Nvidia's in trouble

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quicsilver

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Their graphics depo is fine, their chipset depo is fine. They'd have to REALLY F up to go down the drain. It seems too easy for them to just pop out new cards that easily beat out their previous. Sure the 9600 doesn't beat out their 8800gt, but it's not supposed to. It's a cheaper card, a good mid level into the 9xxx series.

Anyone tell me who's Intel's only REAL competitor in the chipset market? Oh yea, nvidia... WHY because they have the ability to make SLi boards, dual now triple. Let's look at this in an obvious business standpoint on Intel's side. Nvidia wants to make chipsets for Intel processors, Intel wants to rule the world. Intel has put out 4+ chipsets while the core 2's have been king, nvidia, only 2 real versions 680 and 780. So why do we think that is true. I'm almost willing to bet Intel has their chipsets working perfectly the day they finally give nvidia a test processor for a new proc. So it looks to me like nvidia is being choked to push out a 780 just to give us triple SLi, but intel makes it look bad by saying OUR new chipset works perfect with OUR new 45nm.....of course it does IT'S YOUR F'ING product...

So in my opinion intel is just squeezing the life out of nvidia until the last second so they can benefit from both new proc sales and new chipset sales, then hand over the info so nvidia can come in and whip up on their chipset sales with SLi and Intel still gets a good cut on proc sales. It's business baby.

Nvidia isn't going anywhere, their graphics market is too strong, and their chipset may be a couple steps behind, but only because they have no choice, but they HAVE to be their for their SLi support.

This is all my own opinion, so flame me if you want, it's just an opinion of obvious business tactics.
 

dev1se

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I think I'll get my future self to mail me a cryo-stasis chamber, that'll wake me up the day a graphics card is released that'll play Crysis at full smoke.

 

LukeBird

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[quotemsg=6572504,94,150772]
Should you compare performance of 2 GPU's vs. 1 GPU? No. I do, however, believe it is fair to compare a single card, dual-GPU solution, to a multi-card (SLI/Crossfire) solution.[/quotemsg]
Exactly how it should be looked at!!
All this **** about the 3870X2 not being comparable is bollocks, especially when that is the nvidia fanboys arguments, and their bringing out their own dual-GPU single-slot solution in a few months...
 

CiccioB

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I wonder if this forum is all populated by kids.
With few exceptions I see childish comments all over without any clue on the subject.

1) The gamer market is only a tiny part of the whole IT market. You may be surprised to know that most of the income of the GFX board makers comes from the cheapest segment of their products. This is because, for each GTX or 3870x2 sold they sell at least 100/1000 computers for the business world. And these do not need directX10.x support to run Word or Excel (at least not yet, seen the latest moves from M$).
The race for having the fastest card is only for market purpose, not for really selling more of those pieces.

2) Notebook market is as profitable as the desktop one, so nVidia is well positioned with their offer of high performances integrated cards. They still probably still offer the fastest gfx cards for notebooks despite the war on chipsets they are suffering.

3) 2 slots, 2 CPUs, 1 lane, 2 fans, n sockets... huh? Fact is that the 3780x2 is a crap try to create the fastest GFX cards (for market and image reasons). The 3870x2 is faster only for games supporting Crossfire, otherwise you get the same performances of the standard 3870 (but wasting double power). When cross fire is supported, this card is only minimal faster than the Ultra, just showing how ridiculous is the try to get the crown of the fastest card at the moment. Yet, price has its importance. So, if you need SLI/Crossfire support enabled, I would buy 2x9600 in SLI for having faster performance at cheaper price than this single board with 2 GPUs . Not that 2 cheaper cards are worse than one more expensive if all of them do the same work and require the same support (SLI/Crossfire).
If you want to make comparisons seriously you will see that the 3870 is a loser in terms of both price and performances. If you want to belive that you have spent you money on the right product, well, for sure you made a better move than going for a much more expensive 8800GTX Ultra.
No, I'm not an nVidia fanboy. Can care less about who is going to provide the best card (I'm out of market with my puny GF6600 AGP8x). But best for me means performance at at a decent price (yet, the Ultra is not decently priced). More professional cards are available if you want to spend few thousands dollars.

