You can feel the tension....it's palpable

[Allen]

Well, I think mine's borked. So probably won't get that much...

See here.

[SilentDeath]

the next gen cards arnt so much next gen. nvidia has had a lot of redesigning to do i assume,i expect its cards will be ok... ati's cards will be shrunk down to 0.13 process giving upto about 650/750mhz clock speeds when overclocked (9700/9800 cards have been reaching 550mhz!) which will give a smallish speed boost - probably about 15%. then theres the new mem, i dont know much about what thats going to run at..
also theres dx9.1 soon to be released which has a few new features. i think all the new cards will support it in hardware, im unsure if the current cards will, so hopefully i can afford a new card soon

btw, a 9700np/pro (maybe even a softmodded 9500!), with a few mods, can outperform the most recent cards atm. mines close - i would say its better than a 9800pro. doing a few vmods soon, and it will be beter than an XT

[Aaron]

The problem, as I see it, is that it will get to the stage where it's the humans who are the limiting factor.

Imagine how long it's taking Valve to release HL2. The better the technology gets, the fewer the number of people with the talent to exploit it and the more complex the games become. How long did the average 8-bit console game take to write and how many people worked on it? The average PS2/Xbox/GC game now? If a game takes two-three years to produce now, imagine how long it will take to make one when in 5 years time. Will any software companies even have the money to do it?

Oops, that turned out quite negative.