nVidia 400 series

I hate to quote myself, but:

Now, GF104 might finally shake things up a bit – frankly that part is long overdue…

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Looks like Nvidia's managed to pull a rabbit out of their proverbial rear end.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/3809/nvidias-geforce-gtx-460-the-200-king/1



Also worth noting, GF 104 only utilizes 7 out of it's 8 Streaming Multiprocessors, which each have a total of 48 "cuda cores"… In other words if they're harvesting all the "perfect" cores they can we could see another GF104 part down the line boasting 384 cuda cores(IMO a perfect time for a dual chip variant).

I still don't need a new GFX card, but if nvidia puts out a GF104 derivative using all 8 SMs then I might have little choice.

ATI counterattack will come soon…. don't worry. To have this two competing is the best thing that could happen to graphics revolutions, and worst thing that could happen to game development. That said almost no game, uses full power or latest features… that takes years, and cost too much development cost… just saying… so it is not really necesarry…. and the devs spend so much budget on graphics there is not much left for good games.

Of course as a developer I could use unlimited amount of GPU power, if I had unlimited development resources. We could very easily use models with 100 times more polys than now... put that would take much longer to do also.

^ I agree.

My ATI prediction:

- 5830 is EOLd(it's just a castrated 5870; so dropping the price doesn't make sense it's production cost is not far off the 5850 or 5870).
- 5850(and perhaps 5870) get a round of price drops and narrow the Price/performance gap btwn ATI and Nvidia.

I also agree that the constant evolution and advancement of computational/gfx power is a bad thing for game development(rather evolution), it places extreme emphasis on the things I care least about… Unfortunately, eye candy and "action" are what the masses want.

Maybe it would actually be a good thing to have a third party (Intel?) enter the graphics card competition. It would definitely affect the pricing at least.

It would be tough for anyone else to successfully break into the market at this point, considering the stranglehold that nVidia and ATI have, but it would be nice just to see what a 3rd option would offer.

I hate to disagree but the competition with graphics cards has been so fierce the past 10+ years it has lead to some questionable business decisions:

• 
  perpetually beta and untested drivers and install software

• 
  cards made with less rugged materials

• 
  less competition in general (Matrox, Diamond - the S* chip line)

but again what is really stimulating the market is the prospect of General Purpose GPU programming and the ability to make very cheap super computers (ie Fermi)

Its the real reason Intel is jumping back into the market and has nVidia scared.

As the nVidia recruiter told me its one of the reasons in the design decisions in the i7.

I don't think those things were necessarily due to competition, nor do I think further competition would lead to that. In fact, I think the quality would only increase if someone like Intel entered the fray.

Imagine if there were only 2 major car companies, instead of the Dozens that we have. Chances are that we would be paying a lot more for our vehicles, and we'd definitely have a lot less to choose from.

JDR13 said:

I don't think those things were necessarily due to competition, nor do I think further competition would lead to that. In fact, I think the quality would only increase if someone like Intel entered the fray.

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True but Intel has unfortunately cancelled project Larrabee and thus any plans to develop a discreet consumer graphics chip.

Imagine if there were only 2 major car companies, instead of the Dozens that we have. Chances are that we would be paying a lot more for our vehicles, and we'd definitely have a lot less to choose from.

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Yes, exactly, and let us remember that AMD/ATI and nVidia have been accused of price fixing more than once. They settled that lawsuit in the end by paying a total sum of US$ 1.7. The payment could be regarded as a confession of guilt.
It could also be observed that the prices went downhill pretty fast after the lawsuit had been settled. I'm sure that everyone remembers the times when (back then, i.e. late 2008 to mid 2009) high end parts like the GTX 260 or the HD 4870 could easily be bought for under EUR 170,00.