I dunno, now that futuremark will no longer honor those resolutions, as reviewers follow suit save for ones like firingsquad that still cover them, its pretty hard to avoid viewing 1280x1024 as the new minimum satisfactory resolution.

Not to mention that if one is looking for 30fps+ playability, he/she'll look at 1280x1024 4xaa 8xaf benchies at most when buying new hardware, even if on a budget, seeing as playability below that is irrelevant to most.
Benchmark is not a game (most gamers agree with that) - plus most of the times the problems with low FPS is relater to poor or no optimizations of games and VGA Drivers (as you can see they increase with every release).

When games have poor optimizations they get low FPS for what they are capable even with High-End Cards, so it's stupid that we have to pay the price (the gamers), for game developers that aren't capable to put together a decent playable game.



The one above (from FlatOut2 runs at 70+ (FPS) with most on max (as you can see looks nice), even other famous games like Quake IV, HL2, etc get +50 FPS at high settings with a AMD64 2800+ (ClawHammer) at default frequencies + X1600 Pro (like Palit with 256 GDDR3), with some smart tweaks I played even Oblivion, NWN2 (at High settings) and others for which gamers with High End systems complained not running decent - cause they tried playing them at 1600x1200 (or even lower resolutions) with all on MAX and they didn't even knew what most options on MAX can give, which is mostly low performance cause there aren't any NOTICEABLE IMPROVEMENTS, I know this cause I tried the same games on a Mainstream (tweaked - with High Setting on 1024x768) and High-End system (normal - High Settings at 1280x1024/1600x1200).

PS.Don't get fulled by marketing, my biggest obsession is "Logic".