By using this site, you agree to our Privacy Policy and our Terms of Use. Close
Soleron on 21 February 2010
Edit Thread
greenmedic88 said:
Nvidia still has their chipset business, workstation cards and a huge line up of mainstream VGA cards as the meat and potatoes of their VGA card business. Apparently those top end enthusiast cards don't add up to a major portion of their overall business. 5,000-8,000 cards is not much even if they were taking big profit margins on each card, which they aren't. The main thing Nvidia loses from the uninspiring Fermi is prestige. Technically, they will still have the fastest single GPU cards, just overpriced and below what was initially claimed.

I guess this just means Nvidia will continue to use its 2 gen old G90 series GPUs and last gen R200s for their bulk sellers. But if they start cutting out the GTX260, 275 and 285, I'm really not sure what they plan on selling to fill in the gaps. Not more rebadged G90 chips at any rate.

Clearly ATI has the better business plan with respect to their VGA cards this gen.

They've stopped developing new chipsets. There will be no more Nvidia chipsets for either Intel or AMD platforms.

I agree, enthusiast cards don't add up to much, but since they can't make competitive Fermi derivatives their lower end will be rebadged G9x until at least the end of 2010. But those cards aren't competitive now, much less with a hypothetical part-refresh from AMD in the next few months, and certainly not with the confirmed complete refresh in H2 2010.

Currently their lineup looks like this: G 210, GT 220, GT 240, GTS 250, GTX 260, GTX 275, GTX 285, GTX 295.

The G 210 loses to the 5450 on value, with a larger die preventing price cuts.
The GT 220 loses to the 5570 on value.
The GT 240 loses to the 5670 on value, with a larger die preventing price cuts.
The GTS 250 is competitive with the 5750; still, the 5750 has a much smaller die (181mm^2 vs. ~260mm^2).
The GTX260 through 295 are very low on stock, soon to be completely gone. Even when they are availible, the (upcoming 5830 and) 5850 destroy the value proposition of the first three and the 5970 that of the 295.

So that's one competitive product out of eight. And AMD could easily sell the 5750 profitably at $90 which would kill that too.

Only one area looks OK, and that's workstation cards, but heat could be an issue and AMD will have 5xxx workstation cards soon enough.