12.000 points in 3DMark 2003. A score of over 60.000 in AquaMark 3. Over 60fps in Halo at 1600x1200 and more than 50fps in FarCry with High FSAA and 4tap anisotropic filtering at 1024x768 - these are numbers that will bring tears of joy to PC enthusiasts everywhere.

You'd have to go back quite a bit in the history of graphics cards to find a performance leap of similar magnitude. Maybe the transition from 3dfx's Voodoo1 to the Voodoo 2 comes close. Or the jump from NVIDIA's TNT2 to the GeForce 256 DDR, or perhaps the transition from ATi's Radeon 8500 to the 9700 Pro... Maybe these developments might come close, if, for the moment, we left aside the technological quantum leap in the past. But let's start at the beginning.



Link: Tom's Hardware