SO DOES IT HAVE new features, better performance, or what? That's generally the first question one might ask when discussing a new generation of graphics chip—or at least, it used to be. That question has become increasingly less relevant as graphics chips have gained the ability to process a rich set of datatypes, including floating-point numbers that can be very accurate representations of light and color. In fact, since the introduction of the Radeon 9700, graphics processors have been capable of rendering just about any sort of effect one might wish to see. The big question now is: can it pump out that sort of tasty eye candy in real time, or is it just a slideshow? There are still some important secondary questions about the arrangement of computational resources on the GPU and how they impact performance, but at the end of the day, a graphics processor is now judged by its real-world computational power.