Nice article. Tho i can't really say it concerns everybody who games on PCs. Just for the record, i'm playing Far Cry, Doom 3 and the Half Life 2 beta on a Ti4200 and all games run pretty smoothly and look pretty damn good to my eyes. And that wont be changing any time soon. I'm afraid i simply cant justify paying upwards of £300 for any manufacturer's card when the one i already have is still going strong. I'll leave the real argument of the article to the hardcore fanboys who don't mind remortgaging the house or selling their granny for the sake of a few extra pretty lights and colours here and there.... My Athlon XP-M was the best thing i ever did for my framerates....

Joel seems to be of the impression that if HL2 comes out and there is NOT the performance delta between the X800 & 6800 that there was between the R3xx & nV3x that Valve & ATi are up to something?!?! Uhm, no. Is it me or are the fanboys crawling out of the woodwork on both sides lately?

Im much more worried that the developers just focus on the visuals now. FarCry and Doom 3 were the best examples of ignoring a fluid engine that doesnt suck in Multiplayer (and in Singleplayer if people like smooth gameplay there too). HDs reload in the middle of the game, paralyzing you for a bit, graphics run at a good framerate but still dont run as fluid as HL1 for example, because you get stuttering for whatever reason every few seconds, etc etc. And the funny thing is people tend to ignore it. I only met very few people who actually notice that the fluid engines get rarer and rarer. Even on the uberest giga super hyper highend computers most new engines wont run smooth. I guess its the same with the ATI drivers in the past. People get so fanboyish that they completely ignore the normally obvious flaws.

I gotta agree with you, either next gen card is more than enough for either Doom3 or HL2. After seeing the X800 get whupped by the 6800 in all the benchmarks in D3 I wasn't expecting to be really impressed with my X800 pro in it...but the damned thing flies and looks gorgeous! I really don't care if there is faster, I gots me fast enough as does anyone who owns any of either companies mid to high-end next gen cards. :)

I sort of freaked when I loaded up FarCry for the first time after installing my X800 pro, it runs smooth and looks great with AA & AF! :shock: It really is a much better game when it's fluid, I know that sounds a bit obvious and dumb but it's really worth mentioning. (Oh, so is Doom3...but it's too soon for me to get into playing that again already.) It's kind of like going back and playing the orginal DeusEx on an R3xx class card, the game is just sooo much better smooth!

I agree with that, when I got the hardware to run 'em well. ;)

I think doom 3s ultra setting is a joke compared to what it could have been. Most people dont even notice a difference between medium and ultra settings.. Also I dont think the hardware is all thats holding us back. Look at Deus ex 2, you need future hardware just to run that smoothly.. Its also an issue of coding. Some games look an run great (far cry, ut2004) even on slightly older systems (ti4200). Good coding :) This is one area where consoles kinda have us beat. The programmers have to develop better graphics for the console, even though the hardware is static. So they have to work on coding the games better, and optimizing. But with PC games they dont care as much. They can just say it runs fine on the latest 600$+ card, lets leave it at that. :/

imo all games look much better with AA/AF.. Also farcry ran fine on my 9700.. and that card is what, two years old now? (actually it just hit two years a few days ago :) ) Yes deus ex was too laggy to get into.. Theif 3 was too, but not enough to put me completely off.

Test it for yourself. Ive made serveral screenshots in doom 3 comparing medium with high and ultra. I see NO difference at all between those. what I noticed that helped ALOT more was setting AF to 16x. unbelieveable how much better the IQ is with it at 16x. 8x was good already, but 16x is awesome. I gladly turn off AA completely to have my AF at 16.