April 14, 2004

After two years of playing second-fiddle to ATI, NVIDIA regains the performance title in the graphics card market with the introduction of the NV40 GPU which will power the GeForce 6800 Ultra and other cards. The 400MHz 16 pipeline chip provides complete DirectX9 Support including Shader Model 3.0 and is designed to do various forms of image enhancement including 4X Native Multi-sampling FSAA with rotated grid sampling. It uses a 256-bit DDR/GDDR-2/GDDR-3 memory interface and contains 222 million transistors powering a 6.4 billion texels/second fill rate, and it’s endorsed by John Carmack . As a result of its large transistor count the chip requires a lot of power, NVIDIA recommends a 480-Watt power supply. It also uses a large fan and air intake design that may block an adjacent PCI slot. On the plus side it definitely beats the ATI Radeon 9800 XT for fastest gaming card available. Now we just need to wait until the introduction of the Radeon X800 later this month and the X800 XT next month to compare latest generation cards. Beyond3D has a detailed technical review of the chip. No word if any technology from 3Dfx made it into the chip. 11:06:31 PM

While meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Sharon, American President George W. Bush stated the United States' reaction to Sharon’s proposed withdrawal of Jewish settlers and most military units from the Gaza Strip. He hails the proposals as helping to lead to a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and gives acceptance of certain Israeli territorial rights to the West Bank in light of new "realities on the ground". Even more importantly he stated that a Palestinian "right of return" would only occur through the settlement of Palestinians in a Palestinian state and not in Israel. While it is by no means a given that the United States can lead other Western nations to accept this position these statements are an important step to convincing Israelis that taking risks for peace is worth it. 11:04:19 PM

Aren’t you glad President Bush did not use the phrase, "The sky is falling" during his press conference last night? 11:03:56 PM