At US$519 (discounted price), the NVIDIA GeForce 6800 Ultra PCI-X video card costs more than the new Mac mini from Apple.
What??? A $519 video card??? Yup, and that’s just the start of the upgrade path to take full advantage of the features of this hot, new graphics board.
Why buy it? Once upon a time, when games and video displays ran side by side with 8-bit or 16-bit microprocessors, simple ISA video cards with 128K of memory were more than enough.
But during those days, the newer flavors (or ‘up-comers’) back then – the VLB (VESA Local Bus) video cards with either 256KB, 512 KB or even a hefty 1 MB of VRAM-will cost as much as these new PCI-Express video cards that I’m referring to.
People bought VLB video cards then like they will buy these new PCI-Express video cards now so that they can play the latest and greatest video games or manipulate digital images at speeds unheard of before.
In personal computing, where time seems to be measured in gigaflops, the distant past will most likely be only 3 or 4 years ago, and the past 10 or 20 years will already be akin to living in the last century or so.
At the heart of this new video card revolution is the Doom 3 game. Doom 3 requires massive computational speed, so sheer CPU power is insufficient. You must have a video card that will take off as much load from the CPU and hardware memory as possible, process those video images, and spew them off your video monitor in blazing frames per second to give our eyes better “candy.” The faster the frame rate at higher resolutions, the better the video card.
In this aspect, these new PCI-Express video cards are beginning to trickle into the mainstream graphics market. ATI and Nvidia are the major players in the graphics industry today, and their products are what avid gamers and graphic designers are snapping up these days. One MUST have the proper motherboard that supports PCI-Express to use any brand of these new PCI-X graphics cards.
Why PCI-Express and not AGP (Accelerated Graphics Port)?
PCI-X (Peripheral Component Interconnect-Extended)—as it is commonly termed today and was known as “3GIO” a while back—is today’s latest and greatest video interface.
AGP and its 8X incarnation have been around since the crown was wrestled from PCI when the first Pentium II processors appeared in the late 90s. It promises almost four (4) times the bandwidth as AGP 8X using the same graphics chipset.
Some people say that performance-wise, there is hardly any difference between video cards with the AGP 8X or the PCI-X interface using the same graphics chipset.
But, history will tell us that newer but industry-accepted and adapted technologies will always perform better because of the new features that will come up for them in the years to come…until a new and better standard will arise and replace it — and the cycle continues.
For now, with support for as high as 2048 x 1536 (double that of today’s very common 1024 x 768 flat-panel resolution) at 16.7 million colors, SLI-ready and featuring the new TwinView architecture, this new video card will enable you to play the next generation of video games and more than enough to handle your daily Adobe, Macromedia or AutoCad routines.
Moreover, its hefty 256MB of GDDR3 memory, DVI-D (digital), DB-15 SVGA (analog), and single S-Video outputs are sufficient to drive all those extra monitors and TVs at home or office—all at once!
Happy days are yet to come for game fanatics and video card nuts!!!