer distances. It should just be calmed down a little bit, the first night scene brighten up a bit, the clouds in the first free-fall sequence fixed from it's current 8-bit color look and it's much better.
BTW we ended up playing Mster's config and we both agreed it looked undoubtly the best overall, I just wanted him to be able to see anything in the very first level of gameplay, so we started out with Xconfig which also gave a beautiful vanilla sky sunrise. Mster's sunrise is also incredible.
I'm gonna play with POM off since I can feel the difference in framerate actually. Or I'm pretty sure I can, didn't have FRAPS on in the level where I compared with and without.
Also I finally figured out why you had 38 FPS when I had 28. We simply misunderstood eachother as you talked about the performance config, I used the quality
So in the end I found my preferred Crysis config: Mster's config 3.01 (quality) + rygels textures of course. Crysis has never looked any better