It's coming: the Radeon X850 line, and [H]ard|OCP is one of several sites to have a preview of it. I think what we are starting to see is the realization that brute force can only go so far, as we have seen with other architectures in the past. The world of high quality enthusiast gaming is now becoming more and more about pixel and vertex shader as has been alluded to by many companies in the industry. In the GeForceFX days NVIDIA used brute force to keep up with ATI, and now we have ATI using brute force to keep up with and outpace NVIDIA. In both situations, one company had a better architecture than the other. Certainly, it is something to think about when moving into the next round of technology this coming year. 2005. The year of pixel and vertex shader versus brute force fillrate? Or will we see everyone get smarter from their past mistakes? That preview can be seen over here. Ryan over at PC Perspective plays with Asus nForce 4 SLI motherboard. My initial feelings on this motherboard were a bit scattered at first, but with the updates, I'd say the A8N-SLI Deluxe motherboard lives up to the name that Asus has grown to have in the PC community. My internal debate with some of the staff and myself has been whether or not the motherboard deserved to be awarded an Editor's Choice from PC Perspective. In many ways, I would say yes: it has a great feature set, solid overclocking options, the latest in features include the coveted SLI technology. But in all honesty this is the first in a line of SLI motherboards and I think before we hand out any awards, we need to see what the competition is going to throw it a "best of the best" honor. While I wouldn't recommend jumping onto the SLI bandwagon as fast as you can due to some bugs that need to be worked out, you can still drool over it.
