Video Card News
This effects about 2 people here, but i'll discuss it anyway, since it was a long time coming. It's an exciting time for those willing to buy a graphics card... Probably only me and Brendan at the moment, but maybe I can convince Bryant into getting a new one as well... The two titans in graphics cards unleashed their next generation cards this month; in one corner, the NV40 aka GeForce 6800 Ultra and in the other... the R420 aka X800 XT Platinum.

GeForce 6800 Ultra Clock Speed: 400MHz Memory Speed: 1.1GHz Pixel Pipelines: 16x1 222 Million transistors

X800 XT Platinum Clock Speed: 500MHz Memory Speed: 1.12GHz Pixel Pipelines: 16x1 160 Million transistors

Geforce 5950 Ultra Clock Speed: 475MHz Memory Speed: 950MHz Pixel Pipelines: 4x2 130 Million transistors

Now, what does this all mean? Well... First of all, look at the best of last generation, it's clock speed is actually faster than that of the 6800. Is that good or bad? Actually, it's neither. I just like to see how fast the core is running and see if there might be headroom for the next generation. From the chart it looks like the 6800 Ultra can squeeze a little more juice out of the core, so in the next few months, faster cards might come out (in the same design)

Pixel pipelines... Every generation something new comes to light that I've never really paid attention to... This generation is the number of pixel pipelines. Bottom line without going technical, the more you have the better. So 16 is good.

Finally, the number of transistors actually mean something. The more you have, the more complex (duh..) the design. This means more power and more heat. This brings me to the first down side of the 6800 Ultra... It requires 2 outside power sources, and a 480 watt power supply on the computer. Most of us don't have anything close to this so an upgrade might be needed. The 6800 Ultra also requires two slots in the back for cooling. So you gotta make sure you have a free PCI slot.

Now the good side to the Ultra 6800. It's fricken fast. Reviewers are comparing the jump from last generation to this generation like the jump to the Voodo2 in 1998. Before, every generation would jump maybe about 10-20 frames across the board. But with these new cards, we're talking about a 2x performance jump. These benchmarks are amazing. The 6800 Ultra can add roughly 25 frames per second at a resolution of 1024x768. But that's not the good part. Add 4x AA and 8x AF, we're talking about a 45 FPS difference.

Last week, ATI came out and announced their card, the X800 XT Platinum Edition. People were wondering if this card could match the 6800. Turns out, it did. Its competing head to head with NVidia's card. It stands toe to toe, wining some benchmarks and losing others. It looks like all the benchmarks that it did well in still does well, and those that it doesn't... well... It's still a weak area. That means ATI wins benchmarks for Far Cry and Tomb Raider, but loses to NVidia at Unreal 2004... EDIT Hmm, maybe I was wrong, but looking at a few more review sites, it looks like ATI wins those benchmarks too. But by a small margin.

One More EditIn response to ATI's release, NVidia created a new board labeled the GeForce 6800 Ultra Extreme Edition. (Street Fighter II Hyper Fighting turbo edition?) Anyway, it looks like it's an overclocked 6800 Ultra, preliminary results say it's not enough though. Time will tell. I hear that NVidia still has some work to do on the drivers so it might be able to squeeze more frames out of the card.

Now that i've confused everyone.... There's something else I have to discuss. Both companies have come out with multiple versions of this generation. Here's a list from best to worst divided by companies.

NVidia (Name of card - Price - Date Available)
GeForce 6800 Ultra (Extreme) - TBA - June
GeForce 6800 Ultra - $499 - Late May
GeForce 6800 GT - $399 - Mid June
GeForce 6800 - $299 - Late May

ATI (Name of Card - Price - Date Available)
X800 XT Platinum Edition - $499 - May 21
X800 Pro - $399 - NOW

Needless to say, you get what you pay for. Personally, I'm looking at the 6800 GT. I don't think I can justify paying 500 for a new video card. (That's almost a new computer!) Brendan, in your case, I still don't know. On one hand, I'd say get the GT or the X800 Pro when you can, or maybe even go for the vanilla 6800. This is because I'm not sure how much performance you're actually going to see. I have a small feeling that while yes, the Video card in your puter is slowing you down, the CPU may also hamper you from getting more frames. More research will be done though.