Nvidia may be in trouble according to this article

[Muppet]

Originally Posted by slaWter

Same here. Hope we'll see some nice 3D Vision compatible LCD TVs this year.

This is going to be one of the most expensives years to date for hardware. New Motherboard, CPU's, Fermi's large screen 3D TV's and SSD.

[shadow001]

Originally Posted by DarthBeavis

The GPU processing advantage has benefits for many more of us than you might expect. if you do video editing, 3d drawing and rendering, watch videos on You Tube . . .etc Nvidia's goal is for you to be able to scrimp on the CPU part of your budget and spend those dollars on the GPU instead. AMD clearly has different ideas since they are in both markets

Again, I personally hope AMD does well as I love competition. It benefits us all in the end (wow, nice buttsechs reference I made).

I doubt watching you tube videos is that stressing to be honest,but that's just me,and as far as scrimping on CPU's,we've already got more than enough CPU power even at the lowest end that only professional applications actually make use of 4 cores....Most games,even the latest ones,hardly use more than 2,and i'm talking about CPU's costing 200$ here,so not exactly high end stuff here.

[shadow001]

Originally Posted by DarthBeavis

anyone who would want to run three monitors in 3d with one gpu is delusional anyways. Heck I would want Crossfire X or SLI for more than two monitors even without 3d Surround. Keep in mind I am the guy who tried to get four 8800 GTXs running when I did the SKulltrail Waterbox project for Intel

Crytek showed Crysis 2 running on a single HD5870 card across 3,30" LCD's,and it was fully playable,though i have no doubt that if users really go crazy and pour on insane amounts of AA on top,then more powerfull hardware is needed of course.

[shadow001]

Originally Posted by Muppet

And to be honest I really think that 3 screens would totally ruin the immersion of 3D with the 2 bezels showing. I would much rather have one large 40" - 50" screen.

there's always this option if you can stomach the price:


http://www.ostendotech.com/crvd/gallery/#thumbs


Look at the thumbnail picture at the far right and imagine that with a set of 3D glasses on top...

[Muppet]

Originally Posted by shadow001

there's always this option if you can stomach the price:


http://www.ostendotech.com/crvd/gallery/#thumbs


Look at the thumbnail picture at the far right and imagine that with a set of 3D glasses on top...

Something along that line would be pretty sweet. What res is that running at.

[shadow001]

Originally Posted by Muppet

Something along that line would be pretty sweet. What res is that running at.

2880*900 resolution for each display,so 8640*900 resolution for all 3 displays with a full 180* field of view thanks to the curve on each display,but be prepared to pay 6400$ for each one,so about the price of the average car for 3 of those.


Doesn't get more hardcore than that for now though.

[shadow001]

Well,here's an update from charlie on the GTX470 and GTX 480 cards,but without giving specific information on the actual performance numbers so that his sources aren't uncovered....It's a pretty long article:


http://www.semiaccurate.com/2010/02/...gtx480-scores/


In short,the GTX 480 is only about 5% faster on average in real world gaming scenarios than the HD 5870 cards and that the GTX470 is actually slower than the HD5870,also that they run pretty hot even when in 2D mode and the card will have to sell for about the same price that HD5870's are going for.


The main advantage seems to be in tesselation ability,where it can actually beat an HD5970 card,but that only shows in the heaven tech demo when the shaders are just handling the tesselation calculations,and that Nvidia may be very picky about who it gives the few cards they have for review,in order to avoid the situation that happened with the GTS 250 cards and the anandtech and hard OCP reviews,which the cards got slammed hard for simply being rebrands of older GPU's basically....Availability is extremely limited period as if there selling these for the same price as HD5870's,they're losing money on each one they make.


I'm hoping to hell this isn't accurate to be honest,otherwise Nvidia is going to get roasted alive after all the delays that Fermi suffered so far,and all the performance promises they made that it would easily beat the HD5870 cards.

[lee63]

I'm gonna refer back to this thread after the release....just to see how much this Charlie guy really knows.

My gut feeling has always been they would be 10 to 20% faster.

[Madpistol]

Originally Posted by lee63

I'm gonna refer back to this thread after the release....just to see how much this Charlie guy really knows.

My gut feeling has always been they would be 10 to 20% faster.

