Battlefield 2's rendering engine was purposefully weighed to have extremely high system requirements, so that it could remain competitive a goodly amount of months into the future, against whatever technical wizardry is coming next from the minds of those wonderful, quirky coders that crank out the games we love so much. The result is a game that is almost perfectly balanced in its requirements: modern power boxes will have a fairly smooth gaming performance at 1280x1024 with high detail settings, but the highest resolutions are out of reach to the means and intentions of the average gamer - remember that the PCI-Express test box ran on a ridiculously powerful dual-core 64-bit CPU that's not even out on the market yet, and a massively expensive GPU that currently 0wns all other graphics cards. Battlefield 2 manages to remain gorgeous and playable to power gamers, while leaving the hardware mainstream plenty of room to catch up.