2006 was a long graphical year of change
 

THIS YEAR BEGAN with endless delays for ATI's R580 GPU family. This one had a bunch of pixel shaders and 16 pipelines in a new cool design that worked. This was ATI's plan B as it didn't have much luck with the R520. The unlucky R520 (Fudo) was delayed too long to make any big impact.

Nvidia stole some thunder with its Quad SLI which is probably going to turn out to be the biggest fiasco of 2006. The firm made a lot of noise, Cnet got an exclusive, CES gave 'em an award and Nvidia sold a handful of PCs with these cards inside. But it was a dead duck from day one. The Geforce 7900 GX2 will remain the biggest and bulkiest dual chip card to date. Worst of all is that these beasts didn't perform at all. The driver was to blame but even the second version didn’t do much better.

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