Yep... and everyone thought the 2900 XT was going to beat the pants off of the 8800 GTX as well. Guess how that turned out...


major delays + manufacturing problems + lots of heat + lots of power = a slower card.


Seriously... that's always how it ends up.

[lee63]

I wonder if there is any truth to this.

http://vr-zone.com/forums/561963/nvi...n-monday-.html

[shadow001]

Originally Posted by Madpistol

Yep... and everyone thought the 2900 XT was going to beat the pants off of the 8800 GTX as well. Guess how that turned out...


major delays + manufacturing problems + lots of heat + lots of power = a slower card.


Seriously... that's always how it ends up.

It was wasn't it...The R600 was:

1:6+ months late(Like fermi is).
2:Used a large die,the largest ATI ever designed(Fermi is much larger than Cypress).
3:Power use is way too much period(Just like Fermi is aparently).
4:Chip ran hot and the cooling was noisy(Seems Fermi is the same there on both counts).
5:Users couldn't overclock the R600 that much,largely because the above issues(looks like fermi is the same there by the looks of it)
6:The X2900 XT card needed a 6 + 8 PCI-e power connector configuration(the Fermi cards shown at CES in january also had that too).


In short,the only thing not known for fermi was it's actual performance in games,and if this article is correct,then Nvidia better put the PR spin machine running faster than it ever has before,because i can see the flames coming a mile away.

[Xion X2]

Originally Posted by Rollo

I agree Joe Public may not use half the stuff, but wouldn't you want it available even if you didn't?

Why would I want something available that I never use?

Anyway, out of your long list of things, there are only a few that I care about. Eyefinity and video editing/rendering.

In fact, Eyefinity was the sole reason that I went with ATI this time around. If Nvidia had been a little quicker to the game, then I may not have.

And I used to think that Nvidia had the market cornered for video/GPGPU, but it seems as if ATI is making some headway in that area, as well.

Originally Posted by PCPerspective

Final Thoughts

After reviewing all the benchmark data as well as the image quality screenshots, both GPGPU technologies had their pros and cons that could affect a consumer's decision to purchase hardware and software that utilizes ATI Stream and/or CUDA. While Stream's transcoding times were slightly better than CUDA in most of our performance tests, CUDA seemed to produce a higher quality image that evened things out a bit. Stream also seemed to be more efficient in using less of the CPU's resources for transcoding while also producing fast transcoding times.

http://www.pcper.com/article.php?aid...e=expert&pid=8

I agree that Nvidia currently has the best feature set (I'll give them that on the more flexible 3D), but you exaggerate this to the point of being blatantly misleading. ATI can do just about everything that Nvidia can. They might not be quite as flexible or user-friendly at this point, but they can do it. The only thing of significance that you can't do on ATI by comparison is run PhysX. And PhysX, being a propietary technology, is never going to catch on with the majority of developers. Especially with how well ATI is doing with the 4xxx and 5xxx lines.

I think that Anandtech effectively summarizes the problem with propietary technology like PhysX and CUDA in its review of CUDA vs. ATI Stream GPU Computing--

Originally Posted by Anandtech

Meanwhile NVIDIA, and now AMD, want to push their proprietary GPU computing technologies as a reason end users should want their hardware. At best, Brook+ and CUDA as language technologies are stop gap short term solutions. Both will fail or fall out of use as standards replace them. Developers know this and will simply not adopt the technology if it doesn't provide the return on investment they need, and 9 times out of 10, in the consumer space, it just won't make sense to develop either a solution for only one IHV's GPUs or to develop the same application twice using two different languages and techniques.

In the consumer space, the real advantage that CUDA has over ATI Stream is PhysX. But this is barely even a real advantage at this point as PhysX suffers from the same fundamental problem that CUDA does: it only targets one hardware vendor's products. While there are a handful of PhysX titles out there, they aren't that compelling at this point either. We will have to start seeing some real innovation in physics with PhysX before it becomes a selling point.

http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=3475

That's the long and short of it. So waving pom-poms about CUDA or PhysX has very little influence with me, and it should have little influence on anyone's purchasing decision at this point. Both are extremely limited propietary solutions. They will NEVER gain significant developer attention and will eventually be replaced by standards that work on all hardware.