Quote Originally Posted by pmp View Post
The situation now is much better than it was 5 years ago. I have done system building, business analysis, and consuting for many years. It wasn't long ago that to get 512 mb video ram you were dropping 5 bills. Now its standard on all 100 dollar graphics cards. And with stuff like the mid-ranged 9800gt out for under 150, this is a buyers market on graphics cards.

As to the notion that stuff is outdated... outdated doesn't mean useless. You can drop under 150 bucks on a graphics card that will play any game made quite respectably. Trying to future proof your rig by positioning yourself on the cutting edge with each release is a waste. Games just aren't there yet.
I will never "future proof" a system simply because it's not financially reasonable to even try, so I agree with you there. I saw potential with the Aegis accelerator card, but never bought one, and it was a great idea but no one, not even game dev's, bought into it.

However, there are some games (Stalker: Clear Sky, Crysis, Far Cry 2, CoD4, CoD:WaW) that play or played horribly with the video cards that were top of the line when the game was released, even with dual cards. Crysis is a great example of this; it plays great on my single GTX 285, but game play sucked on dual 8800 GTX's. Even the Stalker pre-quil plays bad on a nVidia 9800, but I haven't tested it yet on my rig so I don't know how it will play.

I think the games coming out will continue to push the hardware to evolve more than they did a few years ago, like when the original Ghost Recon was released in 2001 and UBISOFT used the very same game engine for their release of Sum of All Fears game for the movie when it came out.