Today’s launch (and review) of Nvidia’s latest enthusiast cards staggered me. The GeForce GTX 280 is fast, blisteringly so; but it’s also mind-bendingly, incomprehensibly, ball-achingly expensive. It’s certainly not the first – every new launch seems to have such prices attached – and it won’t be the last. But £430 for a graphics card?

Let me set my stall out right from the outset: I once spent in excess of £300 on a Radeon 9800 Pro with a fancy blue cooler just to play Far Cry in all its glory. Being a student, I had no money and even less sense, but it just seemed like something I had to do – how else would I experience something so beautiful?

A launch like the GTX 280 should be like technological Viagra to me, then, shouldn’t it?

In a word, no. Times have changed; I’ve changed; gaming has changed. And it’s all down to the current generation of consoles. (Praise be to Sony. Amen.)

My gaming sessions go a little like this: I buy a game; put the disc in my Blu-ray drive (an added bonus); I press a button; I wait a few seconds; I enjoy high definition gaming of the highest quality on a 40in television from the comfort of my sofa. Cold beer optional.

Contrast this with the Labs: I install the game; load Crysis; can’t run Crysis; install the latest graphics drivers; load Crysis; can’t run Crysis; install the latest Crysis patch; load Crysis; can’t run Crysis; fiddle with graphics settings; daydream about sofa and PS3; check no one can see me, then cry a little; load Crysis; can’t run Crysis.

Have a break; spend it breathing deeply and thinking of dolphins and flowers and swaying forests of calmness (on my big TV).

Get back to work; lower resolution to a level I last used in 1998 on my 15in CRT; lower settings to Medium, thus defeating the whole point of Crysis; daydream about cold beer; finally get Crysis running; realise Crysis at these settings looks like Far Cry; sob into hands; spend £430 or smash up £1,000 review PC.

Is it any wonder the PC games industry is in decline when a single graphics card can hit the market (to much fanfare and positive reviews) with a price higher than that of an entire PlayStation 3? And the fact that it exists at all means games get more and more demanding and your PC is left playing catch-up.

The only PC game I’ve bought in as long as I can remember is Football Manager. And I think it’s safe to say I don’t need to spend £430 on a graphics card to play that.

We were surprised and, dare we say it, a little impressed: Asus packed three 3850 chipsets onto one PCB and, remarkably, made it work. With water cooling and enough electricity to power Bill Gates’ cash machine – almost 300W for the card on its own, in fact. It didn’t really increase frame-rates much when compared to a single 512MB HD 3850 – adding 3fps to our high benchmark in Crysis – but it was certainly an interesting experiment.

We thought that, after taking a look at that particularly ludicrous piece of technological willy-waving, we’d seen the back of it – but it’s surprised us all by arriving back in the Labs with some brand new firmware that, we’re assured by Asus, will improve performance.

So, we’ll be back into the Labs in the next few days to provide some more results and evaluate whether Asus’ new firmware will make any difference to the card’s performance. No doubt it’ll be fun: our last foray into the world of the Trinity was certainly interesting. At first, the water-cooling didn’t work and then, when it did, we found that the pipes were the wrong way round. No wonder the three low-profile passive heatsinks were so hot that I cooked my dinner on them that evening.

At least, in theory, we know how to work the card now. Check back soon for some results as we try to eke some more performance out of the card. If you don’t hear anything from us, though, assume the worst: we’ve screwed up and the Labs has been burnt down after the card leaked and ignited our test rig. Who says that experiments aren’t fun, eh?

Evidently, it’s decided to come out on the offensive: Nvidia boss Jen-Hsun Huang recently lambasted Intel’s integrated graphics, which have long been a staple of PCs that don’t need to play games and edit demanding videos, as ‘a joke’. He also boasted of his plans to ‘open a can of whoop-ass’ onto Intel, which must be quaking in its boots – after all, its CPUs haven’t done that well, and they certainly not market leaders with no real competitors. Ahem.

In a move that could be likened to David squaring up to Goliath and promising to break his legs with his arms tied behind his back and a blindfold on, Nvidia has also now announced its new chipset. The MCP79 is designed to stomp all over Intel’s well-defended backyard after recent claims that Intel “can’t write a graphics driver to save their life”.

It’s certainly a brave position to take – at a recent press event, Nvidia was keen to stress that, as well as excellent processors, Intel’s mighty marketing department was responsible for recent success. Given its dominance in the CPU market, I certainly wouldn’t put it past Intel to seriously frighten Nvidia with its new graphics card – in fact, judging by the aggressive and almost petulant reaction emerging from leading Nvidia figures these days, it could be reasoned that the company’s already pretty worried.

Even so, it makes for a tantalising future for graphics, as there hasn’t been a serious third player in the market for a fair few years – and a bit of playground scrapping could work wonders for the price of new GPU technology.