Now going a bit technical. Hoping for nVidia to have troubles in future for marketing maneuvers of its competitors is quite dumb. If it will ever be true, it would mean we won't have the best product nonetheless.
Because if nVidia is forced to reduce its research investments due to financial problems that will not make ATi/Intel products better in a absolute point of view. Will just flatten the curve towards the bottom. The loser is the consumer in the end.
I would really hope for ATi (and AMD on CPU front) to come up with better products on their own. Just as it is now nVidia is messing up the market at its will (they could even release a faster card (8800GT 512) cheaper than their previously ultra-priced ones (8800GTS 320/640)) without caring about the confusion that would bring (yet, those cards are still rare on the market probably because they have still to sell some of these now obsoleted GTS laying around).
Meanwhile ATi could just hope to get a performance improvement by going to 55nm and so be able to raise the clock much over the previously version (removing the need for a nuclear power for the 2900XT version). Won't call that a breakthrough in R&D, seen that nVidia chips can obtain better performances at lower clocks and are produced at 90nm (now 65nm, but the fastest is still 90nm).
Still I'm not an nVidia fanboy. I'm a bit to old to be called a boy at all, BTW. I'm describing what I see presently on the market. And I can forsee, as anyone else can if can look at the whole picture, that nVidia still has not expressed it full potential.
New released 65nm chips are just clocked as fast (or even a bit slower) than the old 90nm ones. Now, what is holding nVidia from releasing a 8800GT Ultra card based on the G92 chip? Seen what this chip performs at stock clock with respect to the G90, that would outperform the current ultra a lot. Would also annihilate 3870x2 tiny gain where it has it. The answer is that Ati for now is not a great competitor, and nVidia has not will to outperform/obsolete its own cards that are still selling like cookies.
And this is not taking into account how the new G94 performs in its ultra cut down version (the one mounted on the 9600 has 30% less transistors than the G92 and performs almost as well). Seen the extra numbers of transistors needed for ATi R600 (which is the real record ATi can show) and its successive variants, it is clear that this is not state-of-art design.
More clock, more transistors (which mean production costs, even at 55nm) but less performances.
Other particulars make me think ATi has screwed up this development cycle: one was the try of the 512-bit bus on first R600 models for the memory which clearly show they expected better performance at higher resolutions. With current results, it is clear it is a waste of money.

In the end I really hope for ATi to come back with a new chip (R700?) that is going to further push nVidia to release something new on its turn (I think that without ATi 3xxx series we propably would have never seen nVidia's 9600 release so soon, at least). Or we may remain with 8800GTX Ultra as the top nVidia card for a whole year again. Which is not simply an ATi's market problem. It becomes to be a problem for everyone as the prices won't drop shortly (and they have already be stable for too long, IMHO).

Realistc as I am, I won't expect ATi to overthrown nVidia with next chipset (unless miracles happen) as I am quite sure nVidia is well hiding its wardogs, but I hope it will at least able to move waters a bit again.

If you find this a bit long, don't read it at all. It contains only bullshit of a probably too old guy.




 
I find your comments interesting, and to a point mostly true, except they lack the whole picture. You never mentioned Intels entry and you didnt address the cpu/gpu design forthcoming. Thats what I see as a roadblock/trouble for nVidia
 

firebird

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The 3870x2 is faster only for games supporting Crossfire, otherwise you get the same performances of the standard 3870 (but wasting double power).

Who would buy this card and play old games that don't support Crossfire? What games don't support Crossfire/Sli?
 

CiccioB

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What games don't support Crossfire/Sli?
Huh? Seen the benchmarks done on this very site (as well as in others) there are some modern games than do not supprt SLI/Crossfire, or if they do, they do that very poorly. See the 3870x2 is much slower in some games than the Ultra. That would not be the case if all games were all supporting multiple GPU in the right way, would it?
As well, there are some acclaimed games that do not scale with quad cores at all.

About the lack of the whole picture: I do not think that Intel can create a competitive GPU for ATi or nVidia. Past experience proved Intel not having the technical resources for that. Nor the intetest (seen that the most of the gain is from mainstream cheap pieces of "old technology"). You may have tons of money, but if you do not have the know-how you have either to invest lots of those money for long time or buy people that already know. Still GPU developing is a complex market that requires investments on the long run with high risky results (you do not know where you'll be at the end of the development with respect to the competitors, expecially if you have not been in the market before/don't acquire the right "spies").
Maybe lately many ATi engineers may have fallen into Intel hands. But I suspect Intel is probably making a "simple" card with DX10 support for the notebooks in order to contrast nVidia. If so, Intel entry in the market doesn't really change anything, but is probably just not letting nVidia expand on high-end notebook with an exclusive DX10 offer.

