This is the field where I've seen the most advances in the last decade. Everyone has noticed changes in their desktop computers too, but when you're running word processors and spreadsheets, differences are harder to see. The graphics in games is better, but I'm not sure that people recognize the correlation between machine performance and graphics. It is probably seen as an evolution, and that's about it.But when doing video editing, rendering and processing, you really notice these things. I can remember doing ray traces in the early nineties, when there was no PC available that could do a photo-realistic 15-second animation in anything short of a week. That's even giving them the benefit of the doubt - I can recall doing some quick artithmatic and realizing that a 486-50 would have taken something like 200 days to do a brief animation I was working on. Even Macintosh's and Amiga's were slow for this kind of work. But I had a parallel processing network that I used as a rendering engine, so I could "crank 'em out" in a relatively short span of a few days.
These kinds of video systems are really exciting to me. It's been a long time since working with a new technology sparked me like that one did.