If you haven't got a spunky 3D card in your PC then you're limiting the number of decent games you can play. It's not complete doom and gloom though, because not all recent games rely on 3D acceleration to look good - there's now quite a trend of using voxel processing in 3D games. What's that you say? Well, it's quite technical, but here's a brief explanation of voxel processing, courtesy of the University of Iowa:

Voxel processing presupposes that a series of cross-sectional images, representing some volume which was regularly sampled at some constant interval, exists in digital form. A series of cross-sectional digital images of this type is referred to as a volumetric dataset or simply as a dataset.

Each image or slice in a given dataset is made up of a number of picture elements or pixels. The distance between any two consecutive pixel centres in any slice within a dataset represents a real world distance referred to as the interpixel distance. Similarly, the distance between any two consecutive slices represents some constant real world depth with which the volume was sampled. This constant depth is referred to as the Interslice distance.

Processing a volumetric dataset begins by stacking the slices of a given dataset in computer memory according to the interpixel and interslice distances so that the data exists in a "virtual" co-ordinate space which accurately reflects the real world dimensions of the originally sampled volume.

The next step is to create additional slices to be inserted between the dataset's actual slices so that the entire volume, as it exists in computer memory, is represented as one solid block of data. The number of slices needed to fill in the blanks is based on the dataset's interpixel and interslice spacing, and the slices needed are created through interpolation.

Once a dataset exists in computer memory as a solid block of data, the pixels in each slice take on an additional dimension. In effect, the pixels become volume pixels or voxels.

Up and coming games that are using voxel technology include Westwood's Tiberian Sun and Novalogic's Delta Force 2. And good on 'em if they can get their heads round all that...