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Soleron on 17 February 2010
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disolitude said:
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the reason why I actually believe Nvidia could fuck up like this on the Fermi is because of my experience with the 3D vision. Never have I seen a company with such a lackluster support for such a cool product.

Here is an example. Bioshock 2 for has native 3D vision support built in to the game. Devs of the game were working on this together with Nvidia and made the game 100% compatible. But guess what...the driver update for the game is not ready yet. ETA unknown.

So out of the 3 games that I wanted to play on PC this year (Mass Effect 2, Bioshock 2, Alien Vs Predator) NONE are 3D vision compatible as of yet.

I think Nvidia is branching out in to other markets way too fast and is not able to deliver a competent product across all of their division.

Yes. It is obvious from the design of Fermi (officially detailed last month) that it is for a GPGPU/workstation compute product rather than a desktop graphics card.

Nvidia's core business is going away. Clarkdale and Llano are taking away the need for low-end discrete GPUs, which both AMD and Nvidia need to make product volume to pay off the massive costs of designing a GPU. High-end GPUs are declining as a $100 GPU is good enough for 95% of us now. And they've stopped making chipsets because AMD and Intel are making the chipset irrelevant by bringing the NB and graphics on die. ATI avoided this by merging with AMD so they will make AMD's chipsets and AMD's on-die graphics. The goal is complete integration of CPU and GPU, and Nvidia doesn't have an x86 CPU to do it. So they bet everything on general purpose compute.

The problem is that it is a tiny market and as a company need to stick rigidly to power limits and schedules. One screw up (GT200's SP/DP performance) and you don't have the initiative any longer. Two (Fermi's delays and power issues) and you've lost the market. Also Nvidia are pushing CUDA, 3D Vision and PhysX when no one will adopt them because they're tied to one vendor's hardware. OpenCL, DirectCompute, Intel's Havok physics, and whatever becomes a cross-vendor 3D standard will actually get better adoption.