There is no question, the year ahead in 2004, is shaping up to be a banner one for leading edge PC technology. New features and performance abound, as new technologies such as PCI Express, DDR2 and GDDR3 find their way into the mainstream. While the past few iterations of platform products have been more or less, "kicker" implementations of legacy technology, this year's refresh marks what could be exponential performance gains with a host of new features. Likewise, the 3D Graphics market is on a major run with NVIDIA and ATi leading the charge to real-time cinematic effects and what looks to be a significant boost in available rendering power and programmability for the Game Developer community. In mid April, we gave you a taste of NVIDIA's new GeForce 6800 Ultra and in many areas the card was capable of almost 2X the performance of ATi's historically dominant Radeon 9800XT. This was an impressive feat to say the least and NVIDIA made believers again out of many, who were losing faith in the Silicon Valley based giant and its ability to execute



Link: Hot Hardware