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Introduction:::...

I've no doubt many of you have never used a graphics card with less than 64MB onboard, and some of you may be horrified to learn such miserly products even exist, but as one of the old crumblies from the era of sub-2MB graphics cards, it seems inconceivable that we now find very few cards with less than 128MB of onboard memory, and most boasting a healthy 256MB.

Of course when it comes to designing and selling your latest graphics chip there's not a whole lot you can do to make it faster once the final chip design goes into fabrication. As yields improve and production techniques mature you may be able to wind up the frequency a little, and there's always a few tweaks that can be woven into the drivers, but aside from this the other determining factors are locked in with motherboard specifications, or are simply too expensive to implement. This means the only way to give your GPU/VPU a bit of a boost is by increasing the speed or quantity of onboard memory, an unthinkable idea five years ago, but suddenly an extremely attractive option with prices falling lower than a Dachshund's wedding tackle.

People laughed at the suggestion of 32MB of memory in desktop PC's when Microsoft announced the idea, I wonder if they're still laughing as we review a graphics card with a humongous 512MB, that's half a Gigabyte of memory, stuck right there on the PCB?

In a piece if devious marketing, ATi didn't choose their top-dog card as the candidate for this memory-fest, instead they dropped down a little to their X800 line and in doing so managed to beat the competition on price without pairing the memory with a VPU too underpowered to take advantage of it.

Features:
• DirectX 9.x compliant
• VertexShaders 2.x
• PixelShaders 2.x
• High Dimension Floating-Point Textures
• Multiple Render Targets
• Up to 16x Anisotropic Filtering
• Up to 6x Multi Sampling Anti Aliasing
• Up to 12x Temporal Multi Sampling Anti Aliasing
• Full Screen Anti Aliasing Gamma Correction
• Video Gamma Correction
• 3Dc Normal Map Compression

Those of you who have never heard of Club3D may be surprised to learn that they've actually been around since 1997. The Netherlands based company, who were known as Colour Power BV up until this year (2005), actually have a very significant presence in the European market outside of the UK and Ireland and are keen to make their presence felt here too.

The R420 VPU