In a long run nVidia will have problems with its chipsets on desktops only if both AMD and Intel will close their doors for 3rd party chipset development. And I will suspect this is not a thing a real free market can tolerate, despite each CPU company will bring the reasons of defending their own business. Intel is already in a legal storm, so I think it won't probably want to start a new one that would just confirm how bad they act with respect to the competitors (though Intel may have the financial resources to pay for these actions in future when competitors will be crushed). I think that AMD worst problem is with CPU, not GPU, so they need all the help possible to sell more of them. nVidia can help in this as it did in the past where SLI was only available for AMD CPU providing the best game platforms. Still you can see that there are lots of AM2 and also AM2+ motherboards with nVidia chipsets despite latest AMD chipsets. It is also possible that finally nVidia will acquire the license to build Crossfire solutions in order to alleviate AMD on the burden to create their own chipsets for their CPU.
If you want to speculate on far future there are lots of equally available possible endings based on nothing (or BS, if you prefer). What remains is that nVidia has proven to be quite good at marketing in the past (crushing 3DFX, 3DLabs, Matrox S3, and a bunch of other well established video and chipset manifacturers) and probably it is not sleeping in this moments. Still we have not any elements for speculating on this, as it is more a marketing question than a technical one .

As you can see the current interaction between the companies has all been messed up after Ati's acquisition by AMD that broke the established equilibrium. And it is quite funny as well.
nVidia was doing chipset exclusively for AMD. Intel had Ati support. Now AMD build chipsets that support only ATi and sells them to Intel. Which on its turn see nVidia providing SLI support to their CPU. Intel would not probably want to support Crossfire as that would help raising AMD competitor's income, and AMD doesn't want to have SLI support anymore as that would lower its GFX sales. However AMD needs to sell CPU and they know nVidia GFX cards sell well and cannot afford to direct nVidia buyers on Intel platforms only. Intel cannot let nVidia build too good chipsets or it won't be able to sell its own (and I suspect this to be the prolem in the notebook market where Intel can offer its own entire CPU/chpset/GPU set, which is not true on desktops).
Now, given this set of considerations, any small move can make the castle fall on one side or the other. As any scenery is possible, one can suspect nVidia to buy VIA and start producing its own x86 CPUs in order to offer its CPU/Chipset/GPU whole sets as the other ones. That would be interesting, indeed.
Any one wants t add more BS to mine?







 

yipsl

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[quotemsg=6572418,82,37871]almost all the ones saying nvidia is in trouble have not seen the finacial report. 45 billion dollar profit hardly means they are in trouble some are talking rubbish than facts. I dare any showing a link or a stock market holder pulling out of nvidas monopoly.[/quotemsg]

I'm not saying they are in financial trouble, I'm saying they're in trouble if they get locked out of a major emerging technology because they do not have an x86 license. I do not believe that Nvidia's enthusiast market lead will save them anymore than it saved 3dfx. I knew Nvidia worked on some kind of processor, but I didn't know they did so with Via. Via has the old x86 license from Cyrix. Perhaps that's not as restrictive a license as the one AMD has?

At any rate, Nvidia's not innovating the way they should in the enthusiast market. That won't stop their profits, and many will buy a dual PCB dual GPU card that the CEO of Nvidia has disdain for, but it doesn't change the facts that he's alienated Intel, AMD and his board partners.

Even more than AMD, Nvidia needs a new CEO.
 

crazywheels

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To get the meat of the head line, nVidia isn't in trouble!! Just be thankful for us consumers that there is competition. We do get cheaper and faster video cards because there is competition. but I highly doubt that Nvidia is any kind of trouble.
 
Im not saying or wishing any demise or decline in current makers of either cards. From what Ive read, in as little as 2 years from now, Larrabee et al will either be out or on the doorstep. This isnt a pipedream, this is the future. As the manufacturing process becomes smaller, the on die solutions become wider, meaning that availibility of say , Larrabee will be there. Read this http://hoho.bafsoft.net/data/konquerort0Lnyb.pdf I know its dated, but with current comments from Intels Otellini, itll be here by 09 or 2010. Pay special attention starting at page 15 on the pdf. I DONT want less, I want more. But as this tech becomes reality, it leaves little space for nVidia, or discrete as we know it
 

yipsl

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[quotemsg=6572607,105,167461]I wonder if this forum is all populated by kids.
With few exceptions I see childish comments all over without any clue on the subject.

