If you’re a late comer to the GPU scene, then we heartily welcome you to what can only be described as ‘happy land’. It’s a place filled with amazing architectures, one or two obvious and top tier vendors and the one unifying set of APIs that is DirectX. Yes, OpenGL lives on, but it’s a dwindling flame against the raging inferno of Microsoft’s offering.

It’s not hard to make choices in an environment like this. You have ATI or NVIDIA, you usually have access to every 3D effect your video card can generate thanks to a wholesale movement towards general purpose and generic GPU hardware where the shiny stuff is dictated through software APIs, and you have games that are designed around them in a beautiful – almost symbiotic - relationship.

And don’t us gamers just love GPUs? While CPUs, memory, motherboards and a whole host of other hardware allow us to play games, enthusiast gamers have a certain well-earned reverence for the video card as the guts of the gaming outfit. You can tell with the sexy heat-sinks, artwork on fans and full page GPU advertisements featuring half-naked women wielding broadswords, that GPU manufacturers know it too.

You can read the entire article at GamePlayer.