Load times are bad for me as well, but I'm not having any problems with slowdowns, nor with it behaving like it's crashed or anything. It runs quite well when it's actually loaded. This is on two year old hardware, so it's not because I have a supercomputer powered by a processor handed down from God himself.Going around the net i'm finding a surprising number of people complaining how un-playable the demo is. The load times seem to obscene for everyone and frame drops are common with generally low average rates. Did they ask the guys at Crytek to code this game for them?
In fact, the only real problem I've had is that my units keep getting stuck in trees (as in, they go into a wood, stop and then refuse to act on any orders I give them, to the point that they just stand there and let themselves be butchered when attacked), which is clearly a bug rather than a poorly optmised engine. Going by forums, any newly released game or demo is completely unplayable, because most of the people posting are the ones complaining because they can't get it to work properly. The people who can apparently don't bother most of the time.