I don't think so. I can understand SSD/HDD difference and SSD requirement, which is probably due to tons of random, small reads. Yet, Valve has shown us it's p

I don't think so. I can understand SSD/HDD difference and SSD requirement, which is probably due to tons of random, small reads. Yet, Valve has shown us it's possible to have great graphics, atmosphere and playability with modest hardware with HL2 series. They tuned it so hard, so it crashed on AMD systems like crazy in the beginning. They called gamers to their labs and debugged on real hardware when this happened. I remember installing 3+ hotfixes a day. They did HDR on a card (Radeon 9600XT) which supposedly can't do these things and ran with almost no performance penalty. I believe so many things can be optimized further, yet it's not seen worthy of the effort. When games are made for passion, but not for money primarily, everybody wins. When you want to milk something as quickly as possible, this happens.