ATi

ATi is the best. I just read news of their new graphics chip. GAMERS EVERYWHERE CELEBRATE. This new chip will (supposedly) have 64 unified shaders, beyond 650 Mhz clock, 2.0 - 2.6 Ghz GDDR4 (memory specs are theoretical), of course it will have 16 ROPs and be a chip optimized for DX10 (and Crysis :D). What's this about a unified architecture? For those that don't know what that is most GPUs have separate pixel and vertex shaders (except Xbox 360's Xenos graphics core). This means that graphics chip makers get to figure out how to allocate resources. ATi's current flagship has 48 pixel shaders and 8 vertex shaders. This means if there is a scene being rendered that makes more use of vertex shaders than pixel shaders, the pixel shaders stay idle. IDLE. I don't know about you, but I want to know that my graphics card is working at maximum capacity. This is where unified architecture comes in. Essentially, pipelines are made to do either vertex or pixel shading operations. This means that no matter what the ratio of pixel to vertex operations, you can be sure that the graphics card is working to maximum potential. I may be a fanboy, and I am sorry, but this needs to be said. Nvidia, you need to hurry up and jump on the bandwagon, lest you get left in the dust. That is my basic rundown of the new ATi architecture. My sources are as follows:
The article discussing the architecture is here,
http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/video/display/20060525104243.html
The best ATi news site on the planet and the speculation is here,
http://www.rage3d.com

Well hope that was entertaining as well as educational.

Signing off,

Kris