Sapphire Card Cooled With Liquid Metal
Found on ExtremeTech on Wednesday, 18 May 2005
Card maker Sapphire Technology is demonstrating an ATI Radeon X850 XT PE card at the E3 show in Los Angeles, which is cooled with liquid metal.
The "Blizzard" card uses a liquid alloy pumped over the chip to cool it. The alloy, supplied by NanoCoolers, is 65 times more conductive than water, according to the manufacturer, and the card is 25 percent quieter than the standard ATI solution.
The PCI Express-based Blizzard will ship with 256 Mbytes of GDDR-3 memory. No prices have been revealed, but the card will reportedly ship this summer. More information is available at the Sapphire web site.
Ok, now good graphics are great, but are current games (and that's what you need such cards for) really optimized? Back in the old days, Amiga 500 games (like Ambermoon) had smoothly scrolling 3D dungeons. Of course the graphic got a bit blocky when you ran against a wall, but the graphic power of the Amiga was just a small percentage of today's cards. There are still textures used today, and often animated characters look somewhat blocky. I agree that there are neat extras like real time shadows, fog and light effects, but it seems to me that game developers always need faster cards because they don't pay that much attention to an optimized code anymore. For example, look at .kkrieger from .theprodukkt: a shooter with great graphics. The size of the game? 96kB.