Truth be told PC gaming is dying. If you look at sales of video game consoles like the Xbox 360, the Wii and the PS3, in terms of software, the PC sells a small fraction of the same game on like titles. Part of the problem is that the PC is an ever evolving platform with different video cards, motherboards, CPUs, memory configurations with numerous operating systems and software updates to contend with compared to a closed system on the console.

According to NPD Research only $910.7 million of the $8.85 Billion generated last year by the video game industry came from PC Games. What's worse is that the top ten games from the last year consisted of World of Warcraft expansions and Sims 2 expansions. The only FPS game on the top ten lists was Call of Duty 4 Modern Warfare, meaning that the PC's bread and butter were also long absent.

Playing games on the PC have brought me many bright happy moments, including the first Command and Conquer game ending with Kane getting blown up by GDI's Ion Cannon, the beautiful waterfall in Unreal, the first time I played Far Cry and many other memorable moments. The problem I have today is that the latest games just don't have the same innovation or fun.

In any event, one of the most visually striking games of the last year has been Crysis. The game is in a word, beautiful, with lush grass, trees that are fully leaved, realistic characters and vehicles that are modeled with real physics in mind and more. The game runs reasonably well on the 9800GTX with a frame rate of 26 fps at the resolution of 1280x1024 4x AA 16x AF. This setting would put most cards into the back burner but the 9800GTX handles it a lot better than the 3870 from ATI or the 9600GT. Raising the resolution to 1680x1050, the maximum was unplayable with this card at 4x AA 16x AF.

The second game I want to talk about is Call of Duty 4 Modern Warfare. This is the only Top Ten game on our test suite but is still a lot of fun when compared to “WOW and the Sims” IMHO. Modern weapons to the COD franchise are a good fit. The 9800GTX was able to play this game quite well at the setting of 1920x1200, the maximum that my 24” monitor supports, with 4x AA and 16x AF except in heavy firefights where frame rates drop to unplayable levels. Command and Conquer 3 was one of the best games of last year and the expansion pack which tells the story of Kane from Tiberian Sun to after the Third Tiberian War, has just been released by EA. This game plays much like the old school C+C and the expansion pack lives up to its name. The game played 100% smoothly on the 9800GTX with no slowdowns or increases on the frame rate cap that I could detect.

Game screenshots