the constant demand of modern pc games is what drives the pursuit of better hardware

I used to have (but threw out when I moved house) a copy of PCW magazine from about 1992, which included their award for "best power-user's system". They naturally started out by asking what counted as a power-user. "One answer," they said, "might be 'a user who plays games'." That answer, I think, is taken for granted these days, but in 1992 it was perceptive to the point of being subversive.

The same issue featured a GBP20,000 SGI workstation, fitted with a GBP80,000 graphics card, which could just about cope with rotating a 3D shaded image of an aeroplane in real time. If you'd shown them Doom they'd have died.

Peter