30+ FPS?

#41 In practice will a 9800 gt run off a 300 watt power supply?

#42 No. I believe a card like that needs at minimum a good 400W PSU (aka not some cheap PSU that came in a cheap case) and for good practice you probably want a 450W or 500W PSU.

#43 What everyone complaining about the names of the renderers and their performance seems to be forgetting is that T3D is still in Beta. Neither of the light paths are complete or fully optimized. A forward render should always run faster then a deferred renderer as long as your scene isn't beyond the capabilites of the graphics card to handle, however a deferred renderer provides the benefit of adding tons of post-effects without dropping the framerate more then a few FPS on most graphics cards, and in theory can handle a scene easily hundreds of times more complex then a forward renderer (It doesn't really work this way as each mesh still has to be processed by the graphics card at the start even if it doesn't do lighting or anything else).

Ever since Beta 1 when I couldn't even get a playable framerate with a resolution above 800x600 with Advanced lighting, T3D has run quite nicely. With each new beta the framerate is slowly improving and for the most part my framerate never drops below 25 FPS, which while not ideal can still be very playable as that is the framerate most consoles aim for. Considering that most of the games beginning to come out are using deferred rendering, and many of them have recommended specs of 4GB RAM, and at least a Geforce 8800 to get similar graphics to what T3D is capable of with a much wider range of compatibility, I think T3D is on the right track and by release should be running quite smoothly.

As Steve said up above, the minimum specs of some games are now Geforce 7800 and equivalent, and most games do not run at all well at their minimum recommended specs. The minimum specs for T3D with AL is probably at least Geforce 7800 and may be even higher depending on what effects you think you need in your game, and the recommended specs will most certainly be between a Geforce 8800 and 9800. As BL is not as feature complete as AL, and is only there so lower spec computers can run the game it makes perfect sense to me to call it Basic.

My PC specs are:
Windows 7
2GB Ram
Nvidia Geforce 8900GTS
Intel Core 2 Duo 3GHz

As you can see, my PC is somewhere amongst the mid-range PC specs and it runs T3D just fine with AL, and LightRays enabled, and some seriously unoptimized scenes.

#44 Heh... Leadwerks. :)