Realistc as I am, I won't expect ATi to overthrown nVidia with next chipset (unless miracles happen) as I am quite sure nVidia is well hiding its wardogs, but I hope it will at least able to move waters a bit again.

If you find this a bit long, don't read it at all. It contains only bullshit of a probably too old guy.[/quotemsg]

Actually, I expect Intel to overthrow Nvidia by refusing them a license for next gen Intel chipsets, then competing with discrete GPU's at the mainstream end where most money is made and with notebooks using Intel's version of Fusion. AMD will have their own chipsets and Swift, plus mainstream discrete cards.

Nvidia needs a CPU. They're on the way to getting one, but will Intel challenge any Nvidia use of Via licensing if Nvidia buys Via? Perhaps they'll just help Via develop a genuinely competitive CPU and use that for their base? I don't wish their demise, but their CEO has ticked off both Intel and AMD, so I can see them closing their doors to licensing chipsets. Nvidia can still survive as a discrete GPU manufacturer but they need to accept a standard and not insist that Intel license SLI from them. Crossfire is the new standard, that I'm sure that Intel will follow for their discrete GPU's.

I can see it now, Nvidia fans arguing that the best PC for Crysis 3 is a Via OctoExtreme overclocked to 5 gigahertz on liquid nitrogen, on an nforce 2000 mobo supporting Triple SLI with 1300gx2's, which their CEO will tell all and sundry is not really as powerful as a single GPU card. It will need a dedicated Nvidia case because the board won't meet anyone's standards but Nvidia's.

It will win in the enthusiast market by getting 120 points above Intel's best and 135 points above ATI's best in 3DMark13, but Nvidia will have to fudge the drivers to get a sheer performance boost of 11 fps above Intel and 14 fps above ATI on a 42" monitor.

Not enough will be sold to keep either company going, so they'll have to look for a buyer, which will be Samsung. News of the future, or not, but it's a scenario derived from relying upon the enthusiast market while making it hard to use AMD CPU's on a new Nvidia chipset.

As for old, I started gaming in the 70's on a mainframe. Advent was a great text adventure, the precursor to Zork. Another great mainframe experience was a game that later was sold on diskette as EGA Trek. I've owned everything from the Atari 1200 to the C128, then Laser 128. Then I built PC's back in the 386SX days when the CPU was soldered on the motherboard. LIF sockets were a real nuisance and it was great when ZIF arrived.

After my cataract surgery last year, I was able to build PC's again, but I still prefer pins on the CPU, not the motherboard. So, am I old enough to have an opinion a mere 12 years from retirement, when I'll spend all of my spare time playing CRPGs like LOTR online (Age of Hyborea looks good too -- Tolkien and Howard, like having an Anchor Steam and a Rolling Rock. You can tell the difference, but they both have the same long term effect).
 

systemlord

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[quotemsg=6572607,105,167461]I wonder if this forum is all populated by kids.
With few exceptions I see childish comments all over without any clue on the subject.

1) The gamer market is only a tiny part of the whole IT market. You may be surprised to know that most of the income of the GFX board makers comes from the cheapest segment of their products. This is because, for each GTX or 3870x2 sold they sell at least 100/1000 computers for the business world. And these do not need directX10.x support to run Word or Excel (at least not yet, seen the latest moves from M$).
The race for having the fastest card is only for market purpose, not for really selling more of those pieces.

2) Notebook market is as profitable as the desktop one, so nVidia is well positioned with their offer of high performances integrated cards. They still probably still offer the fastest gfx cards for notebooks despite the war on chipsets they are suffering.

