X-bit labs

Annual Hardware Overview: A Glance Back at the Year 2003 (page 14)

Category: Editorial

by Andy Yaschenko

[ 01/08/2004 | 11:51 PM ]

NVIDIA saw the trouble coming in early in 2003 when the long-delayed NV30 (GeForce FX 5800) GPU family came at last out. Those chips were overall slower and more expensive than RADEON 9700 that had been around for quite a while already. It was all so bad that NVIDIA had to release hastily a new NV35 chip (GeForce FX 5900) that replaced NV30 completely. As for GeForce FX 5800, the company tried to muffle the matter, removed technical briefs from their website and so on. Of course, this schedule didn’t allow inventing anything radically new, so NV35 was in fact a bit more improved version of the NV30: it had 256-bit memory controller and a number of new technologies to allow faster Pixel Shader calculation and variety of additional speed improvements.

ATI, however, had a long-prepared answer – R350 core (RADEON 9800/9800 PRO). Both high-end VPUs from ATI and NVIDIA provided the same performance for about the same money. This parity was only reaffirmed in the fall as the slightly overclocked versions of the same graphics processors, namely RADEON 9800 XT and GeForce FX 5950 Ultra, don’t differ in performance and price. On the other hand, they didn’t go far in performance from RADEON 9800 PRO / GeForce FX 5900 Ultra…

RADEON 9800 PRO

GeForce FX 5950 Ultra

It was rumored last year that ATI and NVIDIA agreed on slowing down the technology race. Well, some slowdown of the progress is evident. For example, the new chips from both companies (R420 and NV40) were scheduled for the fourth quarter of 2003, but were then synchronously postponed for the first quarter of 2004. Anyway, the graphics hardware has left the software developers so far behind, that it’s quite possible to skip one or two cycles without anybody noticing it.

The war in the upper echelon was nothing compared to the mess in the mainstream sector. Two new DirectX 9-compatible generations hit the market simultaneously: RADEON 9600 and GeForce FX 5600. Then they started their “do-as-I-do” game: ATI uncovers RADEON 9600 PRO benchmark results and NVIDIA raises the frequencies in its FX 5600 Ultra.

In the fall, the overclocked RADEON 9600 XT meets the overclocked GeForce FX 5700 Ultra. However, they are both confronted with the RADEON 9800 PRO and the GeForce FX 5900 that have come down from the top. Overall, a hell of a mess, and I hope the new year will bring us fewer, but better chips.

RADEON 9600 PRO

I also hope for a clearly-defined product policy as we witnessed in the good old times when the top-end graphics cards featured the latest generation of chips, the mainstream cards – the previous generation, and the low-end products had ancient chips in them. New products appeared less frequently, but were more balanced and comprehensible for both: users and developers.

And there was no need in those brave times to cripple new products into “cut-down” versions in such haste that it turns out no difficult task to bring them back to the original state. In 2003, ATI was spotted in two cases of the kind when users found a way to “upgrade” the RADEON 9500 into a 9700 or bring RADEON 9600 SE into its pristine and faster self.