How my now Low end PC handles these new games...

Amazingly im playing STALKER at great settings, (compared to others), AA and AS is on one or two clicks, what ever setting that is. It says Medium for the quality, certain things are on high, med, low, but most are medium, im playing at 1024x768 the dynamic lighting is on the middle setting, as in some dynamic lights. Turned off alot of the shadows, including the sun shadows, i forget the rest. The inside, especially in the dark insides, looks great, alot like HL2, I guess HL2 looks a bit better, but Stalker is still amazing. The clouds and lightening is great. The people look pretty good aswell. The flash light is like im really using a nice maglight. Sometimes i get a tad slowdown when i go outside from a dark inside, but it stops stuttering.

My Specs. Lower than yours:

AMD Athlon XP 2500+ which is 1.8 ghz! Alot slower than the majority of people now (though a nice Core 2 Duo runs that fast, it is actually alot faster). The FSB is 333! So my ram is 1gb ddr1, at only the 333mhz and its just average ram at that. My board is a 6800gt 256mb ddr3, agp board. Not sure where that relates to a GS board of the 7 series but prolly not too far worse. Windows XP SP2.

Just onboard audio, which i find slows my pc down alot, so i usually opt for the med-low settings in audio, without EAX. Im running Stalker great, NOT nearly all high settings but alot better than I was fearing, and alot better than people with great PCS.

I run HL2 really well, alot set on high, not all. FEAR, PREY, and other newer games all ran good, low-med-high settings. FEAR looks amazing! COHeroes is set usually at medium, it looks great to me, prolly could go higher with this game but havent tried.

The only two games I cant really get away with with good settings is supreme commander, the AI kills my CPU when there are hundreds of units, otherwise its ok. And same with Medeval Total War2, with alot of units, otherwise it looks good.

Not trying to brag, but I have one lucky PC. The only reason I still dont upgrade is not including Supreme Commander and MTW2 I donty need to.

We will see what happens with games like Unreal Tourney 3, im sure I wont have much luck with that. But But Rainbow Six Vegas, runs good with the dynamic lighting on, I do admit I have slowdowns here but not to bad.

Well not bragging just thought id let people know that not everyone is getting slammed by STALKER, im certainly not.  My 3 year old pc is amzing.  Ok im bragging a little.