Hmm... Although I am totally for GPGPUs and the GPU over the CPU (just look at those giga/teraflops of an advantage) it raises one problem I've had to contend with a few times, and many gamers too: a top spec cpu is not a bottleneck, you can still make a decent gaming rig out of C2Ds since its all on the GPU. That way you save £100 or so on your cpu, just make sure you buy the extra HD5990 to make up for it

It come down to the old cpu time vs ram again doesn't it? You can put up a loading screen, compute most it all before hand and store it in ram at the expense of many MBs (not too much of an issue for a lot of people that now have >2GB). Or you can compute it on the fly and save RAM (back in the XP days of 512MBs). On low GPU machines its a case of: RAM & wait first, or CPU and wait a little bit the whole time. Heck, I'm running into this with my libs now: indexing lists for example. just how much do you index? what is a good CPU:RAM usage ratio. Why couldn't it ever be simple right?