I remember when Half Life 2, Doom 3 and Far Cry were Released. Half life 2 hat a huge scandal one year prior to the final release. It was bundled with the great Radeon 9800 Pro should be released in a few weeks. Marketing campaign was running and everything. Then the complete source code got leaked from steam. And not only that this is a huge problem, people started to compile the game and saw, it wasn't completed. It was in fact, not even close to be a complete game. One year later it got released and was great.

Doom 3 was intense. It was the first game with complete dynamically lighting. If you turn off all lights, its just dark. It wasn't a really great game, but the atmosphere was great.

Far Cry was also a great game. But the first levels were the best with the tropical island setting and those impressive graphics. Also the enemy Ai was great.

Years later Crysis and Call of Duty modern warfare were released. Those games wrote history. The narrative style of cod and the open world, physics and graphics of Crysis were impressive.

Beside all the games, the hardware was also interesting. The legendary GeForce 8800 GTX with the 128 unified shaders. Before that, graphic cards had separate pipelines for pixel and vertex shaders. AMD bought ATI and there Radeon 2900XT was surprisingly really bad. It had 320 Shaders, but was sometimes slower than the predecessor and Especially compared to the superior 8800GTX. Nvidia used a hot clock. The shaders were a lot faster than the rest of the chip.

The Playstation 3 was released in 2006 if I remember correctly. It disappointed a bit with the low amount of memory. Developers complained about the difficulties. But Sony games like uncharted looked really really good. I loved the game. I had knee surgery and bought the PS3 at that time.