X-bit labs

February 2004 Hardware News Overview (page 8)

Category: Editorial

by Andy Yaschenko

[ 02/23/2004 | 06:37 PM ]

Graphics

People from ATI Technologies rejoice. According to Mercury Research data for Q4, ATI has outdone NVIDIA in the market share (for the first time in years!) The fact is meaningful, although the gap itself is small (ATI’s 24.9% against NVIDIA’s 24.7%). Having lost 3.2% in the last quarter, Intel still remains an unrivalled leader with its 31.7%.

Anyway, NVIDIA is in the third place now, and this is not due to the failures in the notebook sector (or, rather, due to the success of the RADEON MOBILITY 9600 – it’s all relative in this world), but because of its losing in the field where it has always been a traditional leader! ATI is selling ever more GPUs for desktop graphics cards, while NVIDIA’s sales are declining.

The technical capabilities of the products are one thing, but ATI is also aided by its own suddenly found talent to work with partners, while NVIDIA seems to have lost it. The story with ABIT is quite characteristic: they settled up somehow on mainboards, but didn’t on graphics cards. Meanwhile, ATI agreed on collaboration with ABIT in January and we’re waiting for a full range of graphics cards on the RADEON chips. And this was not the only acquisition of ATI in January, although ABIT alone would be quite enough. Terratec confirmed the rumors by officially announcing their union with the Canadians, while the Korean Sigmacom also improved its partnership with ATI and Soltek decided to add some RADEONs into their product list. A kind of compensation for NVIDIA: EPoX decided to start a life of a graphics card maker with GeForces.

Enough of theory, let’s have some product news. As the intermediary season between chip generations continues, there are few new products, actually. It’s all calm and quiet in the low-end sector, with some more activity towards the mainstream. Soltek launched a couple of cards on the GeForce FX 5700, and Transcend reacted to this with a standard RADEON 9600 XT.

However, there’s some news here. Club 3D and PowerColor are struggling hard to push up the S3 DeltaChrome S8 by offering another, quite nice graphics card on this chip, called SS8-D3L, with passive cooling and costing just above $150 for a 256MB version.

The main events happened in the high-end sector, as usual. The single card from Gigabyte on the GeForce FX 5950 Ultra is no great event, we’re more interested in future perspectives: NV40 and R420 are quite close. The NV40 is rumored to hit the stores in late spring (May – April), called something like GeForce FX 6xxx.

We’ll surely see prototypes of graphics cards on this 0.13-micron chip at CeBIT, and that means we’ll see performance tests of this monster made of 175 million of transistors. The supported interface is AGP 8x, since NVIDIA seems to have problems with transferring to PCI Express. The company preferred to make the new series with AGP, but with an option of using an external AGP-PCI Express bridge. It’s clear the capabilities of the spring solutions from NVIDIA won’t exceed the AGP 8x limitations due to physical reasons (and that’s yet another reason for not being hasty with the i915/925).

However, it’s doubtful the PCI Express bus will give more performance to the R420, although it should have a full-fledged realization of this interface. It’s just not clear if the R420 needs more bandwidth to the CPU. We’ll learn this shortly, as ATI is rumored to be a bit ahead of NVIDIA in chip revisions. So we’re looking forward to CeBIT.

As for the XG45, the DirectX 9.1 successor to the Volari V8 Ultra, we’re not likely to see it at all. Yes, the chip was going to be announced in March (well, they may announce it – it’s no hard matter), but then the announcement was postponed to Q3. In other words, XGI completely skips over this year, and graphics cards based on the new chip will arrive no sooner than by Christmas. Maybe I’m wrong and the company will be doing all right, but I feel like we’ve got a graphical Transmeta, who regularly shows some signs of life, but nothing more.