Without fail, the perpetual battle between videocard manufacturers results in faster video cards and lower prices. The cycle of tit-for-tat comes full circle with the recent unveiling of the Radeon X800 XT, a brutish piece of hardware designed to do battle with nVidia's lean green GeForce 6800 Ultra. nVidia's NV40 GPU is a particularly important development for the company. After delaying the GeForce FX 5800 launch, nVidia played a year-long game of catch-up, complicated by a number of driver issues - specifically, software optimizations aimed at enhancing performance in certain benchmark applications. In fact, right up until it unveiled NV40 GPU in mid-April this year, nVidia hadn't enjoyed a significant performance advantage since the days of its GeForce 4 Ti 4600 videocard. Then, suddenly, the game changed, and NV40 showed everyone that nVidia was back in the game.