X-bit labs

Annual Hardware Overview: A Glance Back at the Year 2003 (page 15)

Category: Editorial

by Andy Yaschenko

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

As for the low-end solutions, we had some calmness there, as they cannot be made into anything slower. MX440 and RADEON 7500 were complemented with RADEON 9200 and GeForce FX 5200. These were faster, although MX440 co-existed with them in 2003. RADEON 7500 was evidently an obsolete chip, so ATI had to release RADEON 9200 SE, which exactly fitted into the niche of the MX440.

To end the last year, NVIDIA acted up with its MX4000, which is an enhanced version of MX440-8x with a redesigned memory controller (to support the today’s popular 16Mx16 128Mbit memory chips). Graphics cards on the new chip should cost somewhat less. It’s now hard to tell the future of the innovation. MX440 is still quite popular, and NVIDIA just has to organize the transition smoothly (in prices and shipments).

As for the future, I have already mentioned the upcoming graphics processor generations, NV40 and R420, and I do hope that we will see some new technologies there rather than the same frequency race. At the same time, it is clear that the new generation of gaming engines (Doom 3, Half-Life 2) won’t use those technologies, and all games scheduled to come out next year will be based on these engines at best. As usual, software is lagging behind hardware in the computer graphics market.

By the way, R420 and NV40 are going to become the last representatives of the AGP-compatible chips. Other solutions will use the PCI Express bus, not only the top ones like NV45 and R450, but also mainstream NV41/42 and RV370/380. In the lower level NVIDIA has some NV33 core on its roadmap, which is to become an AGP 8x solution. There is going to be another mess about AGP/PCI Express graphics cards and AGP/PCI Express mainboards, I am afraid.

Let me now say a few words about the other developers as there are other players in the graphics chip market, besides ATI and NVIDIA. Both XGI and S3 are set to enter the computer graphics market, and there is some evidence we should trust them. XGI has made more success so far, as there are already graphics cards on their chips, namely the top-end Volari Duo V8 Ultra.

Lower performance is not interesting anymore. This solution is as fast as RADEON 9600 Pro that appeared a little bit less than a year ago. Meanwhile Volari Duo V8 Ultra costs $450, like a RADEON 9800 XT. However, there is some reserve: the drivers will be improving and the prices will surely go down with the launch of new cards. On the other hand, the dual-chip solution itself seems questionable.

But at least XGI has something real to offer to the public and they have met their schedule. As for S3, it has a smaller reserve of faith. In the beginning of the year they promised DeltaChrome X9-based graphics cards of the same performance level as RADEON 9700 PRO and GeForce FX could show then and costing from $90 up. Then they promised the cards to show up in November-December, having showcased a PCI Express prototype at IDF, though.

In December, instead of the promised cards, they offered another updated roadmap, with January as the official launch date. The promised performance is now equal to that of RADEON 9800 and GeForce FX 5900, and the price has been risen up to 155 euro. Why euro? Because they chose the main manufacturer of the cards – the same Club-3D that has already started selling cards on the XGI chips. Overall, it all looks quite uncertain, but I cannot dismiss them altogether as BitBoy, since S3 showcases some samples or prototypes every now and then. I do hope the new year makes things somewhat clearer.