Performance does matter, but it matters to a smaller and smaller percentage of gamers and game developers with every generation ... To use rough numbers, the percentage of games that were limited by processing power of the following systems
Atari/Colecovision/Intellivision 100%
NES/Sega Master System 90%
SNES/Genesis 80%
Playstion/N64/Saturn 60%
Playstation/XBox/Gamecube/Dreamcast 40%
PS3/XBox 360 20%
To understand what I mean by this, a game like Tetris can obviously be developed to take full advantage of the available processing power of bleeding edge hardware but the "core" of the game is just as good on a $5000 PC as it was on the NES. One of my biggest disappointments in the last generation was when this occurred to me, and that was because I was playing a game that had advanced dramatically in visuals but had very similar gameplay as a game that was released in 1998.
As much as I would love to see what a developer could do with a system that had 2 Radeon HD 7970 graphics cards hooked up in crossfire, I realize that this graphical processing power (mostly) represent fluff at this point in time.
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