Thresh
Without getting too vague, I've always thought that most games are playable on any "reasonable" resolution, reasonable being 25-35 fps. Back when you guys were playing with your Pentium Pro 200s, I was running Quake on a Pentium 166, and this was in software, too. In fact, I remember the hot (and only) 3D card to get at the time was the Verite V1000, and while the framerates for that card were significantly higher than what we could get in software, the filtered look was a little too much for me to bear. Obviously, higher framerates will look smoother on screen, but what we're talking about here is a "reasonable" framerates.

Thresh
You need to look at this issue as a whole, you short-sighted mole. Even with swanky new technologies, we've still got a big problem (if you can call it that) - all of those software and game developers are also ramping up their technologies. The faster the hardware, the more complicated the software. Hardware's never been able to keep up with the demands of gaming, and that means that most of us are going to be stuck with less-than-ideal performance at some point or another, whether we like it or not. And I'm sure not going to be giving up a great game just because I can't get 80fps!

Take television's 30fps for instance. I don't doubt that at 60fps, TV signals would be much smoother. However, look at what's possible even with a hardware limit. If that's not enough for you, consider a standard format movie. They play at 24fps, a framerate even lower than television! What I'd like to see is if computer animation could someday emulate the processes which make TV and movie animation appear smooth and sharp. This could somewhat relax the heavy burden on "fill rate" and "geometry calculations" plaguing even today's highest-end systems.