I read the first page, will read the rest tomorrow when it's not 2am in the morning!

EDIT: Christ. I'm reading through this and I'm so far out of touch... It all sounds very impressive but I'm litterally spazing out my brain trying to understand it!

Ok, finally finished reading this. You should be proud of me, that's the most reading I've done in a long time! But still, it was good for me as this thing was throwing a lot of terms that I've never heard at me - which made me realise just how out of touch I was.

The part I found most interesting was about the billboard stuff - I had no idea how things like tufts of grass on the ground could be so techincal. I mean, I've seen my fair share of games when you walk in to a bush and the graphics are utter shit when they're right up in your face. You kinda get a white haze around the leaves etc etc - and it amazes me that these issues have been around that long. However, with all the effort put in to re-engineering this kind of technology, thus far they still haven't managed to 'perfect' it.

Hmm, that sounds like I'm saying bad things about what they've done. I'm not, I'm saying it's mad how much work it takes in order to correct such small things!

grats Mole, I really didn't figure you'd be someone to read that, no offense. The first part especially gets into the nitty-gritty a bit. Still, I think it's damned interesting stuff. I'm not a hardware guy by any means, but it's cool how a modern GPGPU is architected. For all intents and purposes, it's 540 (or whatever) little processors all on a single processor die, working together to make magic happen.

I'm looking forward to official benchmarking and prices. Though I would love to have one of these, I'm afraid that either 1) it'll underperform or 2) it'll be priced out of my range.

Cool... by then I should start getting fed up with how slow my 8800gt is on my new box. I hope it's worth the wait. I hope so for nvidia's sake as well... they've been getting pwnt in the retail space by Ati because of all these delays.

to compare
gtx 285
cores - 240
memory - 1GB DDR3, 512bit interface, 1.2ghz clock speed, 2.5ghz effective clock, bandwidth 159GB/sec

I just wish it would hurry up and come out