I was talking about how this relates back to the OP, the 450 is still a decent card even though the 500 series is out would you consider it mid-range though? He won't be able to play Skyrim in his screens native Full-HD without turning some of the bells and whistles off, infact he might find he has to tune things down to 1680X1050 which is what I use for my Desktop. Now if thats the case and Skyrim will be released on the consoles in its standard 720X1080 then it will still look better than it would on his laptop even playing through his TV, providing that he indeed does need to tune his resolution in Skyrim down. So in that case you would be mistaken, because he would be running Skyrim on his laptop in a lower resolution than his console version would be. Not to mention that he won't need to fiddle around if he gets issues like alot of people have been doing trying to get Oblivion to run, me included. On the console you just install it and it works...
I'm not sure how much extra power the 550 packs, but the 450 is the low-midrange card in its range, at least. I never said he'd be able to run it on max at 1920x1080, that's probably asking a bit too much of the little laptop card, but it will almost certainly power far higher than either console. Standard console resolution is actually 1280x720, with many games going below that, so I don't think we have to worry about not hitting console resolutions.
I can also honestly say I've never had to tweak a game running on its expected systems to get it to run. Getting old games to run on new systems? Sure, but new games on new systems? Never. Unless you have a very strange setup indeed, everything is done through abstracted APIs, so assuming your drivers and directx are up to date you shouldn't have an issue - of course, some games are just badly made, such as oblivion, where things that are now standard, such as quad core processors, can cause issues rather than help. I honestly don't see a small chance of having to do some minor tweaking as a particularly bad downside, unless you prefer to think of your PC as a magic box what plays vidyagames.
Getting back to what you were saying, using Crysis isn't a very good benchmark now, yes it was great for its time and still looks fantastic but it is a 4 year old game lets be realistic about that. 4 year old PC hardware is getting to the end of its cycle without having to start tuning things down in the more recent games! You see that is when I used to upgrade, when it got to the point that I had to start turning off the bells and whistles in games or lowering the resolution to make the game smooth and playable. I am not a graphics junkie by any means otherwise I would have gone and bought 2 video cards or more and SLI'd them, and I would have bought a screen that at least did Full HD instead of my mediocre 22 inch screen that does 1680X1050!
Well, name something better? Precisely, there's not much out there. It's a good benchmark because it still ranks among the most graphically intensive games around.
No to test it download the Crysis 2 Demo, how does that run on your PC? Try running it in 1920X1080 and tell me how it works then... that is what the OP was asking. I really doubt Skyrim will run on the same specs as Oblivion, I think you will find the requirements will be a fair bit higher than those were for Oblivion, poorly coded or not. If someone on the Skyrim PC version wants to run the game in Full HD then yes it will require more power than the Consoles can provide but we won't be trying to run the consoles at that resolution.. Btw I never said games didn't run on your system not sure where you got that from, my ageing PC still runs all the new games fine but only in 1680X1050.
Personally I don't have a 1920x1080 output, and I'm sure my card would struggle with it - however 1680x1050 is by no means a small resolution, and being unable to run the game with everything on max at 1920x1080 is no reason to go console.
Also I never said you need an I7 for your system not to bottleneck your GPU, even an I5 might do, well the quicker ones anyhow but I certainly wouldn't be running a GTX580 in a system with a I3 processor installed, sort of defeats the purpose of having a high end gaming card and this would indeed cause a bottleneck! Also...you see developers are only scratching the surface still with the PS3's Cell Processors and finding what they are capable of, people keep talking about its equivalent video card, but they don't realise that the Cell uses Multi-cores all running at 3.2 Gighz capable of producing 1.8 TFlops of processing. Source: http://playstation.about.com/od/ps3/a/PS3SpecsDetails_3.htm Even by todays PC standards that is still very very good! You see if the developers utilize this power properly they can produce games like Uncharted 2, GT5, KillZone3 apon many others which look fantastic and still run smoothly even comparitively to PC's, this is why Sony hasn't released a PS4 or Microsoft hasn't released a Xbox 2 yet because developers are still scratching the surface in terms of what they can achieve with the hardware.
If you do have a high end GPU, then yes, your CPU could bottleneck it in theory. In practice, there's very little that stresses the CPU and GPU equally in video game worlds. It's an important point in theory, but in practice an i7 for gaming is well overkill. The PS3's CPU is hard to compare with a general purpose CPU such as the ones in a PC or the 360, it has a lot of special purpose SPEs which go into producing those figures. That doesn't, however, mean it can produce those figures all the time, only when the tasks it's performing can be equally distributed and correctly placed. It's a powerful CPU in theory, but again, in practice, for general purpose processing it's been well outstripped. It's not really a case of not having "scratched the surface" and more a case of knowing exactly what the processor can do, but actually designing a game structure to fully take advantage of it is a difficult task. You want to make a game engine for general purpose processors, there are volumes of published papers, but for a collection of specific-purpose processors? You're on your own, and often you simply can't take advantage of it all. I don't think any of those games can *actually* compare to what a decent PC can output, because they're the result of clever trickery rather than an example of power.
I think it's important to note that there's a very large gap between "Absolutely maxxed out" and "Console level", and just because you cannot reach the former does not mean you should go to the latter. That's like saying that because you can't afford a private jet, you'll only travel by unicycle - there are a lot of other forms of transport between them. I'm not saying PC gaming is in any way perfect, nor is console gaming in any way without merit, but you really don't need a very strong PC to play games decently, and you only need high end cards to run games very well at 1920x1080 - that still leaves the ludicrously expensive top end cards well alone. Those things just don't make sense to buy, they're powerful but my god are they expensive.
» Sun Jun 27, 2010 2:16 pm 
This is because my CPU IS limiting its potential, put the same 580 card in a state of the art I7 and THEN see how it performs, I have seen benchmarks of over 30000 3DMark06 points using I7s and 580's! 
And the probability of better textures for PC is very high actually. Mayby we will have an additional mip-map level unlocked 
