I say "damn the torpedoes" and get yourself an Nvidia GeForce 7800 GTX card. 8-)
One of the kids at the office brought one in to try on some test systems I've been building (Tyan 2895 + dual Opteron 275 + 4gigs RAM). I'm not much of a gamer, but he booted one of the boxes into Windows XP and started playing Call of Duty 2. The whole office just stopped for 5-10 minutes while everyone watched. With a sufficiently fast computer/video, these shoot-em-up games are full of eye candy without affecting gameplay at all. Wow. Who woulda thought you'd need 4 opteron cores, a $400 video card, and a few gigs of RAM just to play a game with all the "fun bits" turned on. 8-) Thank goodness my daughter is still happy with her PSP....for now. 8-)
Cheers,