Navigate: Advice Beginners BIOS Guide CPUs Links Mainboards Memory Network Storage Video/Sound Cards Contact Forum SiteMap Sponsors WebNews Home	.	.
Prices: Memory Corsair Crucial Kingston Mushkin OCZ What are you shopping for?

Regarding 3D applications, the stand and deliver feature of modern gaming, the situation is somewhat different. The Voodoo2 has come, set new standards and right now is slowly sinking back into oblivion as new and better 2D/3D standalone cards have emerged over the last 3 months. The key features of the newer graphics adapters can be described in rather simplified terms. Larger (amounts of memory), faster (memory and implementation of SGRAM), more throughput (AGP) and smaller (die size to prevent unnecessary heat and power consumption) are the keywords.

Upon closer inspection, the current trends have been going into basically two different directions, similar to the development in the automotive industry in the 1970ies. On the one hand there are the real hi-tech solutions like one has found them in exotic sports cars and the best example herefore is the Matrox G200 with the dual bus technology. What this technology really does is to combine a powerful graphics chip with just barely enough memory to keep running and use the 2x AGP bus speed combined with 2 independent I/O busses to draw upon the system resources whenever necessary. The results are phenomenal but also take their toll in terms of straining the system, often apparent in the form of reduced overclockability of the CPU as well as increased thermal load of the system.

Somewhere in between would be located the TNT-based graphics adapters, offering the best of two worlds but at a high price that makes you reconsider if you really need them. In addition, TNT-based cards suffer from insufficient driver quality, compatibility problems and so, one would only wish that the S3 Savage3D would have made it past the childhood diseases and offer a fourth alternative. There may still be a chance for that to happen, though, and hopefully we will see and hear a bit more about this chipset soon.

So, let’s just step back from everything we know and all the preoccupations that we have about chipsets and brands and just focus on what we really would like to see in a video card. The result might be something like this:

• A die size of 0.25 nm to prevent any further heat production of our systems that are running to hot anyway.
• Lots of memory, let’s say twice as much as the most available today, to ensure high refresh rates at the best possible resolution with the best color depth.
• If other cards have 16 bit Z-rendering, why not boldly go (one step further) where no man has gone before and use 32 bit Z-rendering along with the possibility of 32 bit color depth at 1900x 1440 pixel resolution.
• And because we want to play games over the big screen TV and do video editing, TV in/out is a must.
• Any further wishes? Yes, I almost forgot, please make the card very compatible with SS7 and Slot 1 systems and put it onto the shelves as soon as possible for a maximum of $ 150.

Is that a realistic concept? Well, if you don’t ask for it, you won’t get it. We asked for it and we got it, in the form of the ATI Rage 128 Fury that landed right under my Christmas tree (a humongous thanks to Raymond from ATI Technologies).

Next Page:    => next page =>