Of course in April 2004 NVIDIA also had something beefy up and running. It was called the GeForce 6800 Ultra. Now just from the sheers looks of it, that card said .. I will kill you if you mess with me.

NV40 had 222 million transistors. We reached 130nm production and the 256MB Ultra had a core clock is 450 MHz with 16 pixel pipelines. All that performance for $399 USD.

The year 2005. ATI is back on a winning streak after just have launched the Radeon 800 series. This my friends was the HIS version of the 256MB ATI Radeon x800 GTO. This little ogre was manufactured under the codename R480. The GTO had a 398 MHz core running with 12 pipex pipelines and 2x500 MHz gDDR3 memory.

It's now June 2005 and NVIDIA has been busy with their Series 7 cards. Above you can see a GeForce 7800 GTX aka G70. To date a lot of users still use the Series 7 cards, and this one in particular.

The card had 24 pixel pipelines, 8 Vertex processors, a 430 MHz core frequency and 1200 MHz memory frequency running on 256 MB of GDDR3 memory. June 2005 ... we are at roughly 300 million transistors now.

Moving forward towards 2006 now. ATI started to acknowledge Guru3D.com more and more, which had been an issue in the past. ATI was very conservative towards technical press and just refused to work with them. This is where NVIDIA gained massive media attention from back in 2003-2005.

March 2006 - say hello to my little friend here, what is it? That's right .. ATI Radeon series 1000. This is the Radeon X1800 GTO.
After a year of really good improvement, that certainly changed. Targeted at the mid-range section and performance very similar to a $199 USD GeForce 7600 GT ATI was showing the ATI Radeon X1800 series. The X1800 GTO however was higher priced at $249 and got you a 500 MHz core accompanied with its memory running at (2x500MHz) 1 GHz.

The card came equipped with 12 Pixel Shader Processors and 8 Vertex Shader Processors..