Is Nvidia the new 3DFX?

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Originally Posted By: OVERK1LL
Originally Posted By: greenaccord02
See, I switched to NVidia because of their support of open source software after years of being an ATI user. And I quit using AMD in favor of Intel because after the Athlon XP they sucked and after intel got past the P4, they were awesome.


Comically, NVidia's Linux drivers are closed-source.

ATI had native support (for the earlier cards) right in X. Though 3D support was lacking, or poor.

ATI's current Linux closed-source drivers are, in my opinion, on-par with their NVidia counter-parts.

Though a couple of years ago, the NVidia closed-source drivers were definitely superior.


Well, you're right about that now. When I made the switch NVidia had some very functional and decent drivers for linux while ATI had none at all. I'll take closed source over nothing. I choose to stay with the company because they were the first to support open software, even if their support was restricted.
 
Originally Posted By: MrHorspwer
I can't believe somebody took time to reply to my post point-by-point. It must have been good... or you're just an AMD fanboy.


Actually, I have always had a vehement hatred for AMD. I'm an Intel fan. I was quite disappointed when they acquired ATI.

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The high-end gamer market isn't growing, but it isn't shrinking either. It has never BEEN a large market, and the majority of sales by both manufacturers has always been the low and mid-level cards.


Which is exactly why the success of Fermi really means little to Nvidia. I also disagree that the market isn't shrinking. With the majority of recent PC games simply being ported from the XBox, there is little to stimulate the PC gaming market. These ported games don't stress graphics hardware and even mid-range cards display them at playable framerates running max detail at 1680x1050.


X-box ports are a given. The device is PC hardware. That was the entire idea behind the X-box; to allow console and PC game development to have common-ground. This has been beneficial. Unfortunately, as you mentioned, some are simply "ports". And these are sometimes poorly done. And so the controls when setup for the PC are "lacking" to say the least.

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Now, if Fermi really does bust open GPGPU like Nvidia says it will, well...

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Have you played Crysis?


I have and anymore it remains more of a synthetic benchmark than anything else. "Will it play Crysis?" has become a general guideline for a particular machine's graphical prowess. Nobody actually plays the game, they just use it for benchmarking. I haven't played it in at least a year.


We routinely LAN-party Crysis-wars actually. There are still gamers out there
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AMD does actually.


We're both wrong. Intel holds the laptop graphic solution crown with a 45% share.


Intel dominates the mobile PC market, there is no denying that for sure. But of the two, between ATI and NVidia, because ATI is also AMD, they do have a larger mobile presence than NVidia.

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That is completely incorrect. I have sold numerous notebooks with Intel CPU's and ATI graphics. The most recent being last week.


I should have edited this. ATI is *almost* exclusive to AMD. A quick trip through Newegg will show that, yes, ATI does have graphics solutions for Intel machines, but they are of the minority when compared to Intel's own integrated graphics and Nvidia's solutions.


I disagree, as that's a pretty gross generalization. I've sold hundreds of laptops, and because of the market I deal with, I am exposed to a LOT of machines with both ATI and NVidia graphics. I will not sell AMD CPU notebooks BTW.

And while Intel's integrated solutions are by far the most prominent in terms of notebook graphics, between ATI and NVidia, offerings have been very comparable over the years.

What I'm seeing right now is the beginning of a lot of Intel core-i series Notebooks coming out with ATI 5-series graphics on them. The list is not huge at this moment, but it is growing. For the Core2 stuff, there were a LOT of NVidia offerings, but due to the licensing issues with Core-i, Intel and NVidia, I think we are going to see that reversed with the Core-i notebooks.


A quick glance through my current ASUS pricelist shows:

G51JX: NVidia - Core-i7
K42F: Intel - Core-i3
K42JR: ATI - Core-i5
K52JR: ATI - Core-i3
M60J: NVidia - Core-i7
N61JA: ATI - Core-i5
N61JQ: ATI - Core-i7

ATI: 4
NVidia: 2
Intel: 1

It will be interesting to see what the next few months bring.

