Should I bother with current PC games given my PC's limits?

[DuFresne]

I really want to get games like Bioshock and Quake Wars, but I have doubts about my computer's ability to run them, or at least to run them well. I'm not sure exactly what you would need to know in order to answer my question, so I'll throw out that I have a Dell Inspiron laptop that I bought new about a year ago with Windows XP, an intel duocore processor, and what I believe to be a middle-of-the-line ATI Radeon graphics card (If there's somewhere on my computer where I should be able to find out its number, please tell me because I'm sure that info's useful).

To give a reference, my computer can run Doom 3 on the medium graphics setting, albeit with a little bit of choppiness. What do you think I could expect with a more recent game? How much more demanding have the graphics become?