The PC gaming industry has seen many graphics chips come and go. Companies like 3dfx, S3, Trident, Intel, nVidia, ATI and others have tapped into the gaming industry and have produced 3d accellerators for the PC, and most of them have gone. There are only two major players in the PC graphics industry: nVidia and ATI.

These two graphics juggernauts unveil new products every year, which effectively doubles the effective processing power over the previous generation. This ruthless competition is both good and bad news for consumers: Good in that faster technology becomes cheaper, and we have many options. Bad in that the expensive video card you just purchased will remain bleeding edge for only a few months.

The latest battle comes just in time for the 2008 holiday season. ATI's 4800 series goes up against nVidia's GTX line of cards. Sapphire is one of the more well-known manufacturers of ATI-based video cards, and they have a secret weapon in the world of single-GPU video cards. Their 4870 Toxic video card not only comes pre-overclocked, but is stacked with 512MB of the fastest GDDR5 memory, which is certainly enough for today's gamer.