3) 2 slots, 2 CPUs, 1 lane, 2 fans, n sockets... huh? Fact is that the 3780x2 is a crap try to create the fastest GFX cards (for market and image reasons). The 3870x2 is faster only for games supporting Crossfire, otherwise you get the same performances of the standard 3870 (but wasting double power). When cross fire is supported, this card is only minimal faster than the Ultra, just showing how ridiculous is the try to get the crown of the fastest card at the moment. Yet, price has its importance. So, if you need SLI/Crossfire support enabled, I would buy 2x9600 in SLI for having faster performance at cheaper price than this single board with 2 GPUs . Not that 2 cheaper cards are worse than one more expensive if all of them do the same work and require the same support (SLI/Crossfire).
If you want to make comparisons seriously you will see that the 3870 is a loser in terms of both price and performances. If you want to belive that you have spent you money on the right product, well, for sure you made a better move than going for a much more expensive 8800GTX Ultra.
No, I'm not an nVidia fanboy. Can care less about who is going to provide the best card (I'm out of market with my puny GF6600 AGP8x). But best for me means performance at at a decent price (yet, the Ultra is not decently priced). More professional cards are available if you want to spend few thousands dollars.

Now going a bit technical. Hoping for nVidia to have troubles in future for marketing maneuvers of its competitors is quite dumb. If it will ever be true, it would mean we won't have the best product nonetheless.
Because if nVidia is forced to reduce its research investments due to financial problems that will not make ATi/Intel products better in a absolute point of view. Will just flatten the curve towards the bottom. The loser is the consumer in the end.
I would really hope for ATi (and AMD on CPU front) to come up with better products on their own. Just as it is now nVidia is messing up the market at its will (they could even release a faster card (8800GT 512) cheaper than their previously ultra-priced ones (8800GTS 320/640)) without caring about the confusion that would bring (yet, those cards are still rare on the market probably because they have still to sell some of these now obsoleted GTS laying around).
Meanwhile ATi could just hope to get a performance improvement by going to 55nm and so be able to raise the clock much over the previously version (removing the need for a nuclear power for the 2900XT version). Won't call that a breakthrough in R&D, seen that nVidia chips can obtain better performances at lower clocks and are produced at 90nm (now 65nm, but the fastest is still 90nm).
Still I'm not an nVidia fanboy. I'm a bit to old to be called a boy at all, BTW. I'm describing what I see presently on the market. And I can forsee, as anyone else can if can look at the whole picture, that nVidia still has not expressed it full potential.
New released 65nm chips are just clocked as fast (or even a bit slower) than the old 90nm ones. Now, what is holding nVidia from releasing a 8800GT Ultra card based on the G92 chip? Seen what this chip performs at stock clock with respect to the G90, that would outperform the current ultra a lot. Would also annihilate 3870x2 tiny gain where it has it. The answer is that Ati for now is not a great competitor, and nVidia has not will to outperform/obsolete its own cards that are still selling like cookies.
And this is not taking into account how the new G94 performs in its ultra cut down version (the one mounted on the 9600 has 30% less transistors than the G92 and performs almost as well). Seen the extra numbers of transistors needed for ATi R600 (which is the real record ATi can show) and its successive variants, it is clear that this is not state-of-art design.
More clock, more transistors (which mean production costs, even at 55nm) but less performances.
Other particulars make me think ATi has screwed up this development cycle: one was the try of the 512-bit bus on first R600 models for the memory which clearly show they expected better performance at higher resolutions. With current results, it is clear it is a waste of money.

In the end I really hope for ATi to come back with a new chip (R700?) that is going to further push nVidia to release something new on its turn (I think that without ATi 3xxx series we propably would have never seen nVidia's 9600 release so soon, at least). Or we may remain with 8800GTX Ultra as the top nVidia card for a whole year again. Which is not simply an ATi's market problem. It becomes to be a problem for everyone as the prices won't drop shortly (and they have already be stable for too long, IMHO).

Realistc as I am, I won't expect ATi to overthrown nVidia with next chipset (unless miracles happen) as I am quite sure nVidia is well hiding its wardogs, but I hope it will at least able to move waters a bit again.

If you find this a bit long, don't read it at all. It contains only bullshit of a probably too old guy.Huh? Seen the benchmarks done on this very site (as well as in others) there are some modern games than do not supprt SLI/Crossfire, or if they do, they do that very poorly. See the 3870x2 is much slower in some games than the Ultra. That would not be the case if all games were all supporting multiple GPU in the right way, would it?
As well, there are some acclaimed games that do not scale with quad cores at all.

