by Anton Shilov
12/18/2009 | 10:36 AM
A vice president of Nvidia Corp. said that the early lead of ATI, graphics business unit of Advanced Micro Devices, with DirectX 11 graphics processing units actually meant nothing in the longer term. According to Nvidia, 800 thousand of ATI Radeon HD 5000-series graphics processors already shipped by the arch-rival are not significant at all.
“To us, being out of sync with the API for a couple of months is not as important as what we are trying to do in the big scheme of things for the next four or five years. […] This 60-day lag between these events of when our competition has DX11 and when we are coming to market will absolutely seem insignificant in the big picture,” said Michael Hara, senior vice president of investor relations and communications at Nvidia, at Barclays Technology Conference on the 8th of December.
ATI/AMD started to sell its ATI Radeon HD 5800-series graphics cards on the 23rd of September and as of the 8th of December the lag between ATI DX11 and Nvidia DX11 hardware was 76 days and counting. Moreover, Nvidia is not projected to release its next-generation GeForce “Fermi” GF100 flagship graphics card for gamers in December or early January. According to the company’s chief executive officer, mass production of the GF100 graphics processing unit would be ramped only in Q1 FY2011. Nvidia’s first quarter of fiscal year 2011 begins on the 26th of January and ends on the 26th of April, 2010. As a result, Nvidia has all chances to be 125 days (or about four months) late with its DirectX 11 hardware.
Moreover, so far ATI, the arch-rival of Nvidia, has sold over 800 thousand DirectX 11 graphics processors, the company said this week. As a result, AMD’s graphics business unit has very good chances to sell over a million of new-generation Radeon HD 5000 "Evergreen" chips and roll-out a full line up of DX11 GPUs by the time Nvidia ships its first DirectX 11 graphics processing unit.
However, Nvidia claims that being late to market with new hardware is hardly a problem in the long term, which seems to be logical in general. According to Mr. Hara, DirectX 11 is only a part of the overall experience and that stereoscopic 3D as well as hardware physics effects acceleration are equally important, an argument that can be argued.
“If you look at the last 12 to 15 years of Nvidia, [you will see that] innovation is our core. We go through revolutionary changes every three to four years and that is exactly where we are at today. If you look ahead in Nvidia’s perspective, the game has changed from just pure graphics to computational graphics. The next big evolution in the API world has come with DirectX 11, but we believe that it is a part of the experience. We think about stereoscopic 3D, we think about physics as well as the improvement in graphics as changing the experience of the end-user. We think about these in terms of multiple years,” said senior vice president of investor relations and communications at Nvidia.
Mike Hara said that the company was on-track to release its next-gen flagship GF100 graphics chip made using 40nm process technology in the first quarter of next year (it was not specified whether he meant fiscal or calendar year).
“We are just around the corner from preparing our next GeForce and the experience of what you will see in 3D, what you will feel in physics and the improvements you get in graphics will be obvious to the market. We are almost there. In Q1, the world will get to see what we have done with Fermi,” said Mr. Hara.