Nvidia has unveiled a graphics card that can only fairly be described as the ultimate, being priced a staggering $18,000 (£9,450) - the Quadro Plex 1000.
You could buy a pretty decent sports car for that kind of money. Or, according to Nvidia, you can have 12 mega pixel hi-def video, and a card (actually it's more like a series of cards) that will run every PC game due for release in the next century.
"According to Nvidia, a node can achieve up to 64x full scene anti-aliasing (FSAA), deliver a performance of up to 148 megapixels on 16 synchronized digital-output channels and eight HD SDI channels. The firm says that the fill rate reaches 80 billion pixels/s while the geometry performance is rated at seven billion vertices/s."
The cheapest model starts at $17,500, and it just goes up from there! When they're released in September, we'll probably give a few away. Or, maybe we'll buy a house instead!
The only problem with owning one of these cards is you'd need about 20 of the latest CPUs in order to feed it data quick enough that the CPU wouldn't become a massive bottleneck. Of course, they're designed for integrated graphics computers and engineers, not really gaming!
Story source:
pcgames.gwn.com.
