Engine Architecture

I''ve just started on a new project and i''ve been thinking alot about the architecture of the software. My old way of thiking was that i would have a Gfx class that would handle all rendering whatsoever, and it would provide objects that other parts of the program could manipulate to manipulate the object. The new model i''ve been thinking about is spreading the rendering around into various classes that encapsulate objects. For instance thee is an entity class, wich is used for any computer controlled object. Then there''s the ship class wich is a more full-featured version of the entity class since this is the players ship. I also have a particle class that I can just create, give it some params and a position and it will spawn particles. In this latter description everything takes care of rendering itself. The graphics class becomes simply the CDisplay class, wich inits the display and DirectGraphics objects and thats it. There are however still some specific classes for such things as input, sound/music, networking etc. I guess what I''m asking is if this approach is a good idea, and if anyone has any other good ideas of pointers to a better approach. I know this is a bit of an application specific question, but i''m still curious as to what others think. Plus somethines a comment from an outside opinion can spur inspiration to a better design.. -Zims