About the lack of the whole picture: I do not think that Intel can create a competitive GPU for ATi or nVidia. Past experience proved Intel not having the technical resources for that. Nor the intetest (seen that the most of the gain is from mainstream cheap pieces of "old technology" ). You may have tons of money, but if you do not have the know-how you have either to invest lots of those money for long time or buy people that already know. Still GPU developing is a complex market that requires investments on the long run with high risky results (you do not know where you'll be at the end of the development with respect to the competitors, expecially if you have not been in the market before/don't acquire the right "spies" ).
Maybe lately many ATi engineers may have fallen into Intel hands. But I suspect Intel is probably making a "simple" card with DX10 support for the notebooks in order to contrast nVidia. If so, Intel entry in the market doesn't really change anything, but is probably just not letting nVidia expand on high-end notebook with an exclusive DX10 offer.

In a long run nVidia will have problems with its chipsets on desktops only if both AMD and Intel will close their doors for 3rd party chipset development. And I will suspect this is not a thing a real free market can tolerate, despite each CPU company will bring the reasons of defending their own business. Intel is already in a legal storm, so I think it won't probably want to start a new one that would just confirm how bad they act with respect to the competitors (though Intel may have the financial resources to pay for these actions in future when competitors will be crushed). I think that AMD worst problem is with CPU, not GPU, so they need all the help possible to sell more of them. nVidia can help in this as it did in the past where SLI was only available for AMD CPU providing the best game platforms. Still you can see that there are lots of AM2 and also AM2+ motherboards with nVidia chipsets despite latest AMD chipsets. It is also possible that finally nVidia will acquire the license to build Crossfire solutions in order to alleviate AMD on the burden to create their own chipsets for their CPU.
If you want to speculate on far future there are lots of equally available possible endings based on nothing (or BS, if you prefer). What remains is that nVidia has proven to be quite good at marketing in the past (crushing 3DFX, 3DLabs, Matrox S3, and a bunch of other well established video and chipset manifacturers) and probably it is not sleeping in this moments. Still we have not any elements for speculating on this, as it is more a marketing question than a technical one .

As you can see the current interaction between the companies has all been messed up after Ati's acquisition by AMD that broke the established equilibrium. And it is quite funny as well.
nVidia was doing chipset exclusively for AMD. Intel had Ati support. Now AMD build chipsets that support only ATi and sells them to Intel. Which on its turn see nVidia providing SLI support to their CPU. Intel would not probably want to support Crossfire as that would help raising AMD competitor's income, and AMD doesn't want to have SLI support anymore as that would lower its GFX sales. However AMD needs to sell CPU and they know nVidia GFX cards sell well and cannot afford to direct nVidia buyers on Intel platforms only. Intel cannot let nVidia build too good chipsets or it won't be able to sell its own (and I suspect this to be the prolem in the notebook market where Intel can offer its own entire CPU/chpset/GPU set, which is not true on desktops).
Now, given this set of considerations, any small move can make the castle fall on one side or the other. As any scenery is possible, one can suspect nVidia to buy VIA and start producing its own x86 CPUs in order to offer its CPU/Chipset/GPU whole sets as the other ones. That would be interesting, indeed.
Any one wants t add more BS to mine?
[/quotemsg]

Damn!! Skip skip...
 

dev1se

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i remember a crysis / nvidia promotion video when the game was released, hyping up how much better performance would be with SLi ....

Benchmarks have since proved otherwise.

I cannot believe that Crytek didnt optimize its game for multi gpu setups.
 
G

Guest

Guest
Plus don't forget that Intel just purchased an INCREDIBLE 3D engine. I think they are 110% going to invade the 3D GFX market and running full steam. They are going to come out with something huge that definitely will compete with ATI and Nvidia in the not so far future.
 

SpinachEater

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[quotemsg=6572350,73,124995]They'll put anything at a beginning of a game bootup for enough money .... nvidia should have spent more on development instead of paying off game manufacturers for a stupid popup .[/quotemsg]

It sounds like you don't have an understanding of TWIMTBP program. It is not a simple pay off for an advertising deal. They actually help the developers with coding and such so that the games run with more stability. It is win win win situation (yes 3 wins, one for us). NV plugs the game, the game plugs NV, and if we have NV hardware, the game runs better than on other hardware.

