Digital Home Thoughts: Tom's Hardware: How much Graphics Power Does a PC Really Need?

"Faster and faster, and even faster - the big names in the graphics industry continue to launch new products in ever-shorter cycles. In a seemingly endless spiral of events, the 3D performance of new graphics processors is constantly pushed to new heights, as they gain more features, and are packed with increasing amounts of faster RAM. This leads to an unavoidable upward spiral in price as well: at $500 or more, the fastest graphics cards currently available cost as much as an entire off-the-shelf entry-level PC. So who really, actually, honestly needs all the great new 3D features of such sinfully expensive graphics cards? Or, conversely, does their absence in an inexpensive entry-level PC make it useless? By no means! Usually, such machines offer everything needed for working with office applications, image editing, listening to music and surfing the Internet. These tasks require neither a fast graphics card nor a super-charged CPU. Watching DVDs and videos is also no problem - even the simplest VGA card available today fulfills the necessary requirements."

Slightly off-topic, but an interesting article about the state of computing and 3D cards today. The article quite correctly points out that for the vast majority of day to day computing tasks, even the weakest 3D card is more than up to the 2D tasks an OS requires of it. Vista will change all this, however, if you decide you want to run with all the eye candy turned on. I love eye candy, so I'm planning on it. Mmm. Candy.