Nvidia GeForce 6800 Ultra

2D quality hasn't been forgotten either and the GeForce 6800 comes fitted out with dual integrated 400MHz RAMDACs offering sharp, vibrant performance all the way up to 2048 x 1536 at 85Hz.

The GeForce 6800 can also handle advanced MPEG 1, 2 and 4 video encoding and decoding, as well as WMV 9 decode acceleration. This should improve playback of DVD video as well as any current and upcoming streaming content. It should also offload your CPU during video editing and video rendering. I'm a bit uncertain if this makes the GeForce 6800 a viable alternative to a semi-pro video editing card, but this is something we will take a closer look at when we get a final production card.

Support for Microsoft's Video Mixer Render (VMR) enables playback of multiple video streams without loss of quality. With our US readership being HDTV enabled, native support is a must and nVidia offers this for playback up to 1920 x 1080i, which is pretty much as high as you can go. Even though HDTV broadcasts are some way off in the UK, with Blu-Ray and HD-DVD on the horizon, distributed HD media isn't too far off, so the ability to be able to playback HD content is a real bonus.

But let's take a closer look at some of the more interesting new 3D features. One of the most impressive features, that should have a massive impact in the way that computer controlled armies are created is the Vertex Frequency Stream Divider. This might all sound like marketing jargon to you and me, but there is some substance behind the name. What we're talking about is a way of programming variability into large groups of identical objects, to make them appear individual, even though the base model would be the same. Take for example a war game with a group of soldiers marching. Generated using traditional rendering technology they would be so synchronised that it would immediately look false and obviously computer generated. Apply the Vertex Frequency Stream Divider and suddenly you will have an army where each individual soldier can have his own unique attributes, subtle differences that make for a far more natural and much less mechanical look and feel. Not unlike the armies of orcs marching against Helm's Deep in The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers.

This is something that so far has been extremely complicated to create in games due to the infinite amount of variations that could be applied, which would cause vast amounts of data to be processed for very little gain. Using Vertex Frequency Stream Dividers allows this to be done effortlessly and it can be applied in different ways depending on the type of game.

But this could not be done without support for Vertex Shader 3.0, which is meant to add near infinite-length Vertex programs and dynamic flow control that in turn removes the previous limits on the complexity and structure of shader programs. Breaking this down it means improved performance in games because routines can be looped and effects stacked on top of each other, rather than having to continually stop and start new routines for individual effects.