Some game companies get it, some don’t. If you program your game for bleeding edge tech, the only people that are going to be able to run it are the people with bleeding edge machines. Only a very small fraction of PC owners have this holy grail of completely new hardware/software. Some game companies such as Blizzard get it. They know if they program there games for hardware that the average consumer doesn’t have, then the average consumer isn’t going to buy the game. Who wants to buy a $300 video card so that they can play the $50 game they just bought? If they program the game with a larger install base in mind then more people are going to play there game.

In this day and age where games are multi million dollar projects, just to break even a game company has to sell a lot of units. They are not going to even break even if they sell only to the bleeding edge crew (this goes for consoles too, but not near as dramatically as for PC’s) There are the rare exceptions. The games that are so good that they are hardware sellers. The percentage of new games that come out that are, however, are a select few compared to the games that come out by the hand full’s every month.

Then along comes Vista. Windows is counting on a game to come along that is so good that it is going to drive the sales of Vista upgrades for older systems. They want everyone with a PC to run out and upgrade to Vista. To drive sales they have made the (imho shortsighted) decision to not make Direct X 10 able to be installed on any prior version of their OS. This is the first time they have done such a thing, and they may well soon regret it. Tons of new games are going to come out as developers jump on this band wagon. The problem is that no one is going to be able to run the games (unless the programmers have also programmed the game for Dx9). While some games may increase the install base for Vista; if game companies are going to appeal to a wider audience then they will still have to program for DX9.

My first rant: The one thing more than any that I am over reading are the comments that take some arbitrary fact like, "there are 3 PS3's on the shelf at my local backwoods shop and rob so obviously they system is doomed to failure since no one has bought them in three days" or "The PS3 system has three more lines of resolution than the XBox360 therefor the system is crap..."

These comments tell more about the maturity of the poster than the system, but then there are a lot of young viewers here so maybe I shouldn't be too surprised.

Don't be too quick to judge on too little fact. It almost always ends up with the wrong prediction. When comparing horse power between systems you are really comparing not just apples to oranges sometimes, but more likely apples to composite rock. The MHz/GHz of a system CPU or GPU can be especially misleading. If I had a 1 THz (terahertz) 1 bit processor vs a 1Hz 1024 processor, other than being silly, would be impossible to compare without benchmarks being developed.

Sometimes even the bench marks can be misleading; triangles per second being one such misleading benchmark.

Anyway... grab your favorite game system, have fun and just ignore the competition for a while. :)