NV gets a sneak peak at the game to better optimize drivers for it and since they get the developers to use NV coding, it ensures that NV hardware will run it best. It is actually a genius program that is killing ATI.
 

z_dori

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[quotemsg=6572219,39,115127]Crysis says that Nvidia is the way its meant to be played! ATI is not. End of story![/quotemsg]


for a long time i didn't see an ATI logo in the game....
Crysis is another world of gaming for all we know... needs a rig that cost like a car to enjoy 1920 and 2560 gaming...
if so...

but Nvidia rocks.
for now i didn't saw a 3870x2 vs 88gts512/gtx sli.
at tom's CFx preview 3 ATI GPUs is the limit, the 4th one- 2x 3870x2 isn't worth the money.

i hope when catalyst 8.3 with CFx support will be out we'll see reviews of 3/4 ATI GPUs vs 2/3 Nvidia GPUs...
than we'll know for sure...
but i think that 2x 88gtx is the limit for sain people. 3-way is too much money...
maybe the question will be for me- 88gtx SLI vs 3870x2 + 3870 (3GPUS)... it will still be cheaper than 2 gtx.
let's wait and see...

but for now- Nvidia is the way it meant to be played...
 

jive

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For me it's hard to understand the meaning of what you talk about.Who cares if the hd3870x2 it's better then two 8800gts.
Do you think I will change my mobo plus two new video cards to go crossfire instead of SLi. I choose to go SLi, next year when I decide to get new parts I will look at that time what is the better option. All thoses cards will be out there driver will more mature and eveything will go find.
Now it's more a discussion about, mine is bigger then your's. Continue to check yourself to be sure your the fastest the biggest. Me I will wait and decide when I'm ready.
 

z_dori

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Mar 14, 2007
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first- i don't have a multi GPU mobo so i'm thinking of what is better to get to last for the most.
if i had an sli i would stick with it for sure, moreover if it's supports new CPUs etc..
i want to get max pref for the money.
if ATI x2 is better than GTS512SLI than i'll go with x48 mobo, and add to the X2 the 3870 for 3GPU to max it out.

but i think that 512SLI is better, but didn't saw any benchs.
wondering if to get the striker 2 with 88GTX & add another after a few months.

if, like you, i had a good SLI mobo- 680i etc than there wasn't a question at all....

i don't care about size or power consumption. i'll get evermax 1000w or tagan 1100W/ TT 1200w ether way.

i only care to get the max pref for a reasonable money for mobo+2 VGA Cards, to get 1920 gaming running good.
 
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Guest

Guest
Bah ignore this... I misread some of the info on the ATI site about the x2.

So in that case then ATI does have the advantage back imo.

Hehehe !

Sorry for my mistake :p
 

dev1se

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Oct 8, 2007
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I thought the X2 worked in any motherboard, since it's running the Crossfire platform through a single PCI-Express slot

Correct me if im wrong.
 

homerdog

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[quotemsg=6572755,123,35357]The only thing that sucks is that

1) the 88xx will run in any mobo and is a great ass kicking card.

yes yes that 3870x2 can beat it

BUT...

2) you HAVE to have a crossfire board to use it.

Thats a nice advantage for the Nvidia card as you can choose almost any PCI-E board you want.

So that argument that who cares if ATI has 2 GPUs vs Nvidia's one GPU they are both apples to apples. In fact they actually aren't due to this reason. 88xx runs on any board where you are forced to use a xfire board for your hd3870x2.

So in all honesty and FACT... Nvidia does have the upper hand for single card performance here. Oooooh and I hate to admit this :(

EDIT: Dont get me wrong I am still an ATI fanboy :) and I love their new and upcoming technology still, but this reasoning just hit me. :p[/quotemsg]
It really hurts these forums when misinformation gets spread like this. I'm sure you really did think that the 3870x2 requires a Crossfire mobo, but you should at least do a quick Google search before posting something as FACT if you aren't 100% sure. Otherwise you will look like a fool and confuse those who come here looking for advice.

Please correct your post and learn from this mistake :)
 

z_dori

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Mar 14, 2007
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the 3870x2 don't need a CF board. i saw somewhere in asus or sapphire that it can be run in p35,965p boards, no x38/x48 board needed!

for CF it, need a CFx board- skulltrail & x48 - for now.

still i tend to go with 2x 88gtxs, even if the 9800gtx will be out coz it will cost a lot less...
a reason to buy the 9800gtx & not 88gtx is a good pref boost in DX10 gaming- even Crysis at 1680x1050 with x4AA and Very High Settings with ~30FPS will get me to buy 98gtx & SLI it later, after selling my second kidney.. :)
 
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