VerTecX21 Acquires New Graphics Card

Cork, Ireland. Monday, August 29th 2005.

In a somewhat surprising announcement today. Engineers working for Multimedia specialists VerTecX21 have installed a powerful new GPU into their flagship unit BELLEROPHRON.

On hand to deliver his usual press release was the director of VerTecX21 himself, Mr. Ciarán Creedon.

Mr. Creedon delivered his customary gentlemanly greeting in more languages than the Pope could ever muddle together and read out the following statement which had clear evidence that it had been laboured over for days, perhaps weeks by engineers, scientists and legal experts:

“Ladies and Gentleman, the day has come where we have had to upgrade our primary graphics processor. Since March 2004, we have had installed in our primary machine: an MSI nVidia GeForce5900XT. This unit was originally intended for use only for a period of 12-14 months, however it performed above expectation for longer than expected and it remained our primary GPU until today when it was replaced.

After much consultation and research it was decided than any new replacement must fit not only the high performance demands of VerTecX21, but be comparable in price to what is known as the GPU mid-range market. Several candidates were researched- but if finally came down to a match between nVidia’s GeForce 6800GT and ATi’s Radeon x800PRO.

We felt that while nVidia's products were achieving a high standard, reflected by the fact that VerTecX21 has purchased their GPU's for the past five years ever since the demise of 3dFX, we've decided to award the contract this term to ATi.

At this point, in stark contrast to the reaction of the March ‘04 press release, in which I’m sure you’ll recall the ATi rep committed suicide by seppuku- this time it was the nVidia rep who took his own life by jumping from the 12th story window, high up in VerTecX Towers.

Creedon paused for a sip of whiskey, which he regularly drinks at such press conferences, until the commotion has died down.

“After weighing up benchmarks and performance figures for all cards, we find that ATi’s mid range offering was better than nVidia’s this time round” Creedon continued. “It came down to a lot of factors even down to the heat the cards generate. For example: the GeForce takes up not only the AGP slot, but also it’s so big it has to take up the adjacent PCI slot as well. It’s like a woman parking in a supermarket.” joked Creedon. “AND then you can’t install any card into PCI-2 either because that would restrict air flow, so you loose 2 of 5 PCI slots if you have a standard ATX board. The 6800GT also has not one, but two power connectors, so it draws anything up to twice the power, and that would theoretically generate twice the heat. We’d have to have a fire extinguisher on standby.” There was much laughter from the room and Creedon paused for another sip of whiskey.

“Benchmarks were comparable very well between them, some games like Half-Life 2 following ATi’s lead while others like Doom3 are optimised for nVidia.” Creedon said “It really was a toss up, you win and loose a little whatever card you buy. But I believe we’ve made the right decision and acquired a Sapphire ATi Radeon X800PRO with 256Mb of GDDR3 RAM.

Creedon then took some questions from the floor:

Reporter# 1: “Mr. Creedon, what was the performance increase between your old and new GPU’s?”

Creedon: “Bellerophron with the MSI nVidia GeForce FX5900XT 128Mb in 3d Mark ’03 reported 5440 3DMarks, while after the installation of the Sapphire ATi Radeon X800PRO 256Mb we got 10434 3DMarks which is almost twice the performance. The 5900XT wasn’t really cut out for 3d Mark ’05, achieving only a pitiful 1021 3DMarks in comparison to 4886 from the X800PRO which is pretty standard for the card in a machine with the specifications of Bellerophron. For comparison: Researched scores for the 6800GT in 3d Mark ’05 were between 4600 and 5100 3DMarks.”

Reporter #2: “What about Frames-Per-Second Mr. Creedon? Those are the figures people are really interested in”.

Creedon: “Too right you are son- my people were running their tests last night and have compiled all the information into nice graphs and stuff that makes it all look cool.

(a link to this information is at the bottom of the page)

Reporter #3: “In a recent Podcast Mr. Creedon, you said that Bellerophron suffered a severe drop in framerate while playing the F.E.A.R. Demo. What has the new Radeon done to improve that?”

Creedon: “Bellerophron glides through that demo like a hot knife through butter now, there's no slowdown anywhere on the current demo”

Reporter #4: “Sir, with the release of the GeForce7 series, the 6800GT has now dropped and is much cheaper than the X800, so didn’t you have to pay out more of your shareholders money to purchase what you’ve essentially said is a very similar card?”

Creedon: “Ignorant whelp! There was a difference in price yes, by about 45% but we found a way around that like always. The card was purchased in the UK which offset about 38% and brought over by one of my personal representatives, so only local UK-UK shipping was incurred.”

At this point Creedon motioned to two “Men in Black” standing at the rear of the room, who promptly removed Reporter #4

“I must conclude by inviting you to gaze in wonder at my benchmarking undertaken last week at VerTecx21 labs”. At this point Mr. Creedon withdrew.

Link to benchmarks at VerTecX21 Technology (Offline)