Almost a year ago when I went from a Geforce Ti 4400 to a Geforce 6800GT I thought the GT would stay in the limelight for at least a little while. It was a smoking and pricy card (standing next to the 6800 Ultra). It still performs quite well; I’ve been playing FEAR and AOE3 with it lately and I can almost use the highest settings on everything at just around 1280×1024.

NVIDIA whipped out another “next-generation” card a short while ago in the Geforce 7 series – the 7800 and ATI rivals NVIDA’s latest and greatest with their X850 and a demo to boot. ATI’s showcase demo titled: “Ruby: Dangerous Curves” flaunts real-time motion-blur, glows and precomputed radiance transfer (PRT) while NVIDIA’s “Mad Mod Mike” demo shows off PixelShaders 3.0, Radiant lighting and depth of field.

I wonder if there will always be fancy-shmancy technical jargon to throw at consumers in 10 years. All these advancements they give claim to fame for now will sit on the backburner because it will be run-of-the-mill. What will they have to shout about for marketing purposes? I can see it now – ATI: “Get the new Tungsten Titanium TurboX 96200, with real-time holographic liquid crystal technology…” or something. Maybe we’ll be “in the game” literally. It will be interesting to see what they have to show for in a decade.

This is all great and everything but not everyone has $600 for a new card and another grand or so for a new system that will run the card. If only game consoles would come out as fast as the video cards do.

ATI demo
NVIDIA demo