For anyone that has a Direct-X 9 compliant video card, check this out:
http://www.daionet.gr.jp/~masa/rthdribl/index.html
Download the demo (around 16 MB) and tell me how it looks. Judging from the screenshots, this is simply *awesome* groundbreaking real time rendering

. It uses Vertex Shader 2.0 and Pixel Shader 2.0, and is the only demo to use these AFAIK (not even Futuremark's 3DMark 2003 uses these).
I don't stand a chance of running it on my crappy old Geforce 2, but if anyone's lucky enough to own a Geforce FX or Radeon 9500/9700/9800, then run this demo and tell me how close your jaw gets to the floor!!