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Unlikely they'll come to the Mac- the high end board market is small enough as it is- and the extra memory will likely add $100USD to the price. I posted one or both items recently in Games.

I may have also posted this, or just mentioned to a friend or two via email, memory fails (no pun)- ASUS' dual 6800 Ultra (SLI) board, shown at CEBIT (this, um, won't fit in a Cube):

http://www20.tomshardware.com/business/ … 05-01.html

Now that's video horsepower, but no more than will likely be in the next crop, to be shown shortly. Of course, those won't ship for some time.

Evolutionary.

Bat wrote:

(this, um, won't fit in a Cube):

DOH!!!

bat wrote:

Hence the 'um.' I'm waiting to see what cooling solution they'll use to dump the waste heat of two 6800 Ultras if this beast is ever brought to market- somewhat doubtful as ATi is reportedly showing R520 in June. Proto boards often aren't productized, with the pace of graphics what it is these days.

They might use the Go 6800 Ultras.  They're functionally equivelant to the desktop versions, but include special power management circiutry, and emit just a fraction of the heat.  I don't know if they can make them in mass quantities, although I don't think that'll be an issue.

Indeed we will.  Frankly, I don't see the point of such a card.  All it'll do is make Doom 3 look marginally better, and some people have no problems running it on Ultra anyway.  It also might reduce the amount of loading in HL-2.  That's about it.  The problem is that game developers seem to always target mainstream cards whether they realize it or not.  Running a game such as Doom completely uncompressed is not the optimal scenario.  I would much rather they keep the compression and up the texture resolution and diversity.  I equate it to the DVD.  Without compression, a DVD would occupy maybe 160x120 pixels.  With compression, you keep 90 percent of the apparent color fidelity, but the resolution increases to 720x480.  I don't want to spend $800 on a graphics card only to have to wait until it's nearly obselete before games push it to it's potential.  At the same time, I recognize that there is a visual difference between high end and mainstream cards, which is why I have a 6800 GT.  I know the bang for the buck is certainly not as good as with the lesser cards, but I appreciate the difference.  But when you double the RAM while keeping the GPU roughly the same, I say: Show me the games.