The evolution of graphics cards in the last few years has been incredible. Performance in graphics cards has increased at an ever-maddening pace. Gordon Moore of Intel, claimed that transistor counts double every 18 months for CPUs, invented Moore's Law. Graphics transistors have evolved at a similar pace. Features have evolved so that many of the effects used in CGI movies like motion blur, shaded pixels and vertices and displacement mapping are now available on the PC.
NVIDIA is one of the largest graphics chip manufacturers in the world. Founded by Jen-Hsun Huang and two friends in 1993, NVIDIA's beginnings were a bit of a disaster due to too many Chiefs and not enough Indians. The first NVIDIA PC product was the NV1. This was a combination video/audio card that used quadratic equations instead of the polygons we use today. Today, NVIDIA is one of the two companies driving computer and console graphics forward along with their archrival ATI.
XFX is the graphics card component of the Pine Technology group. Founded in 1989, Pine manufactures sound, video cards, game pads (for consoles and PCs), and had a revenue of $69 million last quarter. XFX first entered the video card market in 2001, with the introduction of the GEFORCE 3 Ti200 and 500 series. Today, XFX builds video cards based upon NVIDIA chips exclusively. I've had the pleasure of reviewing several XFX cards in the past and today have the pleasure of reviewing the new top of the line GEFORCE 7800GTX in single and SLI configuration.
