That's an interesting point, because you're right, they can't really afford to even make things that no one can run. It just won't reach a good enough audience. However, what I'm thinking is that people will be using the engine itself. The game is irrelevant. I had Quake 2 and I hardly played it once Half-Life came out. I have Quake 3 and I don't play it since RTCW is out. The engine itself is going to be heavily modified and probably top-notch game development houses like Raven Software will modify up to 80% of the engine for themselves. It's like how Medal of Honor Allied Assault is based on the Quake 3 engine, but it only gets 30fps while Quake 3 gets 200 fps. Of course Doom 3 will be accessible. What I'm referring to is the prospect of games that will be released using heavily modified versions of the engine. He says he's keeping his card for a good 2-3 years, so I'm giving advice for that. I bet just 8 months after Unreal 2 is released there will be a game based on that engine, maybe even a critically acclaimed game that he won't be able to run at very high graphics settings because he didn't have the right buying strategy and because the engine was so heavily modified.
I also want to note "playable framerates". The Rage 128 chipset, when it was first released, was touted by ATi as being able to run Quake 3, etc. etc. etc. ATi even released a couple generations of "quake 3 enhanced drivers" specifically just for running quake 3. And yes it was playable. But only barely. The problem was that it averaged 35fps but occasionally dipped down to 15fps, and believe me it wasn't very much fun. I played many hours of quake 3 on my Rage 128 and in high-poly scenes things slowed down to a crawl. Just be careful when John Carmack promises things to run smoothly, and remember that there's still 1.5 years until it's released. I'd be cautious about any promises of the future, especially promises made for things that are more than a year away. Finally, last but not nearly the least, no one buys an FPS game nowadays and expects to play the stock game. User-made mods are even more taxing on the computer than any heavily modified engine itself. Half-Life ran fine on my Pentium 166 with a voodoo 2 but now mods like Counter-strike require a 1Ghz processor to be relatively smooth, and even then 1Ghz sometimes isn't enough. I played counter-strike long enough on my Pentium II 350Mhz to know that it's equally frustrating not being able to play mods as it is not being able to play the stock games.
Finally it wasn't entirely about whether or not things would be able to run at all, but it was about cost/performance ratio too. If you want the most bang for your buck (especially for a possible 2.5-3 year period which he is suggesting) it doesn't make sense right now to run out and buy a high end GF4 card. It makes more sense to either buy a mid/high end card like the retail Radeon 128LE or the GF4 ti 4200 and then buy another card a year and a half or two years from now, or to wait for the next generation and buy the top of the line card from that line of cards. If he only cared about making sure things ran, he would go with the fastest possible thing that's out there right now, but his asking for something that might last as long as 3 years was an indication to me that he cared about cost over time as much as performance.
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