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And Ion has absolutely nothing on Atom. Nvidia lacks the resources to compete with Intel in this market.


Atom and Ion are not competitors. Ion is a compliment to Atom, offering a higher performance alternative to Intel's integrated graphics, be it GMA or Pinetrail. Without Atom, there is no Ion. Again, a large and growing market with no ATI or AMD presence.


Sorry, I was thinking about Tegra, which is NVidia's competition to Atom. Err on my part.

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I didn't intend in getting into an ATI vs. Nvidia debate. I simply was listing reasons why Nvidia isn't going anywhere. They have a significant presence across multiple platforms. All their eggs are not in the Fermi basket. Counting out Nvidia now would be like counting out Intel when the Pentium 4 was being beat up by Athlon.


I wouldn't go quite that far
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Intel has always had a larger market presence than AMD. The Athlon was crippled by [censored] chipsets from VIA, SIS and ALI. Even NVidia's offerings weren't that great when they came to the table, but were at least much better than the other three.

Intel's solid chipsets have always been an ace in the hole for them. I've never run anything else in any of my systems or the systems I build.

I think ATI is in a better position than NVidia right now. That doesn't mean I have to like AMD
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If I were in the market for a video card today, I would likely pick up a 5850. Then again, my GTX260 hasn't struggled with any of the recent releases, so there's not much motivation to upgrade. I go back to the fact that many ported games, like Left 4 Dead 2 and Modern Warfare 2, will play great on mid-range hardware at max detail on any reasonable monitor resolution. At $310 for a 5850, that's 75% of the cost of an entire Xbox. To play ported games? Even less incentive to pay for expensive graphics hardware.


Meh, to each their own. I'd rather spend $300.00 on a video card than waste it smoking or drinking. We all have our vices; the money some on this site spend on oil should be indication enough of that.
 
From what I learn among friends who work in the R&D industry for these silicon. Nvidia's problem was not too much on the graphics but more on the chipset financially. AMD and ATI merged and currently you can still put Nvidia's chipset on the latest AMD processor, because it is still using a hyper transit and memory controller is integrated into the CPU. Intel switched the interface and integrated some uselessly slow graphics into the package of the CPU (rather than the silicon), and prevented people from using Nvidia even without a license, that's why everyone is crying foul.

The biggest problem I've seen on Nvidia is the amount of R&D they spent on stuff like the Targa rather than solid, robust chipset and simpler graphics like ATI does. When you fan out too much, you are not going to be able to focus. What it seems like Nvidia is doing is attempting to fan out into the Netbook/Tablet/Smart Phone business and abandoning the low end graphics. Their newer products aren't that reliable driver wise and they still have a shadowed past with overheating laptop chipset.

In terms of TSMC processes, sooner or later they have to migrate, and 2% is not a production yield and it isn't common for silicon to take months before the yield improve, and if TSMC can't do it, ATI can't have it either.

Intel will never be big in the graphics business as their solution really sucks for high end. When (not if) their practice of forcing people to use Intel chipset fail, they will very likely get Nvidia to develop its own CPU or license from AMD (very likely since people license from each other in the industry a lot), buy VIA, build its own (since processing power isn't all that anymore), or finally migrate to ARM platform and focus on Netbook/Tablet/Smart Phone.
 
Originally Posted By: greenaccord02

You think Intel will buy VIA?


I think Intel may eventually buy NVidia.

I don't see VIA bringing anything to the table that Intel can't do in-house.
 
Originally Posted By: OVERK1LL
PandaBear:

You can still use NVidia GPU's with Intel's latest CPU's........ Were you saying you couldn't?


What I meant was the integrated chipset.
 
Originally Posted By: PandaBear
Originally Posted By: OVERK1LL
PandaBear:

You can still use NVidia GPU's with Intel's latest CPU's........ Were you saying you couldn't?


What I meant was the integrated chipset.


Which one? LOL!
 
