One of the demo's shown was this ogre. Click the image for a close up and image that moving in realtime - absolutely amazing.

There is no doubt that this card will show the start of CG being used in games (such as S.T.A.L.K.E.R) but I think it will be a while yet before games where there graphics are all as good as this ogre are run of the mill. I think before we do get to this stage, there are a few moral questions we have to ask ourselves. Imagine a time when games such as Unreal Tournament look 100% real and perhaps with the aid of virtual reality equipment you can walk into a room and shoot someone in the head and it's as if you actually did it... How does this mentally affect us? Is it a game anymore? Perhaps it should be made a law that games where the imagery is considered lifelike, the characters must be non-human and 100% fictional? Otherwise - how might we distinguish between a game and reality. This is something that definitely should be looked into further as this time comes closer and closer and will most definitely be within our lifetimes.

There are lot of issues such as these that could be discussed into great length, if you feel like doing this - head over to AOA Forums.

As far as performance in games that are already around we can only go by what nVidia have told us (until we get a card to look at ourselves that is). They seem to think it will be at least twice the speed of the ti4600 - making this a clear leader over the Radeon 9700 Pro. But is it too little too late? This card is being bought out a lot later than was conceived and the long awaited Doom3 is optimised with Radeon cards in mind. The next question is, will it be available for Christmas? They seem to think so - but going by companies ideas of available and OUR ideas of available I don't reckon we will start to see these until mid January at the earliest.

I must add that this is just a product technology launch and not a card launch - it has yet to be officially released what cards will be in this family. Unofficially I hear that the names will be the Geforce FX 5400 and the Geforce FX Ultra. The question running through some peoples mind is when a value card is eventually launched, what will it be called? The Geforce FX MX? Hmmm.

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