Well the nv30 has some reall bad low level problems. Combined with being very bandwidth limited compared to what the core can do it doesn't make for a pretty picture. Lets jsut say the silicone is not quite what nvidia expected. It's also only getting yields of about 20% max. This makes for a very expensive card to produce.


Now I can say it will be arround july or so but indeed nvidia is to the point were they really dont care about the fx because it is just like a cork to try and fill a leaking dam with a huge crack. In july however they intend to get the nv35 out. We will have to wait and see how it goes but they are really shooting for july.

The r350 is already in mass production. It will be out in march only a few weeks after the fx and well there will be no competition till the nv35 comes out.

Sept/oct however is the slated date for the r400 witch will of course put ati back in the lead for a while.

One thing is for sure the gpu industry is going to really heat up this year and do things like youve never before seen.

Ps: how would you like a gpu that runs with portions of the core in an smp mode allowing for multiple paths and work to be done within the same core smp style. It's going to get very interesting by the end of the year.

It would be about time!

I remember fiddling/programing an Amiga 2000 (anyone remember it? Ok, I'm old!), and that was essentially the structure. Very efficient, perfect for gaming. Imagine GPU driven sprites...

I have an old friend that's always maintained that his gamebox ran faster than a PC:rolleyes:

I had an Amiga 500 and I loved that thing! It was great when my friends owning early model PC's would come over freak out at the graphics and sound capabilities that thing had.

I still have my Commodore SX-64 "portable" computer and it still runs too - all of 1Mhz. hehehe

Sometimes I really do miss those days of computing.

Sorry to go off topic there but I just couldn't resist.

Shoddy drivers
 

I wouldn't really say they are shipping it with shoddy drivers....I mean it's not on shelves yet. One would hope that the driver issues will be resolved by the end of the month when the card starts creeping onto shelves. Hey even with most video games you need to download the current patch to fix the bugs.
Damn, Microsoft and their damn Mechwarrior 4 and their damn 50MB patch!

LOl actually I have 2 amiga 2000's here with the gvp 8 meg/scsi cards in them and the agp video card. I really like them.

Anyway the part about smp gpu is speculation but I hope it's not far off from what I know about it.

As for the nvidia fan boys. Well things should get better soon but not till later this year.

Here is a quote from Nvidia president and the most likely reason they would rather just forget about the fx all together and get on to the next product.

Huang is confident that Nvidia will end up back on top. ``Tiger Woods doesn't win every day. We don't deny that ATI has a wonderful product and it took the performance lead from us. But if they think they're going to hold onto it, they're smoking something hallucinogenic.''


Here is the original article

http://www.bayarea.com/mld/mercuryne...ss/5093187.htm

Re: Shoddy drivers
 

How to put this. You are right kind of. The drivers are not that bad really. They have allot more time to get it working than you think. The tearing and stuff is because of the massive overclock they put on the cards from the factory and some of the other low level hard ware issues I mentioned.

This card actaully has very mature drivers. Oh and one other thing those drivers were optimized for the reviews. So some of the tearing can be atributed to overly optimzed drivers.

I think that you will find when the nv35 comes out it will be more of what you wanted. Nvidia took a gamble on allot of fronts and this time around they made just about every wrong choice they could for the time. The good thing is that they have allot of engineering under thier belt now and they are painfully aware of the shortcommings of the nv30. This will give them a good map of what to do for the nv35 to get it just right and it will be more of what you expect from nvidia.

Re: Re: Shoddy drivers
 

... or not.

In the mean time, we all lose from this situation. Current GF4 prices won't drop. ATI will get more confidence and keep high prices as well. A good FX would have dropped the ti4600's and ati9700's prices to a bargain.
Let's hope they learned their lessons on the .13µ process and that it won't be a problem for the next gen chip.

I had an amiga 4000 with a Video Toaster Flyer rig strapped onto it. was a DAMN mean machine for video work.

It seems Pro/Cooling is a nest of Amiga owners :p
I had an Amiga 500 (back in '87), then a 1200 all with HDDs and 68030 then 68040 then 68060... And i've been using Amigas until '99 for semi-pro video work. The OS was a best of its class, years ahead of competition, until Enlightenment appeared on Unix.

It also had the most advanced capability for displaying many colors: something like 20 bit color (but only available as 256 color palettes for each scan line):D

Well gmat it can actually be looked at a couple ways. The fx was really a good thing. Yes it means that the radeons will stay a little higher priced for a while maybe but really ati has a different plan than nvidia. Ati wants directx 9 compliant cards all the way down to the bottom card and the lowest price points. They really want to drive this home on nvida who has a habit of making thier low end cards really suck. Thier high end ones are good for what they are but the low end cards have problems.

The other thing is that nvidia was starting to take over the game makers. Really this is a bad thing. It was kind of like glide and 3dfx. It makes it so that games sometimes dont play properly on ati or any other card out there. It's not really ati's fault if things like that dont work right since it was programmed with custom extensions that only nvidia was using. From what I understand the fog in tribes was done this way.

When companies start doing this it is really a bad thing because it locks you into a product wheather the product is good or not. It is much better to program to the standard api's so the game is playable on everything out there.

Ok so it's most likely a good thing because now ati will be taken a little more seriously and the programmers who make the games will do a better job of supporting both video cards instead of just one or the other.

Besides ati will be comming out with the rv350 based cards that will target the low end market and when the r350 comes out the 9700's should still get cheaper. Things are only going to get better from here on out.