No.I dont care much about this SM3 since i wont buy a new card til next year, which as you realized Verto.. its the R520.

LOL as i expected, the MEGAGAMES BITCHES deleted my post. Anyways i not buying another graphics card till next year either. Until the good PCI-E stuff is out.

i don't care much, i still like my X800pro!

yeah my 9600 pro still serves me well on those lonely nights at sea.

No upgrade for me until PCI-express is out and has matured alittleBy then the SLI feature of Nvidia's cards will be affordable, well, at least semi-atainable. Good luck ATI, hope it all works out for ya. Hope ya drop another big bomb on Nvidias market. hehhe

Canada = ATI = SUCKS !!!U.S.A = Nvidia = OWNZ !!! BAHAHAHAHAHHA

ATI is Canadian and it is still better than Nvidia :D lol....man I still have love for my 9600 pro.....ATI pwns.

doesn't matter what games nvidia adopts or gets to make use of that 3.0shader etc etc facts are games look about as good as they can get. Everything else is just an added bonus and i'll tell you I'M NOT SPENDING 600+ DOLLARS ON A CARD FROM ATI OR NVIDIA JUST TO SEE SOME NEGLIGBLE GRAPHICS. sorry for the spelling but i'm illiterate. (I use nvidia) that says it all. :-()

Acctually No ATI does not pwn...Nvidia is... I had a 9800xt and upgraded to a 6800ultra OMG it f**ken PWNS.....

Considering the amount off $$ ATI gave valve, they should hold off releasing the game until the 520 releases. Whats another few months. -_-

Omosa, your comparing two totally different Series of cards.. compare your card to an x800xt and see who "pwns"

Haha Ati is getting destroyed utterly. Just look at the current benchmarks and testing. Along with reviews. Whats more interesting is that time is against ATI. The further down the road, the more their older card designs fail. Everything is falling into nVidia's Lap, where it belongs. Long live 3dfx (Part of nVidia if you people didn't know, creatures of the voodoo cards)Long live nVidia

Well Anonymous at 19:17, comparing the 6800 series to the 'x800xt' it still "pwns" it LOL you dumbass

Nvidia has bad design I think their boards take up 2 slots on the motherboard cause the card is so huge, and ATI only takes one. Why is it that something that takes up double the amount of space is only on par with its rival company ? I tell youBad design.

you do better you smartmouth

nVIDIA

bad design, its the motherboard manufacturers that have bad designs, why would you spend 500 dollars on a gfx card just to fry the card in PCI slot 1, nvidia is smart for making their cards 2 slots, it saves the user time money and trouble of replacing overheated sound and network cards, also, nvidias SLI will be awesome, but who in their right mind would pay 1000 dollars for just graphics, oh and SM3.0 adds negligible graphical quality, but it makes the card more efficient when rendering complex scenes (as seen in 1.2 farcry)also PCI-E is just a fad, cards dont even use the full width of AGP 8x yet, even with the 6800 UE and x800 xt PE, pci-e is just a big waste of money and will be for another 2-3 years only reason its out now is so all the bugs and stuff can be sorted out before the cards will utilize all the bandwidth, notice right now how the only cards that utilize pci-e are the lower end ati cards, ati knows that the x800 series doesnt use the full buswidth so they are not wasting their time with pci-e on their high end cards just yet, that and also the pci-e boards are intel with ddr2 and those boards are actually worse than the old socket 478 boards (ie 875 chipset) both board manufacturers could learn something from the 6600gt as it uses .11 micron process and doesnt produce nearly the amount of heat that the new boards do and it runs at a higher clock rate

OUCH! That's like a strong kick to the groin for ATI.The overrated Half-Life 2 is supposed to be ATI's baby. Plus now ATI is having major driver problems (again) with SM 3.0. I'm not surprised at all...No wonder they're so desperate now. Trying to get SM 3.0 to their cards after bad-mouthing the SM 3.0. That's like eating their own shit. How desperate can you get?I kinda feel sorry for ATI. With continuous blows from Nvidia, that must've hurt.Here's a couple of articles for you fanboys. Enjoy! ;-) http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=18134 http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=18119

NVIDIA = USA = THE COUNTRY WITH THE MOST STUPID PRESIDENT AND THE WORST LEVEL OF CORRUPTION.ATI = CANADIAN= JUST A GROWING ENTERPRISE...GROWIN' N' GROWIN' DAY BY DAY... NVIDIA ASSHOLES JUST SUCK MY c**k! f**kIN' CORRUPTED CORP.

