A point to make here about graphics cards that is important. I spent the summer learning about CGShaders and HLSL shaders..
What sets the graphics cards apart is what their GPU can do with shaders. Shaders on modern graphics cards (Radeon 9800 or greater and GeForceFX 5x00 and above) is that they contain their own vector processor units.
Different levels of graphics cards have different Hardware shader capabilities and the better your hardware GPU is the better rendering and FX will be in games. The GeForce 3 TI were the first with hardware pixel/vertex shaders with Nvidia hardware (and that was limited).
The latest ATI and nVidia cards have great GPU hardware and shader technology (think if of it as a CPU just for rendering FX).. Having texture memory and just supporting hardware lighting and texturing are trivial compared to the importance of what your shaders can do and how good the graphics look.
Software these days usually supports 3 levels of shader capability number 1 2 and 3 a level three is just amazing..
If anyone wants to talk HLSL or pixel and vertex shaders offline just email me I love this new stuff. Amiga needs to support this technology in a better way than just OpenGL 2.0..
As far as bandwidth goes, have you all checked out PCI Express?
