There's an old adage that reads something along the lines of "the only two sure things in life are death and taxes." Whoever coined that saying clearly wasn't a gamer. If they had been, it would have read "the only three sure things in life are death, taxes, and the obsolescence of your video card in six short months. Sorry. And your total comes to $424.67 - will that be cash or credit?."

Without fail, the perpetual battle between videocard manufacturers results in faster video cards and lower prices. The cycle of tit-for-tat comes full circle with the recent unveiling of the Radeon X800 XT, a brutish piece of hardware designed to do battle with nVidia's lean green GeForce 6800 Ultra. Actually, both cards were designed to tear through all of the latest games at 1600x1200 with anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering cranked up through the roof. It's all a matter of which card does it faster, conferring the best image quality in the process.

nVidia's NV40 GPU is a particularly important development for the company. After delaying the GeForce FX 5800 launch, nVidia played a year-long game of catch-up, complicated by a number of driver issues - specifically, software optimizations aimed at enhancing performance in certain benchmark applications. In fact, right up until it unveiled NV40 GPU in mid-April this year, nVidia hadn't enjoyed a significant performance advantage since the days of its GeForce 4 Ti 4600 videocard. Then, suddenly, the game changed, and NV40 showed everyone that nVidia was back in the game.

nVidia Geforce 6800 Ultra Includes: This is a reference card, so no accessories were included.

In order to fully appreciate the level of technical complexity involved in manufacturing NV40, the chip powering nVidia's GeForce 6800 Ultra, consider that the GeForce FX 5950 Ultra consists of 130 million transistors on TSMC's 130nm manufacturing process. It comes equipped with four pixel pipelines, each with two texture units and is backed by DDR memory on a 256-bit bus.