Curious...

[Guest]

Does anyone have an informed opinion on why ATI dominates the high end vidcard market with thier Fire GL series cards-I have the understanding that Nvidias high end card is less desierable(technologicaly speaking) than ATI's. Yet Nvidia completely dominates the mid range: RADEONS, Geforces, etc... Wouldnt ATI be able to crush Nvidia if they just chose to implement more technology into the mid range?

thoughts please

 

[mpjesse]

Probably because ATI has been making FireGL cards for a long time and companies trust ATi. nVidia's GF2 Quadro actually has a "theoretically" high fill rate- but in practice doesn't. Currently, nVidia dominates the price/performance market in high end. Check out Tom's review of high end cards. That's just a guess though.

-MP Jesse

"Signatures Still Suck"

 

[Guest]

they are 2 driferent markets: the fire gl serires is beter than quadro in certian areas: opengl programs. ati cant make a game card out of the firgl.
the quadro is a beefed up gefroce (quadro and geforce are actualy the same, the difrnce is that some things are left disabled in the geforce line and enabled in the quadro) so it has the same peformance as geforce in games but beats it in certian areas. firegl architure is difrent from any other ati card
(firstly beacuse it wasnt devolped by them they just but the company) and if you look at it the specs (filrate and other) you will notice that firegl has lower specs than any modern vga card. the same thing is right for the wildcat series- it is optimized for certain areas only. every yaer more and more things that only apear in high end graphics turn into "low end" products.
hope it helps.

 

[HolyGrenade]

ATI has been making FireGL cards for a long time

ATI has owned FireGL for only 5 months. They haven't made any FireGL cards, but are just contuniuing to manufacture them. And, they don't intend to carry on with the line. They plan to release Workstation class cards based on the R200 and later the R300.

So, [wusy,] it would seem that ATI is also setting out to rip off the professional people's "monay".

High fill rate is not of a major concern, since getting X frames per second isn't the developers worry, instead you need brute power. That is why cards like the Wildcat have multiple chips setups, and are the graphics developers choice. Full featured final renders are done mostly by the CPU. Besides, The nVidia cards seem to be better at textured operations anyway.

Having said all of that, since both Quadro2 and FireGL2 cards are similarly priced, the FireGL would come recomended if you want to do anything more than the casual 3D work. If you want to play a game or to and do some 3D work as well, I think Just get a GeForce 2 and then do yourself some soldering.


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