Both ATI and NVIDIA have recently updated their graphics product lines. Now even a heapy-cheapy graphics card is more powerful than anything you could buy a couple of years ago, and the really high-end cards are absolutely hoss. Packed with 128MB of RAM, these cards are faster than a French surrender. Today, we've rounded up a total of nine—count 'em—different graphics card configurations, ranging from the Radeon 7500 and GeForce4 MX to the new 128MB Radeon 8500 cards and GeForce 4 Titaniums. We've tested them all together in a massive, teeming, silicon-based pack, and we're here to show you who's fast—and who's faster.
Because we're dealing with a whole lotta cards here, we're going to limit our focus to performance. We'll address the newest wrinkles in image quality and anti-aliasing in more depth in a future article, where we can devote more attention to how every mip gets mapped. And we've already covered most of the highfallutin' 3D theory in our previous articles. We've already compared the GeForce3 to the Radeon 8500, and we've charted the changes contained in the GeForce4. Not only that, but we've dug deep into the Radeon 8500's GPU to see what makes it tick. So we'll dispense with the theory here. If you're not up to date on that stuff, do yourself a favor and go read our previous articles before you go on.
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