NVIDIA launches the world's fastest graphics card EVER!!! (Again) : Tech Digest

The evolution of graphics card technology trundles inevitably onwards, with us now seeing the first of the 9800 series NVIDIA graphics cards. PC Gaming addicts will be falling over themselves in the rush to get their mitts on what amounts to the most powerful graphics card in the world today, but with increasing pressure coming from the consoles, is this really what PC Gaming really needs right now?

First, here's what you get: with the 9800GX2 snuggled deep within your computer case, you'll be reaping the benefits of 256 processor cores and a 1GB total framebuffer running through PCI Express 2.0. Core clock speed comes in at 675MHz, Shader clock speed at 1690MHz and Memory clock speed at 1100MHz - in short it's a fairly significant leap over former heavyweight champ, the 8800 Ultra.

It is also interesting to note that the card sports an HDMI output and is capable of carrying both audio and video over that connection.

Any serious graphics head won't actually be happy with just one though. God no. For proper graphical power, you need two of these puppies stuck together to form your own Quad SLI rig, ideally slapped into a brand spanking new motherboard sporting an nForce 790i Ultra SLI chipset.

With just one of these cards costing over £350, it's a little hard to get excited. Sure, if you do get one, you'll no doubt notice a decent graphical performance boost. You're certainly paying for one at any rate and I suspect you might even manage an even 60FPS from Crysis with a couple of these under the hood. Well, maybe.

The real problem is that while these companies keep endlessly pushing up the power and price of the card technologies, the insides of gaming PCs are beginning to resemble a kind of sports car. We already know that many developers are beginning to find a serious problem with this - there's now such a massive divide between the power of proper gaming rigs and ordinary run-of-the-mill PCs that it's getting very hard for new customers to break in. It is one of the first problems the newly announced PC Gaming Alliance is going to have to tackle.

Given that there is a simply vast number of PCs out there, PC gaming should be easily the biggest games market in the world, and yet publishers are increasingly turning to consoles because they offer a straightforward means of playing games without paying through the nose or requiring you to familiarize yourself with the inner workings of computer.

Unfortunately, NVIDIA's ability to make headlines with "The Fastest Graphics Card In The World", is really not in the best interest of PC Gaming. In fact even those PC gamers who are rushing off to build themselves a stupidly powerful, stupidly expensive new rig, might well have found themselves in a much better place in the long run if the headline were more like "NVIDIA launches cheap, surprisingly powerful and easy to install graphics card for everyone to use".

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