Could insatiable demand for performance be reaching a plateau? Is there enough software out there to drive high-end computing? Maybe there is too much chasing too few dollars.

Here's a couple of totally unrelated events that got me thinking:

someone told me that die hard Quake players opt to play at lower resolutions, with all features turned off in order to get maximum frame rates another person told me that Microsoft is probably done with OpenGL, and will not support future versions of the API on Windows

I don't how true either statement is, although I think it is fair to say that both statements are mostly true. If frame rate is so important in a competitive situation then, why not tweak your visuals to get maximum performance? Now that SGI is on crutches, why should Microsoft put any more effort into OpenGL than it has to, particularly if the number of high-end applications that support it don't deliver more than a fraction of Windows users?

Isn't interesting to note that Quake is a benchmark for 3D graphics hardware, and general performance, but as a matter of fact, the level of detail that is evident in the best performing systems is lost in the heat of actual battle?

Isn't also interesting that multi-billion dollar CAD, and animation applications, having been courted on to the Windows platform, may now find themselves having to completely re-think future directions because, the numbers don't add up?

The bottlenecks inside the box are floating point performance, memory bandwidth, and integer performance per pixel, but the real bottleneck in performance systems is on the outside of the box. In the professional graphics arena there aren't enough users willing to dish out enough dollars to justify a great investment in performance. In the consumer space, the metrics for performance tend to be games with devotees that are in the minority of game players. By that I mean, there ain't enough Quake and Unreal players out there in comparison to the number of Pokemon enthusiasts. No one is doing object-parallel rasterization on Pikachu, that's for sure.