The next generation of computer games sporting more realistic visuals than ever is not yet in full swing, but a range of new graphics chips is letting gamers beef up their PCs in anticipation.

     It's the latest round in the grudge match between Nvidia, the last remaining independent graphics chip company, and ATI, which was folded into PC processor maker Advanced Micro Devices last year

     The new chips are some of the most impressive pieces of silicon ever produced—sporting more than half a billion transistors, hundreds of processing engines, and accompanied by more than half a gigabyte of memory.

     The magic lies in their ability to run games using DirectX 10, the latest version of the software from Microsoft, enabling games to run on its Windows operating system.

     Only a handful of games take advantage of DirectX 10 now, but the most anticipated releases later this year—jungle shooter "Crysis," online role-playing game "Age of Conan," and "Unreal Tournament 3"—all use it.

     "People are buying the new cards because you buy with a degree of headroom to support games coming down the pipeline. People want to buy today knowing they can maximize that experience," said AMD spokesman Jon Carvill.

     AMD brought its newest Radeon chip to the table last month, giving it a powerful product to compete with Nvidia's GeForce lineup, which it refreshed in late 2006.

    Reviewers have praised the $400 Radeon 2900 XT's specs and said that though initial tests showed it underperforming a comparable Nvidia card, the results should improve as AMD's engineers tweak its software.

     "Fortunately AMD's driver team has a very solid history of delivering steady performance improvements as they become more familiar with the architecture. A month or two from now the performance picture could be drastically different," FiringSquad.com, a gaming hardware review site, said recently.