Continued:

The concern for ATI would be that since NVIDIA has already launched boards with full-scale x16 SLI, it would be a major performance impediment if ATI boards continue to run at the limited 8x version. Due to this, they would then lose out to NVIDIA in the motherboard market where as of now NFORCE4 reigns supreme (at least in my opinion).

Clearly at this point in time, NVIDIA has got the edge but as we saw a couple of years ago when NVIDIA launched the 6 series of cards to trump the 9800s, things can change pretty quickly, and if the leaked specs of the R600 are anything to go by, NVIDIA could have trouble on its hands, as ATI has gone for a complete overhaul. The R600 will be fabricated on 65nm and will feature a higher clocked core running at a cool 800MHz (compared to 450MHz for the 7800) along with 512MB of GDDR4 memory. At these specs, it would simply be the fastest clocked graphics card ever. It would be interesting if someone could come out with a way to run our computers straight from the card without needing a separate processor, but I’ll leave that for another column.

Maybe ATI will come out with a motherboard with is a single R600 chip that does graphics when you play games and switches off the processor and takes on the workload when you are simply doing a word document. It’s worth a thought for the sheer novelty and expertise show off.

The battle for graphics supremacy is going to be an interesting one to watch but I just hope the game developers wake up to the massive amount of power available to them and start designing better looking games soon. Only then will it be worth anyone’s while to splurge on an R600 or the 7800.