On Monday, chip maker Advanced Micro Devices, which already supplies the graphics power for the Nintendo Wii and the Xbox 360, showed the "SNL" skit at an event in San Francisco. Then AMD gave a taste of what it says a game maker can do with its new microprocessor: A 30-second clip of what appeared to be a real scorpion skittering around a terrarium, presumably hunted by another equally terrifying bug. The scorpion demo was made by the film director David Fincher (director of "Fight Club") on a computer. Was it a video game? An interactive movie? AMD wouldn't say. But it looked scarily real.

The comparison between that and the GTA IV isn't quite fair. The current generation of game consoles that GTA IV plays on is already a few years old, and AMD's new processor is for state-of-the-art PCs. The processor will be featured on a new graphics card from AMD called the ATI Radeon and will go on sale in a few weeks for $200. The graphics card, which will also be built into some new computers and possibly video game consoles someday, will be able to show special effects in games that many of today's graphics cards don't (most PC games let you turn off those features if your processor can't handle them).