@Red: If you want to see how badly full blown shaders can crawl a system then check out the newest Thief game. Of course, there's always Doom 3 but Thief 3 has shaders everywhere, too and it's plain ridiculous at times. I think these types of games are just going to chug along by their very nature and you need a machine from those gods you mentioned to get anything enjoyable out of them. Makes me glad I'm focusing on lame point & click(gasp!) and storytelling(choke!).