Just few things I observed...
On the Medium-detail benchmarks page, it seems that you forgot to put "Ti" after "650" as it was mentioned twice.
On the CPU bencmarks page, when you said "Dual-core chips from both AMD and Intel take fairly substantial hits..." I just found it a bit misleading (no offense) because the i3-2100 is still dual-core chip technically.
[strike]I also noticed how you used your "Medium-Detail" test settings for the CPU bencmarks (which is understandable seeing that the HD 7970 was already on the edge with your "High-Detail" settings), but it might've still been better to customize the graphics settings until you could squeeze as much detail as you can and still maintain playable framerates. In this way, you might've not experienced the same GPU bottle-neck starting from the i3-2100 and up.[/strike]
Just my take on it.
(Edit: Oops. My logic was flawed. My bad... Only noticed that it was when I read silverblue's post. Yup, increasing graphics settings won't help the GPU bottleneck. It would make it worse. Though, I guess you, Don, didn't bother with lower details, because it might've not really mattered much as people wouldn't normally buy more expensive CPU's to play on the Low-Detail settings. Come to think of it though, knowing what CPU a person would need at Low-Detail settings might've still proven to be useful (to whomever would play at those settings). I mean, hey, you already did benchmarks at that setting for the graphics. Hehe...
😀)
As for the 3x landsape 1080p setup, it looks like my CF'ed HD 7850's won't be able to handle Ultra most-definitely, unless they suddenly release game patches and/or newer drivers that magically, and I mean magically, optimize performance.
😛
But that aside, you said twice that you don't think there are current generation graphics cards or setups that could handel that monitor setup at Ultra. I noticed how the HD7970 wasn't even able to reach half of a 30FPS minimum, so I'm thinking that it might not be so likely that two of them CF'ed would solve the problem, but what about:
3-4x HD 7970's CF'ed
2-4x GTX 680's SLI'd (I mentioned included 2 as a possibility just in case it performs better with Nvidia's architecture (with more memory bandwidth, which is what the 680 has over the 670) or drivers)
1-2x HD 7990/7970x2's
1-2x GTX 690's
(Edit: Oh yeah, and HD 7970 GHz Editions. Just remembered them because fuzznarf mentioned them above.)
I wonder if any of those setups would be able to handle it.
😀
I wonder! Is this a taste of what we should expect from Crysis 3?! I really wonder since Don did mention has it uses a heavily-modified CryEngine. Crysis 3 may or may not have better graphics, and CryEngine 3 may or may not be more optimized.