This is very cool:
http://www.anandtech.com/show/5261/amd-radeon-hd-7970-review/6
I'm currently running Rage on a Mac Pro 8-Core 2.93 GHz (3.33 with Intel Turboboost), Radeon 5870, Boot Camp, XP Pro. I have 2.6 TB of storage with 3 drives: Snow Leopard boot, XP boot, and a third drive with 2 partitions to hold backups of those boot volumes.
I am tweaking away playing with the various cvars that control MegaTexture performance and options.
I will be very excited to see what a hardware acceleration of the MegaTexture streaming system will do for Rage.
The game is gorgeous on the 24" Apple LED Cinema Display.
PC gaming is not dead. Community-generated content is not dead, but it did slow down as engine and art complexity shot up. You almost need a full-time game development studio these days to tackle creating new levels for modern games. But it is still beeing done, and it is very rewarding. I participated in creating an Israel theater of operations for Falcon 4 Allied Force, for example, and enjoyed it immensely.
Mac Pro is not dead.
I get so tired of trolls and wonks who post "absolute" knowledge about business trends. If these guys were that good, they wouldn't be posting from the basement flat in which they live rent-free below their aging mothers, but rather from an executive corner office at a computer company.
Comparing PC gaming to console gaming is a non-starter. As has been pointed out in this thread, many of the major AAA titles are running at 30Hz and 720p on consoles (which gets scaled up for TV display in a lossy process after rendering that adds some lag). Yuck. Doom 3 chopped significant content to shoe-horn it into consoles -- the console versions have only three-fourths of the rooms and corridors per level compared to the PC version because of RAM constraints. That's why Prima has different printed strategy guides for the console and PC versions. Maybe a *lot* of undiscerning kids will accept it without caring, but not "enthusiasts". What's the point of not exploring Crysis in all its developer-intended glory? And what's up with split-screen FPS gaming, anyway? Is it not the height of obsurdity to see your opponent's view? Console controls? Try a modern flight simulator like Falcon 4 on a game pad. Next.
Comparing Mac Pro to over-clocked liquid-nitrogen-cooled PC gaming rigs makes no sense anymore because all gaming output gets scaled to 60Hz on modern LCD monitors. At 1920 x 1200 on the beautifully color- and black-saturated IPS Apple LED Cinema Display, I'm running just about evey single modern game there is that runs under XP at the max frames the LCD will display, 60! And I know my server-class Xeon components are running cool in the best thermal enclosure ever designed, extending their life and my investment. Someday I'll upgrade to Windows 7 to catch the few games that need it (Battlefield 3). Heck, maybe I'll just chuck another drive in there and dedicate it to Windows 7. That's a five-minute task with the sleek Mac Pro design.
So there I am, on my clean-lined, babe-impressing, brushed-aluminum monster enjoying max gaming. And sometimes, I even switch over to the fantastic OS X Snow Leopard desktop publishing environment to do some work with the great Adobe professional toolset!