teh Forum

So I've been playing with the GeForce FX 5800 Ultra, the NV35 (don't know what it will be called when it comes out yet,) and the ATI Radeon 9800 Pro. The 9800 Pro is absolutely amazing. I'm totally happy with my 9700 Pro, as it's actually faster than the NV35, which won't even be out for a few months. I do however, want a 9800 Pro. Nizice, it's just grizate!!! I think I've abandoned Nvidia until the product after the NV35. Hopefully by then they will be back on track. I think there is some room for improvement though before the 35 actually comes out. I don't think it's a good idea to say anything more about the 35, it's nice though. Well, I just about get to go and take teh big sleep, so I'll hop back on when I wake up in three days. L A T E R ! ! !

Wow - sounds like your job rocks. So where did nvidia go wrong? They didn't release a card for over a year, now they're behind. Too much effore into the xbox? And what's up with AMD? They have a chance to push their way back on top?

I think they just had 3DFX IP burning a whole in their engineering pockets, wanted to use it, and had to find a strange way to implement it. Since they already had a fairly failsafe, developement path, just making bigger faster versions of the same hardware with a few new features once a year, I think trying to implement someone else's technology is probably what did it. Not to mention X-box like you said, and the fact that they were moving to a smaller fab process. I think they hit themselves with a bad combination of normally small problems. I don't know why process shrinking always causes so many problems. I'd think that you would just make a simple test chip to make sure the factory could reliably produce that early on in the developement cycle. That way, by the time you're done with the design, you can just toss it in, and start making wafers. If I was Nvidia, I would have taken a Ti4600 and done a quick die shrink to .13 and given it a whirl while the design of the FX was beginning.

We have a couple of relatively low clocked ClawHammers, and they are quite fast. They are just engineering samples, but not bad. And that's just running standard XP. When the 64bit kernel becomes available, it will spark up and blaze [TEE HEE HEE] The Athlons with the 333MHz FSB are also very fast. I think it will always be the same situation though. Intel will always be the most popular, and the highest priced. AMD will sometimes have superior performance (though not always, and usually in different areas,) cost less, and be slightly behind financially. AMD is a really cool company, so I hope they continue to be cool. I really actually want to build an nForce2 system with a gig of Corsair DDR400 and XP2700+. I just don't have funding for that currently, and my
P4 is still rather quick. I'm using the ASUS P4PE with serial ATA (which I need to get a drive for.) and 1 GB of 333 a 9700 Pro and Audigy2. I'm really quite happy with it.