"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times." I'm quite sure that Charles Dickens wasn't thinking about video cards when he wrote that famous line, but it applies if you happen to be in the market for a video card right now. On the plus side, there is a plethora of high powered cards from both NVIDIA and ATI at the $200 and below price line that will keep the average gamer more than happy. Also on the plus side, both manufacturer's extreme cards are not too far out of reach for a well endowed or industrious gamer looking for the best. Hell, even the motherboard manufacturers have designed their boards so that you can take two mid-range cards and challenge the performance of a much higher performing card. There is, however, one huge monkey wrench that has been thrown into the middle of all of our video card happiness; and that monkey wrench is named Windows Vista.

Now that Vista is on the verge of release, most people that are in need of a hardware upgrade are holding out so they can ensure that all of their gear will work with the new OS. That is especially true for video card replacements. In order for Vista to be able to run all the eye candy, it must have DX10 capabilities and also have some pretty beefy memory specs. As of this writing, the NVIDIA 8800 series is the only card out there that is able to run DX10 (and it is quite a powerhouse in other areas) but since there aren't any DX10 apps to run and there aren't drivers yet developed for Vista, why pay the premium price that it demands?

Well, you don't pay the price. It will be a while until most system tweakers and gamers are ready for the Vista upgrade, and by then there should be plenty of options for a DX10 compatible card that won't break the bank. I'm talking at least a year down the road. So what are you to do in the meantime if your video card goes areola's up? You find the best performance available at the best price available, that's what you do. The Sapphire 1650 Pro Ultimate card caters to a specific segment; gamers looking for a good performing card that is silent but won't force you to only eat Ramen noodles while you pine for your DX10 gaming.

Specifications

Now for the specs on the Sapphire 1650 Pro Ultimate Edition as taken from the Sapphire product page.:

Passive Cooling for the Aggressive Gamer
Experience the performance edge in computing without the added distractions of noisy coolers with an upgrade to completely silent ULTIMATE RADEON™ X1650 PRO and rest assured that your hardware can accelerate all that the eagerly anticipated Windows Vista™ 3D environment has to offer. A tool for the mainstream enthusiast, the Sapphire X1650 PRO packs enough hardware muscle to deliver far off worlds, exploding with life, right to your desktop! Equipped with the awesome feature-set of the RADEON™ X1650 PRO core, a robust onboard memory configuration and 12 shader unit architecture the ULTIMATE X1650 PRO is the definitive gaming solution for today and the titles of tomorrow. An impressive hardware compilation promising unparalleled speed with CrossFire™ support, HD Display connectivity with Avivo™ and support for Microsoft® Windows Vista™ ensures future compatibility and that you will not have to limit your fantasies to just your desktop. Limit the distractions of noisy PC fans and enjoy a true media experience without the auditory interruptions with the SAPPHIRE ULTIMATE series!

Features
- 157 million transistors on 90nm fabrication process
- Dual-link DVI
- Twelve pixel shader processors
- Five vertex shader processors
- 128-bit 4-channel DDR/DDR2/GDDR3 memory interface
- Native PCI Express x16 bus interface
- AGP 8x configurations also supported with AGP-PCI-E external bridge chip
- Dynamic Voltage Control

Ring Bus Memory Controller
- 256-bit internal ring bus for memory reads
- Programmable intelligent arbitration logic
- Fully associative texture, color, and Z/stencil cache designs
- Hierarchical Z-buffer with Early Z test
- Lossless Z Compression (up to 48:1)
- Fast Z-Buffer Clear
- Z/stencil cache optimized for real-time shadow rendering

Ultra-Threaded Shader Engine
- Support for Microsoft DirectX® 9.0 Shader Model 3.0 programmable vertex and pixel shaders in hardware
- Full speed 128-bit floating point processing for all shader operations
- Up to 128 simultaneous pixel threads
- Dedicated branch execution units for high performance dynamic branching and flow control
- Dedicated texture address units for improved efficiency
- 3Dc+ texture compression
- High quality 4:1 compression for normal maps and two-channel data formats
- High quality 2:1 compression for luminance maps and single-channel data formats
- Multiple Render Target (MRT) support
- Render to vertex buffer support
- Complete feature set also supported in OpenGL® 2.0

Advanced Image Quality Features
- 64-bit floating point HDR rendering supported throughout the pipeline
- Includes support for blending and multi-sample anti-aliasing
- 32-bit integer HDR (10:10:10:2) format supported throughout the pipeline
- Includes support for blending and multi-sample anti-aliasing
- 2x/4x/6x Anti-Aliasing modes
- Multi-sample algorithm with gamma correction, programmable sparse sample patterns, and centroid sampling
- New Adaptive Anti-Aliasing feature with Performance and Quality modes
- Temporal Anti-Aliasing mode
- Lossless Color Compression (up to 6:1) at all resolutions, including widescreen HDTV resolutions
- 2x/4x/8x/16x Anisotropic Filtering modes
- Up to 128-tap texture filtering
- Adaptive algorithm with Performance and Quality options
- High resolution texture support (up to 4k x 4k)

Avivo Video and Display Platform
- High performance programmable video processor
- Accelerated MPEG-2, MPEG-4, DivX, WMV9, VC-1, and H.264 decoding and transcoding
- DXVA support
- De-blocking and noise reduction filtering
- Motion compensation, IDCT, DCT and color space conversion
- Vector adaptive per-pixel de-interlacing
- 3:2 pulldown (frame rate conversion)
- Seamless integration of pixel shaders with video in real time
- HDR tone mapping acceleration
- Maps any input format to 10 bit per channel output
- Flexible display support
- DVI 1.0 compliant / HDMI interoperable and HDCP ready
- Dual integrated 10 bit per channel 400 MHz DACs
- 16 bit per channel floating point HDR and 10 bit per channel DVI output
- Programmable piecewise linear gamma correction, color correction, and color space conversion (10 bits per color)
- Complete, independent color controls and video overlays for each display
- High quality pre- and post-scaling engines, with underscan support for all outputs
- Content-adaptive de-flicker filtering for interlaced displays
- Xilleon TV encoder for high quality analog output
- YPrPb component output for direct drive of HDTV displays*
- Spatial/temporal dithering enables 10-bit color quality on 8-bit and 6-bit displays
- Fast, glitch-free mode switching
- VGA mode support on all outputs
- Drive two displays simultaneously with independent resolutions and refresh rates
- Compatible with ATI TV/Video encoder products, including Theater 550

CrossFire
- Multi-GPU technology
- Four modes of operation:
- Alternate Frame Rendering (maximum performance)
- Supertiling (optimal load-balancing)
- Scissor (compatibility)
- Super AA 8x/10x/12x/14x (maximum image quality)