Far from slowing down because of the worldwide economic crisis, PC technology evolution (and particularly the videogaming peripherals one) continues to break records and Gigaflops, opening usage scenarios that was solely related to super-computers just a few years ago. Such scenarios are currently colliding with the opposite development of standards and API competing with each other, resulted from the desire of market supremacy or from the need to reach an agreement on a common computing platform.
The discreet graphic peripherals scenario has become extremely complex in a relatively short period of time, and what can be considered no more like simple “accelerator cards” for 3D videogames years by now have achieved an even greater importance since Intel decided to fight on the same ground of NVIDIA and AMD-ATI opposing the well-known GeForce and Radeon brands with the upcoming Larrabee technology.
