Lars Weinand

A new patch is out for the eye-candy heavy shooter FarCry, bringing with it a number of changes and improvements. Owners of a GeForce 6800 video card will find this patch especially interesting, as it finally brings adequate image quality and a performance boost, thanks to the addition of support for Shader Model 3.0.

NVIDIA's GeForce 6800 processor lets you double your graphics fun. By incorporating SLI (Scalable Link Interface ), a mobo with two x16 PCI Express slots and two GeForce 6800 cards makes it possible to harness the power of both graphics cards at once. Yes, Alienware has already put its dual-graphics card stake in the ground, but NVIDIA has taken a far different tack.

Welcome to THG's new Graphics & Displays Guide, a standalone Web site dedicated to graphics cards, displays and video technologies.

NVIDIA is ready to bring the PCI Express versions of their new GeForce 6800 cards to the market.

ATi is ready for the move on PCI Express and announced the new X300 and X600 models.

ATI is cheating on trilinear texture filtering with the new X800, according to posts in Internet forums. Others ardently defend ATI. But what is really going on here?

ATi drops its bombshell after NVIDIA's more-than-impressive launch last month of its GeForce 6800 Ultra. With its debut today of the Radeon X800XT Platinum Edition and the X800 Pro, has ATi managed to win back the graphics performance fiefdom?

NVIDIA has seemingly pulled out all stops in an attempt to deliver cutting edge graphics with its GeForce 6800 Ultra. After gamers for too long have had to be content with mere incremental improvements to graphics performance, NVIDIA new card delivers a performance jump not seen for a long time. The device is also solidly engineered as well as insanely fast.

The new graphics memory GDDR-3 is ready to roll. Though this new technology was developed by ATI in collaboration with memory manufacturers, its rival NVIDIA is the first to deliver it in the form of the updated GeForce FX5700 Ultra.

PCI Express is coming. We try to give you a forecast of how it will affect graphic cards and systems. We also try to find out if we really need the increased bandwidth of 4 GB per second that PCI Express x16 offers at this time.

Almost all graphics cards offer connectivity for two monitors. However, the Dual-Display functionality goes largely unused by modern games, although the potential to use it in order to add a new dimension to game play is there. We take a look at the dual-display capabilities of several cards, gauge the facility of their dual-display set up and check out their performance in the few games that feature multi-monitor modes.

In recent times, integrated graphics chips, with their cost-saving advantage, have been on the rise. We show what you should really look for in integrated graphics. We also give you the scoop on ATi's new Radeon 9100 IGP.

ASUS's Top-Graphics Play Radeon 9600 XT/TVD Offers Top Graphics Pretences for Budget-Minded Gamer

After more than a yearlong hiatus, Gigabyte has begun to offer cards again based on NVIDIA's graphics processor. Gigabyte's latest addition to an entire NVIDIA card family it plans to launch is the Gigabyte GeForce FX 5950 Ultra, so that now Gigabyte's roster includes cards powered by Ati as well as NVIDIA graphics processors. We see what, if anything, is special about Gigabyte's GeForce FX 5950 Ultra.

This year's THG VGA charts feature performance tests from ten different games and benchmarks, including an overview of 46 different graphics cards from ATi, NVIDIA, Matrox, S3 and XGI. We also included tests gauging anisotropic filtering and FSAA and a ranking of the cards by a price/quality ratio. As always, some of the results should surprise.

The new HIS Excalibur Radeon 9800 Pro IceQ graphics card sports an especially effective and quiet cooling solution. This brief test, the first review in our new Short Take series, demonstrates why.

A new player dares enters the graphics card market that ATi and Nvidia have dominated for so long. XGI (eXtreme Graphics Innovation), based in Taiwan of course, comes at the market leaders with a line of cards for a whole lot less money. We look at XGI's product range, and offer results of a beta model from XGI's top model Volari Duo V8 Ultra.

NVIDIA tries to hit back at ATi's launch lead with its news enthusiast and mid-range graphics cards: the GeForce FX 5950 Ultra and the FX 5700, respectively. Does NVIDIA raise the bar for highend and mid-range graphics performance? Do incremental performance gains that both ATi and NVIDIA's new cards offer really matter in game play? Not that much really, but the very good news is that some really great graphics cards out there will become that much cheaper.