With each company 'optimising' for these programs though, that does make them fairly worthless unless they let developers in on those little optimising tricks.
I'm not too bothered with my systems graphics speed right now.
Have an 1800XT and 7800GTX right now, both of which play everything I have completely maxed out graphics; still with a good room to spare on rendering speeds. That's even with the horrible PC Rendering pipelines that takes up more processor power and ram than needed cause it's running under a Windows environment. (that said Doom3 on Linux is just retarded on how much slower it is to the PC version.. not that it's a particularly well developed game as it still uses techniques from the yesteryear of programming that doesn't make proper use of the new fangled crap that our computers have.)
So to me it is begining to become overkill. Suppose the good thing is the low-end users are begining to get reasonable hardware rather than something that can just about run Quake3 at a reasonable framerate.
Now that graphics are basically at that stage where they can't really improve except for subtle things.. (oh look Quake 5 the guy can now make his face wrinkle when he winces after being hurt which you can only see when you're next to a mirror!) hopefully developers will start becoming more creative in thier games.
Not gonna hold my breath though.
