Computex 2004: Graphics Cards Galore
by Derek Wilson on June 5, 2004 3:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Trade Shows
Final Words
Hopefully, our graphics coverage has been enough to whet everyone's appetite for the inevitable onslaught of reviews to come. There are plenty of companies producing graphic cards these days, and with the sheer number of GPU SKUs available from both NVIDIA and ATI, we expect to be very busy.
Of course, this year, PCI Express was a recurring theme, but AGP has definitely not left the table. Most vendors had a little bit of both to show off, and no one quite seems to have a firm grasp on just how the battle will play out. Surely, the switch to PCI Express is inevitable, but will most people be early adopters, or will it be another GPU revision or two before we see a majority of the market shift its focus? Only time will tell, but NV45 is a very interesting indication that NVIDIA might think that the switch will occur faster than previously expected.
We did happen to notice that some of the vendors were touting the fact their graphics boards were only 8 layers. This is impressive as there had been rumors of previous generation high end graphics products possibly requiring 12 or 16 layers. We haven't had a chance to speak with our contacts on the manufacturing side about just how these boards have come together, but we will be exploring the situation further.
With Computex offering an early view of the "look" of the graphics card market for the next few months, performance still remains to be seen. Many vendors are already handing out reports that their high end parts will receive a bit of a performance face lift via overclocked speeds. Most vendors weren't quite sure of their final shipping clock speeds (especially for ATI parts), but it seems that we are consistently hearing 460MHz for 6800 Ultra "Extreme" cores. As always, noise and heat levels will be very important, and we just can't know what shape the playing field will take until we get our hands on cards.
The rest of the summer is stacking up to be just as exciting and interesting as our Computex coverage, so get ready for a wild ride!
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
16 Comments
View All Comments
EddNog - Sunday, June 6, 2004 - link
Okay, who FUBAR the photos?!?J/k ;-)
-Ed
Illissius - Sunday, June 6, 2004 - link
Damnit, I wanted to see MSI's 6800s :/.Oh well. Can you just say whether they had any nBox-esque coolers on them? Best coolers evar (possibly) excluding the Silencer and Zalman's stuff.
jiulemoigt - Sunday, June 6, 2004 - link
I had to laugh what happened to ATI's responce that shader 3.0 weren't useful and not going to be implmented? it just goes to show that it's more about PR that about what is useful, this is the second time in as many months ATI is having to pull the foot out of their mouth... when's nvidia going to get caught? or has it finnaly come down neither company should be throwing stone in the first place as they both live in glass houses... for the record I like nvidia's cards but hate both PR deptments!kristof007 - Sunday, June 6, 2004 - link
Wow I can only imagine what kind of overclocking will be avalible with coolers like PowerColors fan (at least I think it was PowerColor). This should be very exciting summer.orion23 - Saturday, June 5, 2004 - link
Hi, did anybody notice a picture of an ASUS ATI X800 PCI EXPRESS video card with support for Shaders 3.0?Also, how many different X800's are out there, 2 or 3?
X800 450MHZ
X800 XT 500MHZ
X800 XT PE 520MHZ
orion23 - Saturday, June 5, 2004 - link
NeedSpeed - Saturday, June 5, 2004 - link
Alienware has been shipping 6800 Ultra's from at least May 14th when I got mine. They announced the card a month earlier.Its not cheap, but it is very fast. The drivers are still not perfect.
DerekWilson - Saturday, June 5, 2004 - link
doh!!HIS is working on a dual DVI solution, but they aren't sure about the market yet. I essentially told them "if you build it they will come" ...
they did have a sample dual dvi board (I believe an x600 though I could very easily be mistaken), but the very important fact slipped my mind since I didn't have pics of it...
Sapphire also mentioned working on dual DVI solutions for the future (of course, they've told us this in the past as well).
I'll add an update to the article.
Lonyo - Saturday, June 5, 2004 - link
I take it you missed the captions on Asus' booth saying both the 5900 and X800XT are the fastest PCI-Express cards? ;)RyanVM - Saturday, June 5, 2004 - link
#5, my thoughts exactly. Not one single manufacturer felt the need to stray from the ATI reference design far enough to go dual DVI? Pathetic.