"No one is going to publish a game that can run normally only on newest and most advanced hardware because this makes the game inaccessible for the majority of users."

Ahem. Halo? When it came out, no PC on the planet could handle its advanced shaders. While Randy Pitchford made the ridiculous claim of playing it at 1600x1200 with all the effects maxed out, it was over a year before hardware existed that could even come close.

Morrowind. Doom 3. Oblivion. It's becoming more the rule that titles are being released that choke on existing high-end hardware, as developers have become fixated on future-proofing (what a joke) their games with more wiz-bang graphics than the next guy. John Carmack expressed "future-proofing" Doom 3 as part of the rationale for its hardware requirements: 512Mb video cards BEFORE they were even on the market! At the intersection of these power-hungry titles and skyrocketing video card prices (why not buy two for only $1200!) are average consumers who cannot possibly justify spending $3000-4000 on a PC that just barely competes with a $500 X-Box. Stuff like Oblivion, Crysis, and $800 video cards is killing PC gaming.

The industry needs to wake up and design for mass markets again.

The Radeon HD2900 XT is the best choice in terms of performance/price, that bit is for sure... but being king in mediocre land doesn't equate to much. Also, these DX10 benchmarks are dubious. Call of Juarez is the only benchmark that actually features a difference between DX9 and DX10, the other two only suck up system resources, with Lost Planet being a total fiasco. I'd march both software and hardware devs back to the drawing board because this ridiculous.

Skipping this generation is probably the best thing a gamer can do. The Radeon x1000 series and the GeForce 7 series still offer excellent performance in most games. It's better to save the money for later.

The Radeon HD2900 XT is the best choice in terms of performance/price, that bit is for sure... but being king in mediocre land doesn't equate to much. Also, these DX10 benchmarks are dubious. Call of Juarez is the only benchmark that actually features a difference between DX9 and DX10, the other two only suck up system resources, with Lost Planet being a total fiasco. I'd march both software and hardware devs back to the drawing board because this is ridiculous.

I totally agree your post #4, you say everything: "The industry needs to wake up and design for mass markets again. "

still no response on whether ATI optimizations were disabled or not?

yeah nice compare it with the 8600 gts.........

direct x 10 HA i got duel 4800 geforce 8800 4gig of ram and still have very hard time run this CRAP once agian came out before its time.I THINK ILL SIT THE NEXT ROUND OF ADEAS OUT