NVidia: lack of competition?

Is it just me or is ATI not providing credible competition to NVidia in the current vid card market. I'm looking at this from a gaming perspective. On paper, ATI cards seem formidable, but they get thrashed by their equivalent NVidia cards in benchmarks.

Is this likely to change with the next generation of vid cards?

 

they went all out for the desktop market which i still say they do give nvidia a run for their money in that market. Its the laptop industry they left in the dust... poor move i would say. I have a feeling were about to see an up in ATI laptop technology. THey have been making more and more 3x00 series for enthusiasts now... we shal see!

 

I miss the p4 era... I wonder what went wrong...

 

There's alot of competition, just not for the benchmarks.

Price & Value wise they both offer solutions, but they aren't the eWang ones that get the press or 3Dmark titles, they make their money of the low, midrange and upper midrange.

AMD's focusing on that market again it seems with their HD2K, while nV is left alone at the $500+ level with an expensive huge chip. Last round AMD was able to make and sell the HD3K series for a low price, whereas the yields on the G92 were supposedly low. Both companies' former high end chips were expensive and no longer viable at the end of the round, despite the potential of the GF8800U holding top spot 'til near the end. Are you still going to pay $400-500 for a GF8800U if you can get a GTS-512 for $200-250?

Which is the better value next round we won't know until they are widely available, but it's likely the GTX280 will have the performance crown in most apps.

As for the laptop market, AMD made strides to regaining alot of the market share they lost in the X1K era when nV passed ATi in the mobile segment.

Still waiting on a high end AMD/ATi mobile graphics solution, hopefully something will come this generation, because it's unlikely that there will be anything GT200 based, just like there was never anything G80 based, which means a long wait until they do something else adapt from some desktop midrange card/solution.

 

Even though they don't currently have the performance crown, Nvidia is actually under a ton of pressure from ATI. Don't forget that the desktop 8800GT was released mostly as a fast reaction the the HD3870. Also, if the rumors are any indication, ATi the HD4k series will be no different. Will the 4870 be beaten by the GTX 280? Probably, but really ATI doesn't intend for the HD4870 to compete with the GTX 280.

The GTX 280 will be Nvidia's flagship product, while the HD4870 won't for ATI. The honor for ATI flagship goes to the 4870X2 which is supposed to come out in August with some kind of (rumored) shared memory scheme between the two GPUs. What ATI really needed to do wasn't beat Nvidia straight up in benchmarks, but instead put pressure on them to release the GTX 280 faster than they would have normally had to without the pricing pressure.

The result of this is pretty clear, the GTX280 is going to have a huge die size, and it would be a shock to noone if it sucks a ton of power and has a lot of heat output. The advantage ATI has here is that there's very little chance of Nvidia being able to design a GTX280GX2 without significantly lowering the expected heat output / power requirements, which would require a significant time investment. Meanwhile, ATI has the 4870 with a very low power requirement of ~150w that can easily be paired on a single PCB. This would allow the 4870X2 to compete with the GTX280 without the fear of a reactionary GTX280GX2.

At least this is all my theory based on the rumors and speculation I have read. Could I be wrong? Probably, but the point is I'm not presenting this as absolute fact. Either way, we're in for one hell of an interesting GPU war this summer.

As for laptops, I think that ATI is intentionally not investing a whole lot into their mobile chips right now, and I think this is because they're really putting a lot of effort/money into Fusion.

 

Yeah...my point was that as it stands right now, NVidia has no incentive to release their next gen of mobile cards while their current line is dominating to this extent.

 

You mean other than to lower the cost of production of their low yield parts?

The move to the GF9800GTX is more about the process shrink and it's benefits than because ATi may or may not release something as competition. That potential pressure already came from the sighting of the HD3800s on Asus Franken-card, but even it wasn't required to push nV forward, although I'm sure it's existance confirmed AMD was at least working on solutions even if they weren't selling them. What a competing AMD solution would do is change pricing, not accelerate development of the mobile VPUs.

 

Agree with alot of what you wrote, especially;

Yep, and it looks like the one after that will be entertaining to with the addition of intel potentially by late 2009.

Could be, but with thoe early MXM HD3800 cards out there, it shows they didn't abandon it completely. It'd be nice to see more product options out there, especially something a little more HD3850/GF9600-esque.