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The Fastest Video Card You Can Buy
Mack writes "OCAddiction takes a look at the fastest video currently on the market. Here's what they say."With the release of Doom III pending, both ATI and nVidia are scrambling to show their very best product on game day, this we can count on. But as it stands now, the OCSystem Enhanced Radeon 9700 Pro Level III SE is simply the best card your money can buy today.""
I did research under a professor who specializes in bioinfomatics. One particular goal of his research group is in visualization. Specifically, how the f*** do you graphically represent gigabytes of genetic data in a meaningful way? And how do you do it so that you can get useful information from it, like repeated patterns and whatnot?
The answer to the above is to do it in 3-D. One of the (mad-skilled, overachieving, indian) grad students wrote a program which renders DNA base sequences into a 2D plane, and then looks for important sequences (such as functional groups). When it finds one, it raises it out of the plane. All of this could be shown on our ImmersaDesk, but not everyone has an SGI Onyx. For that project, having a lot of processing power on individual PCs was a life-saver.
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
That's why I'm still playing NetHack...well that and because it's still the best game out there.
Seriously though, can these super cards be used for anything other than the generation of display output? As they are doing so much 3D processing so much faster than any CPU can, I'd like to see the ability to use these GPU's as coprocessors for rendering images back to software/files rather than just to display output. Something like using it as a hardware accelerator for POV-Ray or Renderman. Does anybody have any insight into potential non-traditional uses of these super cards?
I find it interesting that mack@ocaddiction.com
is the person that submitted this story. Makes you
wonder what ocaddiction gets out of it. I find it
interesting that ocaddiction appears to have a lot
of very positive gushing reviews of ocsystem
products, including claiming they are using
the "Expeditious Gamer" line of ram in some of
their test systems. I "personally" would take about
anything that ocaddiction has to say about hardware
with a grain of salt at this point. YMMV
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