As m'learned colleague Mr Morris pointed out the other week, Nvidia has been making some intriguing product decisions recently. Decisions that might just leave the door open for AMD to retake pole position in the PC graphics market.
All the indications are that Nvidia's new high end graphics card, to be known as the GeForce 9800 GTX, is a frankly feeble revision of its existing G92 GPU. Slightly higher clocks and few detail tweaks is about the size of it.
G92, of course, is itself little more than a mildly modified die shrink of the beastly G80 chip. All of which means the green-tinged graphics goliath has remained essentially static, in terms of high end GPU performance, since the launch of G80 in autumn '06.
And please, let us not speak of the dual-GPU irrelevancy that is soon to be known as the Geforce 9800 GX2. Like every other dual-GPU board ever made, it's an inefficient and deeply unattractive device that's likely to deliver patchy, unreliable performance.
18 months is a long time in graphics
Anyway, the 18 months since the launch of G80 is an incredibly long time in the cut throat graphics game. Moreover, the impending release of the 9800 GTX indicates Nvidia has no immediate plans for a more powerful and complex GPU.
It's likely we won't see such a chip from Nvidia until at least this autumn. Is that complacency? Has Nvidia been too dominant for too long? Or is there an unseen crisis bubbling behind the scenes, a troubled new GPU that has been killed off even before it was born?
It's impossible to say. But either way, I'm convinced that Nvidia will shortly be wishing things had gone differently. Because even a company with a recent track record as poor as AMD's becomes a threat given enough time.
Specifically, that threat takes the form of AMD's upcoming RV770 high end graphics chip, very likely to be sold under the Radeon HD 4800 brand. It might just be a corker.
Based on the latest 55nm production process, the chip is expected to address most of the weaknesses of AMD's current Radeon HD 3800 family. For starters, I hear that the GPU's texture unit count has been doubled from 16 to 32 units, solving the existing HD 3800's most obvious flaw.
Rumour round-up
Then there's the rumour doing the rounds that AMD has nearly tripled the chip's shader grunt. The HD 3800 architecture currently packs 64 shader units arranged in four arrays (ignore AMD's claims of 320 stream processors, it's mostly marketing). The most popular theory for RV770 is no less than 160 shaders in five arrays (or 800 stream processors in marketing parlance).
If the details aren't confirmed, what is almost guaranteed is that RV770 will at least offer some additional functional units - unlike the disappointing GeForce 9800 GTX from Nvidia. Simply put, it's a significantly larger chip built on the same process as the HD 3800. The extra transistors must have been spent on something.
Best of all, it looks like it won't be long before we find out for sure. Early engineering samples of RV770 has been spotted in the wild. It could be on sale before summer is in full swing.
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Reader comments (4) Jump to Add Comment
gavin
March 26th
4. I have spent the weekend playing with some 9800's in various rigs and frankly the performance was impressive, which a lot of people including those writing these articles tend to forget. They are still powerful cards. But obviously the main issue is the step up from 8800 to 9800 is relatively insignificant, with a few mild clock improvements. I think this rang would have been better suited in the guise of a 8850 or 8900 rather than a whole new series.
Admittedly a lot of the tests I made with the cards were on rigs of impossible specs (to the regular user).
I think for the moment I will be sticking with my 8800 Ultra and wait for the 10 series (or whatever name they decided on)
If the 8800 take a significant rice decrease thanx to the 9800 this could prove to be more of a blessing to those who crave top notch performance at a smaller price.
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emike09
March 18th
3. I agree that ATI has not been performing well for a long time. Years now. I also agree that the 9800GX2 is very powerful, it just doesn't really show the performance we were all looking for. I'd rather just buy another 8800 GTS and overclock it. In terms of competition, intel has announced that they are going to jump into the high end video world when they release thier nehalem platform. Perhaps we'll see even more price drops and perfomance increases!
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anhe
March 18th
2. WHAT ARE YOU SMOKING?
I want that too!!!.
just kidding, but this is the biggest BS I have read on this website for a long time. I thought you guys were not biased but check any review or e.g. the monthly graphics card line up at tomshardware.com and you will see that ATI has a problem.
Not only lower end but also the high end. The 9800X2 is indeed the same trick as ATI was doing earlier but latest reviews shows that when they do the same ATI is blown away in the dust.
I really would like to see ATI do better since it will increase competition but they are the ones that come up with the X2 trick and have to lower their prices to keep up with Nvidia. Nvidia will keep their prices high as long as ATI fails so that really really sucks.
Can't blame them for thinking about their profits but it does hurt in my wallet. ATI pleeze some compitition....
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emike09
March 18th
1. Good work Jeremy,
Its about time somebody points out how weak the 9800GTX and GX2's are. I was confused when nVidia released the 8800 GT and GTS on the G92. It made no sense to release a G92 chip on the G8x platform. Now that the G9x series is coming out, nVidia is having a hard time impressing me with its numbers. They should have waited on the 8800GT and GTS G92 and released them on the G9x platform as 9800GT and 9800GTS. Lets look at the difference between the 7800GTX and the 8800GTX! It was incredible! The difference between the 8800GTX and the 9800GTX... I'm not impressed. They havn't even put in the useless DX10.1! nVidia has really dropped the ball with thier G9x series this time around. Perhaps they will figure something out and release a G 9950 like they did with the 7950. I was so excited to upgrade my 8800GTS G92... Way to go nVidia. Maybe next round we'll get dual core GX2s and Dual triple sli.
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