In today’s world, technology plays a big role in all of our lives. We depend on it daily to do our work, to talk to our friends and family, and even to sit back and whoop some arse in Counter-Strike. The video card industry has to be fast paced in order to meet new demands and to set new standards for the games of tomorrow. As I mentioned in my ATI Radeon X800 XL 512MB review, games have improved tremendously in just the last two years. Each new blockbuster game that hits the market brings amazing new visual effects and increasingly realistic graphics. None of these developments could be made, however, if our systems didn’t have the horsepower to push a playable number of frames per second.

This is why we see a new batch of video cards from the two big players (ATI and NVIDIA) every six months or so. It was only December when we were looking at the almost-top-of-the-line ATI Radeon X800 XT, and already I have in front of me the upgraded X850 XT Platinum Edition. The X850 XT PE is based on the R480 core clocked at 540MHz, has 16 pixel pipelines, and 256MB of GDDR3 clocked at 590MHz (1.18GHz DDR). We have rounded up a good number of cards to pin against the X850 XT PE, including NVIDIA’s top-of-the-line Geforce 6800 Ultra. Let's find out if this behemoth is all it's cracked up to be.