F U C K canada the little bitches we protect, who put shit that dosn't even fully support HL2 on the shels with it how G A Y. NVIDA owns ATI and f u c k s them good, so f u c k ATI. If you want a borad thats stable and dosn't suck a big canada D I C K you have to buy Nvidia

Well if you are soo stupid to look at the current hl2 benchmarks, the 6800 ultra does worse than the 9800PRO, 68% worse in hl2 then the x800xt, and on top of that, that with nvidia not even havn't as much AA , and shader 3.0 wasn't even enabled

Nvidias DUMB investment. f**k this shading shit, ill only buy a card with it support once a GAME WONT RUN otherwise. As i understand HL2 is good enough even on Geforce 2 series

"Anonymousat 0:23 28/8/2004Well if you are soo stupid to look at the current hl2 benchmarks, the 6800 ultra does worse than the 9800PRO, 68% worse in hl2 then the x800xt, and on top of that, that with nvidia not even havn't as much AA , and shader 3.0 wasn't even enabled" *bowls over laughing* right :p

PWN3D ATI or any other Nvidiot,Do you even realize how dumb you are and what shit you said ? You must be either 10 year old gamer or a complite retard. SM3 isnt some major breakthrough, its a faster effect achived, some extra eyecandy here and there, nothing essential to run thouse games.In the news... right now Nvidia payed millions for games to support it and now ATI's gonna use their investment. Who do you feel bad for ? Did you even know that Nvidias profft lately fell 79% !!! from 24,15 mln $ to 5,199. Meanwhile ATI trippeled its. Go read some f**king news and save people from your CRAP.

lol you listed tiger woods 2005 twice who wrote this a 12 year old? lol

no need to bring country of origin into this or politics. just cause a company is owned by a different country doesnt mean sh*t. all you americans have got to get over yourselves. youre not the only country in the world and even if you dont think that, you definitely are not the best. ammount of nukes is what makes you the dominate superpower, not your class or culture; or breakthrough in electronics. nvidia and ati may have originated in the usa and canada but the technology would have come from japan. but on the discussion ive always been an nvidia supporter, they usually make better cards, but the last lot over the year have been cr*p, so i have an ati card. i usually buy mid to low range cards cause i dont wanna pay top $ for high range and then 3 months later have unsupported gfx in my card. i update my card about every 3 months and seriously i save so much $. what you net nerds have to get through your thick skulls is that you have to pull your money from somewhere. if you have the money to get a high range card everytime a new one gets released you must have a well paying job, or a life devoted to playing games to escape from reality. which do you have?

lol dude !! but still those cards r too expeinsive ! and i don't think they r only for Games ! who gonna spent more then 700 $ for a graphics card and after 1 day a new graphics card will released ! anyway if anyone want to buy a good vga and stable and can handle the game in good fourm try Geforce Fx5950 256 and of coures use any brand of MSI !

i hate idiot canadians f**k off the f**king female canadian who called americans idiots well i tell u what slut f**king bitch corrupt idiot bitch canada woman u canadians are not that smart, why?ATI finally have to include SM3.0 and Half life 2 supports SM3.0 What the f**k ATI!Just to have SM3.0,u have to splash another $500 for that idiot canada company ATI burn to hell...6800GT is the best card(value+performance) at the moment

ATI owns Nvidia in Half-Life 2 baby :D and who the fuk cares that ATI is Canadian or that Nvidia is American. You stupid fuk heads.

HEY STUPID MORON FROM MEGAGAME STOP SAYING THE CANADIAN COMPANIE EVERYBODY KNOW THIS!!!!! ATI=CANADIAN SO? NO 1 CARE SM3 SUCK!!!!NO 1 CAN SEE A REAL DIFFERENCE BETWEEN SM3 AND SM2A SO STFU JEWRICAN YOU And YOUR STUPID NEWS FROM NVIDIA

Valve already told everyone that HL2 IS BEING OPTIMISED for Nvidia because it run so poor on nvidia. dont you remember ??? it only makes sense that it supports sm3, dumbassess cant remember some monts old post or just dont understand them. yep its not optimised for ati but nvidia, arent they nice, unlike carmak who couldnt code 5 or 6 line straight for ati just cuz nvidia puts alota cash in his bank account. the bench with source is showing right now what valve said, nvidia run HL2 realy poor compared to ATI.

"ATI owns Nvidia in Half-Life 2 baby :D" A perfect question for that quote would be... Who gives a fcuk?That's like comparing a stone (Half-Life 2) with a diamond (Doom 3) Gamewise, nVIDIA is way on top of ATI. I bet if (keyword: IF) the results indicates that Half-Life 2 runs better on ATI, those ATI fanboys will be LOUD! Bragging, flaming and all. But guess what? They'll be bragging and cheering for an ordinary game (if compared to Doom 3 and other latest games). Half-Life 2 is just an overrated ordinary game. Looks and feels like any game you've seen in the market today. Go brag about that! I feel sorry for them. You're waaay far from a win-win situation right now. Get over it.

