One incentive for upgrading to my current system was that my old one was utterly incapable of playing "Myst III." Which shows you where I was back then.

I upgraded, and for the first time my graphics card had its own cooling fan. It eventually died when the fan did. My latest one actually needs its own power feed directly from the power supply.

Modern graphics engines are jaw-dropping. I haven't the slightest idea what almost half the functions are that are enthusiastically advertised in the literature. Go here (slow loading) and gaze upon a high-end card. Then go here and check out the tech specs:

Unified shader architecture
GigaThreadâ„¢ technology
Full support for Microsoft® DirectX® 10
Geometry shaders
Geometry instancing
Streamed output
Shader Model 4.0
Full 128-bit floating point precision through the entire rendering pipeline

16x full screen anti-aliasing
Transparent multisampling and transparent supersampling
16x angle independent anisotropic filtering
128-bit floating point high dynamic-range (HDR) lighting with anti-aliasing
32-bit per component floating point texture filtering and blending
Advanced lossless compression algorithms for color, texture, and z-data
Support for normal map compression
Z-cull
Early-Z

Advanced shader processors architected for physics computation
Simulate and render physics effects on the graphics processor

Patented hardware and software technology allows two GeForce-based graphics cards to run in parallel to scale performance and enhance image quality on today's top titles.

Dedicated on-chip video processor
High-definition H.264, VC-1, MPEG2 and WMV9 decode acceleration
Advanced spatial-temporal de-interlacing
HDCP capable3
Spatial-Temporal De-Interlacing
Noise Reduction
Edge Enhancement
Bad Edit Correction
Inverse telecine (2:2 and 3:2 pull-down correction)
High-quality scaling
Video color correction
Microsoft® Video Mixing Renderer (VMR) support

Two dual-link DVI outputs for digital flat panel display resolutions up to 2560x1600
Dual integrated 400MHz RAMDACs for analog display resolutions up to and including 2048x1536 at 85Hz
Integrated HDTV encoder provides analog TV-output (Component/Composite/S-Video) up to 1080i resolution
NVIDIA nView® multi-display technology capability
10-bit display processing

Full DirectX 10 support
Dedicated graphics processor powers the new Windows Vista Aero 3D user interface
VMR-based video architecture

Designed for PCI Express® x16
Designed for high-speed GDDR3 memory