So that's what the performance picture looks like at uber-high resolution with today's most outrageously expensive graphics cards. At the end of the day, performance at 2048x1536 isn't really a good indicator of relative rendering power or likely performance in future games, but it is a very interesting special case. For what it's worth, it seems to me that the Radeon X850 XT PE scales up a little more gracefully than the GeForce 6800 Ultra most of the time, although neither card handles uber-res modes as well as the 7800 GTX. The GeForce 6800 Ultra SLI rig, in particular, suffers mightily at three megapixels, so that you're almost better off with a single 7800 GTX.

One dynamic that we haven't mentioned yet is video card memory. We've had a really difficult time finding a situation where a 512MB graphics card makes much sense. I expect that could change once we subject a 512MB card to the rigors of our new 22" paperweight from hell. It takes quite a bit of RAM to store all of the data needed for rendering at 2048x1536. A screenshot of a single frame alone is roughly 9MB uncompressed. The question is: can a graphics card with a GeForce 6800 or Radeon 800-series GPU really take advantage of that extra memory at high res given their respective two-megapixel limits? Maybe, maybe not. This may be one reason why ATI and NVIDIA have been reluctant to promote 512MB versions of their cards aggressively.