I've been out of the loop on changes in gaming hardware and have fallen a bit behind on what's coming on the horizon. I"m looking at upgrading, but I like to future proof myself as much as possible. Does anyone have any good links to the basics of gaming hardware these days? For instance, things I know exist, but not enough to inform a buying decision include:

Direct X 10 cards are out, but when will DX10 be out and useable in games?

How many games are written to make use of dual core chips? Are most new games doing this or is this change further off?

Is the Intel 2 Core Duo a good chip for gaming or more for media applications?

What's the difference between the ATI and nVidia chipsets for graphics? And is the whole SLI dual card thing overkill for most games?

Will most games these days play fine on a widescreen monitor?

Have refresh rates, color and viewing angle improved enough on LCDs for gaming purposes?

Also, I've noticed that stores like EB Games have one sad shelf dedicated to PC Games. Is PC gaming going through a lull due to the new consoles coming out? Are there some great games on the horizon that warrant upgrading?

Again, I don't expect anyone to answer all these questions which have probably been answered here a hundred times, but I'd greatly appreciate some links to point me in the right direction!

Thanks!
-Travis

Direct X 10 gams will start making their way to the market shortly by early next year, but they will also have to be DirectX 9 compatible considering there are still going to be a ton of users that will still be on XP for sometime to come.

Not a lot now, but that will change shortly considering you have the Xbox 360 and PS3 that uses 2 or more cores on their consoles which allows gaming companies to develope games for dual cores fully across platforms.

The Core 2 Duo is a great media and gaming chip. AMD doesn't have an answer to Intels Core 2 series yet and won't until sometime mid next year.

ATI and Nvidia battle back and forth to become the best mainstream graphics producer. Right now Nvidia has the edge with it's Geforce 8800 series. You really can't go wrong with either of them.

It depends if that game can take advantage of widescreen format.

Yes over the years LCD's screens have continued to become better and better in terms of sharpness and clearity and response times. Most of your LCD's out now do just as good of job if not better then CRT's.

New consoles may hurt PC gaming sales for a short time, but once the flair is gone from these new consoles PC gaming sales will pick back up again like they always do, especially when something good comes out for the pc that you can't get on a console.

AMD Athlon 64 X2 4600+ OC 2.7ghz
2GB Dual Channel DDR 3200
Nvidia 7900GT
SATA II 2x 300gig 7200rpm 16mb cache RAID-0
Gigabyte Nforce 4 SLI

If your running XP don't even worry about DirectX 10 because it's only compatabile with Vista.

Console games will never, IMHO, take over the PC market because certain games, such as the FPS games, are much funner, and easier with a mouse and keyboard.

"Computer security." — Oxymoron

It's all a matter of opinion. I personally like game controllers over a keyboard and mosue or a joy stick. Playing flight simulator sucks without a decent joy stick.

AMD Athlon 64 X2 4600+ OC 2.7ghz
2GB Dual Channel DDR 3200
Nvidia 7900GT
SATA II 2x 300gig 7200rpm 16mb cache RAID-0
Gigabyte Nforce 4 SLI