As hardware gets more powerful, less optimised code becomes acceptable, developers can use higher level languages that makes their life easier.
In the old days you would use an assembler to write in machine code trying to get time critical code in page zero where it ran slightly faster and you were always trying to work out how to get a bit more performance out of that 8bit cpu. When you get a game that makes you wonder if its the real world or artificial then you know you are getting somewhere with regards performance.
However I think there is a point to this. As hardware becomes so powerful that it can run many games simultanously on one computer then we enter a stage where that one computer will be a shared resource which is what another thread I commented on was talking about. Streaming of games being the future. No point me owning my own PC if I'm only using 2% of its performance I may as well share that resource with other people to save money. We are a long way from that time though.
