Big meaning the newest (and therefore hardest on hardware) and usually most graphics-intensive (finest detail/fastest movements)
Gaming is the single most stressfull activity you can do on a PC... the rest of your gear should be Smokin' fast-- why underpower it?

For right now... I would avoid Vista. IMHO there are too many driver issues other weird things going on ... it is a not-ready-for-primetime OS --to me. I tend to hold back on new releases for just this reason.I'll give them 2 years to work the bugs out before I think about upgrading
XP has been tweaked/refined for 5-7 years now-- I am familiar with it... wait 'til Vista's flaws start showing (they will-- and soon) No OS is perfect --and there are "wolves" just salivating to pick microsoft apart again.

Others may disagree with me on this --but if you want best game performance XP would be better. There may not be as many games you can PLAY on Vista as XP --simple software incompatibilty.

Why would the newest, most graphics-intensive games not work on an IceQ II Turbo Radeon X1950 Pro?

Yeah.. I guess I'll re-install my XP Pro.
Besides, I get a volume license when SP 1 comes out for Vista.

I've just looked and I don't think that card is DirectX 10 compatible so you won't get the best of DX10 games.

Personally though I think all this is stupid, I personally cannot justify £3-500 on a new graphics card and £150-200 on a new CPU every year a new game comes out and I think it's pointless I stopped the craving for the latest and greatest in the Geforce 4 days and my computer will get upgraded when I NEED it.

Think about what you need, If you want to run the latest and greates games at full specs then you're wallet will suffer every few months.

As I said, just consider what's important to you and build accordingly don't fall for my willy[3DMark scores] is bigger than yours crud.

not the cards fault its vistas at present, it is picky what games it will play, it likes some pc setups but not others.
eg garhar has no probs at all with vista everything works great for him... am very jealous.. but for me playin a downloaded video wont work and some games i've had to move to xp again because of random shut downs and locks.
there is a service pack coming out soon i think which may resolve a lot of these issues however.
so it may be worth putting xp in another partition and running both until vista works out its issues. it will be great when fixed.

YES. Omg I SO agree with you on that..

I find it funny how they run games as benchmarks at like 2560x1600 resolutions, and then at the bottom in small font note that "the game doesn't actually support this resolution, but there's a way to achieve it" and then they write these technical steps you can do.

I mean what is the point of that.. noone is going to run HL2 on that resolution..!!

Also, it's funny how they all get over 61FPS ANYWAY, afterwards..
I guess they don't realise that the human eye can't tell the difference between 62FPS and 24502fps.

although the upgrade IS needed... this is what I'm running right now:

1gb of DDR ram
Intel Pentium 4 2.40ghz
Ati Radeon 9200 SE (9250 chipset)

That should tell you enough.. it's not too bad, I mean it runs great, I just can't play many games with that setup.

That's it.

Like the idiots with Quad core, dual/quad all singing all dancing willy waving graphics cards in an sli/crossfire set up, I challenge any of them to utilize all of that performance on a day to day basis.

It's like the Dyno Queens with 1500HP surpa's, you can't put it down on the road, you can't utilize all that power but you can use it for pub talk.

No offense intended to anyone, this is just my opinion