Originally Posted By: ToyotaNSaturn
overkill, why the dislike for AMD?


Just personal experience with them.

Really, the bad luck in the past has been due to the awful chipset offerings by VIA, SiS and ALI.

The 750 chipset was the "best" available for the Athlon in terms of reliability and stability. When AMD stepped out of the chipset market to focus on CPU's.... It was a big step in the wrong direction.

I don't SELL AMD systems, and haven't in a long time, but I do WORK on them. It is rarely the CPU that is the root of the hardware problem; in fact I don't ever remember it being the CPU. Always the chipset or poor quality motherboard. Not that the latter is AMD's fault, but the former, in a round-about way is.
 
NVidia dug their own grave in the notebook market. Remember "chipgate"?

NVidia [censored] off the major OEMs and finally coughed up $100+ million to fix their mobile graphics problems. Not "fix" really, but replace with another motherboard with a BIOS that runs the fan full speed all the time. NV burned bridges with Apple as well as other OEMs.

Really no where to go for NVidia on desktops, apart from discrete graphics. AMD and Intel don't have northbridges anymore, graphics are going on core and NV can't crack that.

Fermi is shaping up to be a problem child. 3 respins, 20% yields and a TDP that would make a spaces heater envious make it a problem child, an expensive problem child.

If NV is looking to blame anyone they should look in a mirror. They have screwed up every way possible in the last year.
 
in the past 6 weeks or so, about 8 laptops--Dell D620's & Macbooks have failed us...all with nVidia video cards. I didn't realize how bad the situation really was until recently. Thankfully, 7 of those were under warranty and were fixed at no charge.
 
ATI cards do not support multiple desktops and monitors nearly as nice as nVidia does. Think nView app. That reason alone is enough for me to stick with nVidia.
I have nVidia Quadro NVS 110M in my dell D620, ironically enough. So far, so good. With 4 GB of RAM and 512 MB of VRAM, I won't need to upgrade for a while.
 
Originally Posted By: OVERK1LL
Originally Posted By: PT1
I bought a Nvidia Radeon 9250 128mb PCI card for the Dell computer I have now (about 6 years old). It lasted 3 years and failed. So I bought another 9250 256mb off ebay and now can't get it to work at all. So, I am back to the intel card that is integrated in the motherboard (64mb really secks). So I won't be buying any nvidia garbage again.


Radeon is ATI.

Radeon 9250:
4628d1217932420-stealth-256-mb-radeon-9250-ddr-graphics-card-stealth-256-mb-radeon-9250-ddr-graphics-card.jpg


Mind you, ATI doesn't MAKE the cards, just like NVidia doesn't make theirs. So if you had a defective card, it was not necessarily the that was at fault, but rather, may have been the manufacturer of the card itself, which could be Powercolor, ASUS, MSI, Gigabyte, Saphire.....etc.


You are correct, mybad. I have an nvidia in my laptop and the ATI is different.
 
Originally Posted By: punisher
Really no where to go for NVidia on desktops...


Except to manufacture their own x86 CPU, which is the rumor.
 
Originally Posted By: greenaccord02
...oh geez... I'll have to start keeping an eye out for the 620a now. Dell... the bane of my existance.


It's not Dell's fault and it happens on MacBooks, too. Probably other mfr's as well. Intel M/B's with nVidia video. I guess there's some class action lawsuit that Apple is a part of regarding this very issue (probably what you all were talking about earlier in this topic).
 
Originally Posted By: Bottom_Feeder
Except to manufacture their own x86 CPU, which is the rumor.


How, by buying VIA? How many possible NVidia aquisitions have an X86/X64 license in their portfolios?

NVidia will never get an X86 license from Intel (Don't bank on any DOJ/legal actions either). NVidia will never get X64 licenses from AMD.

NVidia sees the writing on the wall. It's the major reason they are going in the direction they are as this consumer graphics pie is going to shrivel over the next year. AMD and Intel are the two players, and neither wants to share.
 
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