Hey I am new to graphics world can any one tel me wich card is good PCI or AGP and what is the diffrent in both

first off guys stop fighting... secondly there was two new tech. that went out, shader 3.0 and 3Dc compression. both will improve performance when on (more fps) and increase visual effects. the best way to look at it is to run "farCry". it is the only game, right now, with shader 3.0 and 3DC. keep in mind that neither increased the visual effects of this game, just performance (when shader 3.0 is used they can increase the level of light and still get a performance increase; with 3Dc you can add 4 times the texture with still a performance gain). now just look at what is gained before, and after the patch is installed. as i said visually nothing changed (the patches would then need new coding or a large teture down load to see any changes) but you did gain performance. we know with a high end system that x800 xt runs better in farcry than a 6800 ultra. http://www.hardocp.com/article.html?art=NjQxLDI= what we should look at is the performance gain and what gained more than the other (the answer you should find out, because you will never believe me if i told you) this is how the next cryoteck (spelling??) and hl2 (hl2 will have shader 3Dc and shader 3.0) engine will be. what we are use to as textue detail being set at "very high or ultra" will be now "medium". only cards with 3Dc or 512 mb will be able to handle the very high or ultra settings (keep in mind what 4 times the texture is like, thats alot) now with lighting effects (or in most games shadows) the "very high" will now be "medium" and only shader 3.0 cards can do very high with out a performance hit (a shader 2.0b can run more lighting effect but at a high performance hit). in the end of the day you will either get better looking skins, walls and picture perfect visuals or you will get more realistic lighting effects. only ati can do both (or a 512 mb card) but will the lighting effects set on "high" be to much of a performance hit for it, or will it be able to play with everything on high and

continued: only ati can do both (or a 512 mb card) but will the lighting effects set on "high" be to much of a performance hit for it, or will it be able to play with everything on high and keep a 30 fps count. if it can visually ati will win, if not one will be better in lighting and the other will be better in texture detail, only time will tell.

why did ati go with 3Dc tech. over shader 3.0??? by the time enough 3.0 shader games come out ati will have a card that can do both shader 3.0 and 3Dc. even if nividia comes out with there own texture compressor, ati's has been around now for a year and two large engines (plus the new unreal engine) is using it. for nividia to catch up they will need to use ati 3Dc (which does look to be introduced into a future version of Direct X). that means nividia will have to pay royalties to ati... now that would be funny.

F U C K canda and ATI THE USA owns canada Nvidia owns the canadian company ATI. look at market share 70 % Nvidia 30 % ATI need i say more

why does hl2 have shader 3.0? it is because they want the best looking game. they do not what just one card to look good but all cards to have the most in there games. i hope that this in turn will make doom 3 patch there game for ati (code change) and even put in a 3Dc patch as well.

look at market share 70 % Nvidia 30 % ATI need i say more all i ask is where did you find this? give me a link to a web page so i too can read this.

Hmmm, OK. My mate@work spent £640 + £140 on a GEForce 6800 Ultra and water cooling. What a sad twat! What is the point in spending all this money on graphics cards? Jesus Christ, cant you lot see that these companies are taking U all for a ride. I'd prefer to spend £600 on a holiday, in the 'real world', which obviously U lot dont know about!

i just hope the terror stike at nvidia hq ... less stupid american yay

well here's my $.02...after reading the first couple of posts i got tired of all the fanboys and i've gotta say wow there are some special people who post here. the 6800gt and x800xt are mostly the same since their performance is limited by cpu power at the moment, but the big difference is the amount of power the cards need. you gotta have a pretty powerful psu to power a 6800gt. imagine what you'd need if you where using sli...wow. oh -and for people who are saying shader 3 is the big difference...its like saying theres a massive difference between brilinear and trilinear filtering (look it up). hmm i didn't mean to type that much. find the information and draw your own conclusions on which company makes better products. -mjonir

I choose Nvidia. ATI might be faster by a few frames in some game but overall i choose Nvidia. Nvidia also has better unified drivers, 3d stereo support + more. ATI doesnt have 3d stereo support as far as i know. Nvidia just is compatiable. And thats "The way it's meant to be played"

ati's cavalry is better supported with nvidia? it's supposed to be ati's weapon to fight the green king. ouch! that must've hurt! sucks to be an atidiot.

u guys are all idiots it really depends on what motherboard u play ati or nvidia on would work and f those damn canadians with there talking heads and makes expressions with there top mouth and suck c0cks

canadians love to suck mooses c**ks

Moose, beavers and mounties... Gotta love em ei? NOT!

Does it really matter in whose company's ass you stuff your precious money? nVidia and ATI both laugh at all those who spend their 500 bucks on annual feature-updates stuffed into an AGP card. Keep on flaming, bragging and whatnot - the big winners are those companies, not your little trophies in your machines.

the king of graphics? how do you define this? well lets look at the the old kings to find out. the 3dfx line, the card that i think about was the 16mb voodoo 3 3000. it was king, more like david, and took out those 32mb golith cards. the next true king was the geforce 2gts. man could that card do lots. then came the geforce 4 ti 4200 to 4600. nothing came close to there power. after that came the ati 9500 to the 9800xt. it made us remember the days of competition, and how the under dog could win. but right now do we have a king. do we have a card that kills all of the others??? the answer is no. we have two kingdoms, that are right now even. one might be better here but not so good there. there is no true king but a group of great cards that all keep up with each other. so if you own an x800 or a 6800 why are you here. be happy that you have a great card and play games... for all of you who say you have one (but we know you don't) save up and buy what ever you want. don't cry about it, just do it.

ati has the best image quality the best color the best 3d esp with true form, the all in wonder series are the best for video watching(nvidia is trying hard though and are close to be as good). if i offended you that means you needed a reality check.