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512MB GeForce 6800 Ultra Reviewed
Timmus writes "If you thought the $500 GeForce 6800 Ultra and $550 Radeon X850 XT PE were excessive, wait until you see nVidia's GeForce 6800 Ultra 512MB: it officially retails for $999.99! Firingsquad has a review of the card manufactured by BFG. They ran tests with 6 different configurations (including a pair of 512MB cards running in SLI) with widescreen benchmarks at 1980x1200 as well."
a complete waste of money. For an extra $500 you get maybe 1 or 2 fps. What I find strange is that firingsquad is split over whether or not readers should buy it. The whole review seems to be a better benchmark of how much of an industry shill firingsquad is than the graphics card itself.
I read the article, the card didn't do that great against ASUS's 256mb card, and in fact, in most of the tests the Asus 256mb card did better. ATI got blown away in pretty much all the tests.
John Walsh once found me while looking for some other kid. He was not amused.
It is very well possible that these GPUs have more processing power than any desktop CPU currently sold, although it is somewhat specialized. This power is one reason why Apple made a developer-accessible API that taps into GPU processing power for image and video manipulation.
That's how much graphics accelerator cards used to cost back in the mid 1980's - and they didn't even do texture-mapping or 3D.
Hercules Graphics Station Card = $750
+ 2Mbyte VRAM + PROM chips = $200
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
The only reason I can justify buying a 512mb video card for gaming (the workstation benefits should be far greater, but this is not a workstation card) is to run Doom 3 at the ultra setting without SLI. The textures in ultra mode are larger than 256mb, so a card without that much memory gets drastic performance penalties. If firingsquad wanted to show off the capabilities of the card, they should have shown that in Doom 3, at ultra graphics settings, with one card, the performance gain for the 512mb card should actually be something to talk about.
Nonetheless, even if you justified buying the card on the grounds that you don't need SLI, chances are you still have to upgrade your motherboard to PCI-E, and you still spend $1000 on video cards without the gain in performance achieved with two graphics processors.
But hey, at least you're ready for Half-Life 3.