For many PC users, work is paramount, and gaming remains secondary. Those who run a large display for intensive multitasking, and only play the occassional game, may not justify the purchase of a highend grahics accelerator for the occasional 3D. Here is the type of settings that can be run on a NVIDIA GeForce 9600GT (a generic one like the Inno3D) on Dell's 30 inch display.

Left click captured frames (settings/image quality) above to open them in a new window at 2560x1600.

With the above settings, timedemo ran at 50FPS, which was rather comfortable for such a fast paced game. The test was run in Shangri-La where lighting and foliage posed rendering challenges for the 9600GT. Even so, it was possible to run at pretty high detail settings. Not too shabby for native resolution.

Left click captured frames (settings/image quality) above to open them in a new window at 2560x1600.

Crysis is understandably stressful on current generation graphics accelerators. With help of new generation drivers and the updated patch, performance was reasonable as long as users do not expect too much out of the Crytek Engine. Running anything less detailed than the above settings made Crysis look terrible. DX10's supposedly lower overheads need some real-world tweaking, at least on Crysis.

Left click captured frames (settings/image quality) above to open them in a new window at 2560x1600.

ET: QW ran pretty on its Doom 3 Engine, although it wasn't exactly fast on the 9600GT. NVIDIA's stronghold on OpenGL didn't shine here, but then again, there was 12xAF applied. The tradeoff was easily justifiable, for images gained a sharper character.