by Anton Shilov
11/06/2002 | 02:30 PM
On Sunday we told you that NVIDIA had discontinued its GeForce4 Ti4600 graphics processor and there will be no more graphics cards based on this chip manufactured in the future (see this news-story). Today I come over this article at AnandTech web-site claiming that the Santa Clara, California based GPU developer still bets on its current technology and intends to sell its GeForce4 Titanium chips in future.
Apparently, NVIDIA will soon launch two new GeForce4 Titanium graphics processors this year. According to the source, one will be called the GeForce4 Ti4800 and another – the GeForce4 Ti4800SE. The first will represent the GeForce4 Ti4600 with AGP 8x support, while the remaining will be the GeForce4 Ti4400 with AGP 8x protocol. <%BANNER[article]%>
As you may see, NVIDIA will simply add the new bus to the old GPUs and will start to sell them under the new brandnames. Frankly speaking, the names of the novelties are rather misleading and the graphics card market, as well as end-users, will be confused with the nomenclature of the new graphics cards powered by NVIDIA’s chips. On the other hand, ATI Technologies also calls their products with pretty strange indexes and, unfortunately, this trend becomes a good tradition for these two developers of graphics solutions.
I also have loads of questions about the product positioning for these new chips from the Santa Clara-based company. Presently NVIDIA’s partners sell the graphics cards powered by the GeForce4 Ti4600 with AGP 4x and the GeForce4 Ti4200 with AGP 8x and 128MB of memory for $299 and $199 respectively. According to the rumours, there will be two versions of NV30, one probably sold for $399 and another for either $299 or even lower – NVIDIA has a lot of competitors on the DirectX 9 field and they for sure do not want to lost their market share. Provided that there are NV30 powered graphics cards for $299, they will have to lower the prices for the GeForce4 Titanium based graphics solutions, say, to $199 for the 4800 model and even lower for the rest. Keeping in mind that this year NVIDIA will not be able to deliver their NV30 VPUs in volume quantities, it is logical for them to beat its competitors on the mainstream field with the prices, as they cannot offer any new features this year. I have no idea if ATI is be able to cut the costs on their RADEON 9700 and 9500 series of products, but I am sure that in this case they will not be able to achieve their planned gross margin on 35% this quarter.
I have no doubts that NVIDIA will launch the bunch of the AGP 8x supporting GeForce4 Ti chips since they need such cores for their professional series of Quadro solutions. Of course, the company may never release some of the products on the retail market, leaving the parts for the OEM customers and pushing the NV30 to the retail, however, the situation on the market of graphics cards develops really rapidly these days and even NVIDIA managers may not be sure about the plans now.