I'm playing the demo on medium spec under XP for now, and it looks pretty darn good to me. After I finish it once, I will play around with bumping things up to high. From what I see here, I don't feel compelled to rush out and spend $700 for an 8800 GTX and Vista. But screenshots can't tell the whole story, since it is how things move and change that really count, like lights, shadows, water surfaces, etc. I'm pretty sure I will play the game under XP first, then once Vista SP2 comes out and good DX10 cards are more reasonable, I will enjoy playing it all over again.

I used to have upgrade fever all the time. Then vid cards went from AGP to PCIE, and I realized I'd need a new mobo and vid card at the same time, so I had to wait to get some $ saved. Then 64 bit cpu's came out and AMD went to socket 939, and I needed a new mobo, vid card, and CPU, so I had to wait some more. Now it's AM2 and DDR2, so now I need a new mobo, vid card, CPU, and memory. And now new mobos aren't supporting IDE hard drives, so I need one of those too. And guess what, during all of the waiting, other components are just starting to wear out. Now I will need a new OS too, and the decent versions aren't cheap. Sure you can get an OEM version of Vista for about half price, but if you upgrade your hardware, you cannot get a new key for an OEM version; you will have to buy it again. In the mean time, things I was almost ready to upgrade to are now old hat. Well, I saved a bunch of money, and my old rig has hung in there just fine. But I will wait a while longer, because Crysis is the game I care most about, and it is a few months away yet. In the meantime, Vista will get better and more DX10 vid cards will come out. So I am looking at shelling out at least $800 some time this summer. Ouch. But even if I had so much money that I had to shovel it off my driveway in order to use my car, I would still wait for the first service pack to come out before installing Vista. The last time Microsoft created something that worked right when it was first released was DOS 5.0.

It is a complex situation right now for several reasons, but a few things can be said fairly easily: 1.) If you are asking whether you can get better performance by upgrading your video card, the answer is very likely yes. 2.) On the CPU/mobo/vidcard compatibility questions; if you have and AMD system with an AGP vid card, you almost certainly have a mobo that supports Socket A CPU's at the latest. I know of no PCI Express AMD mobos that don't use newer AMD sockets (i.e. Socket 939 or AM2), so if you want to jump from an AGP vid card to PCI Express, you will almost certainly need a new mobo and CPU too. This is a bummer, since the three components are going to cost serious dough. The good news is that most Socket 939 setups can use PC3200 (a.k.a. DDR 400) memory, so you may be able to keep your old RAM. I am ignorant about current and recent Intel setups, so I have nothing to say about that. 3.) If it seems cheaper to buy a new system than getting a vid card, mobo, and CPU, it probably is, but you won't get the same class of vid card in a pre-built system for less than it costs to do it yourself. 4.) If you need to upgrade your mobo and CPU along with your vid card, and you are not made of money, you might want to wait until the DirectX 10 cards come out, as painful as it may be. I was inches away from breaking down and buying all three compnents (PCI Express vid card, Socket 939 mobo, and Athlon 64 CPU), but then the DirectX news came out, and AMD introduced the AM2 CPU platform. Now I am in wait-and-see mode. The new platforms will drive the prices of current gear down. Also, if I'm going to spend such a large amount of $$$, I want the latest gear. In the meantime, I consoled myself by getting an AGP Sapphire Radeon X800 GTO and flashing the bios to 16 pipelines, which is a substantial improvement over my Radeon 9800 Pro, and far less expensive than moving over to the PCI Express/ Socket 939 setup. 5.) SLI and Crossfire may be great if you have wads of $$$ to toss around, but otherwise I agree that getting one good card is better than getting two mediocre cards. Also, if you move up from AGP to dual PCI Express cards, you will almost certainly need a new power supply as well. 6.) If you don't like to gamble, shop at newegg.com.