Fortunately, the green team did take that risk, and they managed to pull it off. I still can't believe the G80 is a collection of scalar stream processors, and I'm shocked that it performs so well. The real-world, delivered performance in today's OpenGL and DirectX 9-class games is roughly twice that of the Radeon X1950 XTX. Yes, it's taken 680 million transistors to get there, but this kind of performance gain from one generation to the next is remarkable, a testament to the effectiveness of the G80's implementation of unified shaders.

No second videocard needed, and the thing is damn quiet too. Now just gotta wait for the prices to drop a bit.