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video cards
The Nvidia cards have chips on them that are more complex than the CPU. The GeForce4 has more transistors on-chip than either the Pentium 4 or Athlon XP.
It also has faster memory. 250Mhz DDR SDRAM is not cheap. Neither is 300Mhz DDR SDRAM.
Nvidia has turned the motherboard and CPU into something that feeds the graphics engine.
In other words, PCs have officially become just like the Amiga, seeing as how there's a chip that processes the graphics that is just like Agnus or the AA chipset. Nvidia takes this even farther with the Nforce chipset, by integrating it on the chipset. DirectX 9 should take better advantage of this, I hope.
Mac OS X 10.2 and Windows NT 6.0 (Longhorn) take this to an extreme by having these GPUs actually do a lot of your GUI work for you on the GPU chip. Quartz Extreme in 10.2 is an example, with Microsoft to follow in NT6. Instead of the GPU chip just being dumb, it's now a co-processor.
Mitch
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