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Fastest Graphics Ever, Asus ARES Rips Benchmarks
MojoKid writes "Over-the-top, killer graphics cards are always fun to play with, though they may not be all that practical. With a pair of ATI Radeon HD 5870 GPUs on a single PCB and 4GB of GDDR5 graphics memory on board, the recently released Asus ARES is one such card that can currently claim the title of being the fastest single gaming graphics card on the planet. This dual-GPU-infused beast rips through benchmarks, besting even the likes of a Radeon HD 5970 or NVIDIA GeForce GTX 480. You can even run a pair of them in CrossFire mode, if you're hell-bent on the fastest frame rates money can buy currently."
1) 30fps is a joke and not anywhere near a playable framerate
FPS is one of those subjective issues where there seems to be a lot more "I don't like X so you are daft for suggesting someone might" then hard facts.
For lot of people 30fps is perfectly fine if it is a minimum rate rather than an average. A lot of people talk at cross purposes on this one, the "30 is fine" crowd assuming that the people looking for 100fps+ when there monitor probably refreshes at 60Hz are daft and want 100+fps everywhere and the "30 is no were near enough" crowd thinking that the 30fpss would be happy with 30 on average. For games that require decent graphics hardware the demand on that hardware can vary a lot, so a card that gets 30pfs in some areas will drop below 15fps in others, likewise that card that pushes 100Hz in the lighter scenes may drop below 50 on the really heavy ones.
So any quote of an fps requirement or recommendation is completely useless unless you qualify the figure in more detail.
Another factor that needs to be considered is screen size. An object moving from one side of the screen to the other at the same framerate is going to look smoother on an smaller monitor than it'll look on a full-wall projector (unless of course you are far away from said wall, to the point where it is effectively the same size as the small monitor in terms of how it appear on the back of your eye). How far objects on the display travel between frames is what needs to be measured, not just how many frames there are in a given time. This brings up another point as to why this sort of thing is subjective and difficult to sound reasonable discussing (without so much supporting detail that you bore people to death) - it very much depends on what games you play and how you play them.