X-bit labs

May 2004 Hardware News Overview (page 7)

Category: Editorial

by Andy Yaschenko

[ 05/11/2004 | 11:21 AM ]

Graphics

The announcement of the GeForce 6800 was undoubtedly the most important event of April. It seems like NVIDIA came up with a practically blameless product for the first time since the TNT, a product that can be truly called a new-generation one: the NV40 provides nearly twice the performance of the NV35! Of course, it comes at a price: two hundred million transistors (central processors are left far behind in this regard!) and an energy consumption of over 70W. Anyway, having spent over $400 million, NVIDIA has fully rehabilitated itself after the last-year fiasco with the NV30.

Graphics card makers reacted with an unsuppressed enthusiasm (well, they would do it in any case, with any new generation of chips, like they did with the NV30), all announcing their products on the new GPU. Even Gigabyte who has made friends with NVIDIA just in time for the release did so. Anyway, GeForce 6800-based cards are expected in retail no sooner than June, so ATI has chances of outrunning NVIDIA in the race for the shops.

As usual, a professional analog of the consumer chip was also announced, the Quadro FX 4000 (curiously, it keeps the FX suffix). Evidently, with the performance growth, the Quadro, once only a nominally professional solution, starts looking more like a pro product. It is especially so as the traditional players in the field, like Matrox, Number Nine and 3DLabs, are passive.

Being the leader of in the field is good and all, but NVIDIA’s share of the market is mostly due to its presence in the mainstream sector, like the GeForce FX 5700 and thereabouts. In April, some activity was felt in this field where card manufacturers caught at NVIDIA’s recent offers: the GeForce FX 5500 and, especially, the GeForce FX 5700 Ultra with support of DDR3 memory. Such cards were announced in March and appeared in stores in April, with a nice price/performance ratio. The GeForce FX 5700 LE, like an in-between product, also enjoys popularity among the manufacturers.

As a result of successful moves in this sector, NVIDIA starts regaining what has been lost to ATI Technologies in the recent months. The Canadians don’t seem to be ready to give up, though. ATI’s ambition feeds on its recent successes and the last quarter should add confidence to ATI, too: $463.3 million sales and $47.6 million net gain.

On the other hand, the event that would break the balance to ATI’s advantage doesn’t happen – MSI still can’t start producing graphics cards on ATI’s chips. In April, we saw photographs of the cards, but there was still no official announcement. Maybe they are waiting for Computex? By the way, the second thing that may happen at Computex is an announcement of the RADEON 9550 for the world market, not only for the Asian one. This chip may make a good competitor to the GeForce FX 5700 LE – it’s silly to leave it for Asia only.

I don’t say anything about the RADEON X800 here as we had only rumors about it in April – let’s better wait for the May results. As for other rumors about hi-end products from ATI, some manufacturers are said to be readying RADEON 9800XT-based cards with 128MB rather than 256MB of memory onboard. This will affect their price, but shouldn’t tell much on their performance.

That’s not all. In April we heard some news from…Matrox! It announced three new products, but all three are multi-monitor solutions for specific market niches like systems for watching satellite snapshots. There’s no mentioning new chips and it seems like Matrox didn’t want to get back to the market with the Parhelia either. They just made the graphics core a bit stronger for using on these exactly niche graphics cards of their own manufacture.