The current state of PC hardware is a tangled mess of marketing and hype. Why would anyone want a hardware forum to pollute their programming site? Certainly hardware doesn''t impact game development, does it? Check out these posts (actually no, just look at the titles!). They are all from within the last 5 days. 1)How good is my video card? 2)Bloody Riva TNT2 can anyone help me at all? 3)Help with Banshee Card 4)John Carmack Joins XBox Advisory Board 5)nVidia TNT2 Good or bad? Above and beyond "tech support" type questions and questions like "which video card should I get?", or, God forbid, "Athlon vs. Pentium 3" there is room for hardware-specific development techniques. What is T&L and how does one best take advantage of it when programming a game? What are the differences between the Charisma engine and the nVidia GeForce2 GTS? This might also be a forum for compatibility problems, minimum requirements analysis, driver conflicts and assembly programming...all things that a professional game programmer must consider. Anyhow...what do other people think? Anything to add? I know there are a multitude of hardware review sites on the net, but most of them deal with getting the highest Q3 frame rate and not how to make your game get higher frame rates.

I think it''s a great idea!

Speaking of how to take advantage of specific hardware to make your game better, here''s a prime example of what I think a game hardware forum could help programmers cope with:

Radeon Pixel Pipeline, D3D and OpenGL