disolitude said:
I disagree with your whole price/performance ratio... and its because Nvidia offers things ATI doesn't. 3D vision, Physx, cuda...etc. They can get away with charging a little more, just like lexus charges more than toyota yet has similar horsepower. You read me wrong. I think that NVIDIA HAS BETTER PRICE/PERFORMANCE. As far as demand...I am also not sure about that. I mean, yeah GTX 470 and 480 are not selling like hot cakes as they are expensive high end cards. And gTx465 was a dud. But GTX460 and GTS450 now have changed the demand wars. I can tell by the 15 new posts every day on Nvidia forums asking "will my GTX460 run 3D vision?" that these cards are moving... Let's look at the Steam survey results coming out early October. Closest we'll get to real numbers. I bet the GTX 460 and 450 won't even register against the advances of 57xx and 58xx in the same time. And the average GF104 is $200 while the average Cypress is about $280, considering all SKUs, and GF104 is bigger, so Nvidia must be making less money per chip. I am not arguing that ATI isn't in a better position when it comes to market share, or even card profitability. But Nvidia is doing things right to get market share back from regular consumers...price cuts, rebates, aggressive game bundles with cards. None of which are helping the bottom line. It's great for consumers but unsustainable for Nvidia. I still think they're being forced into these rebates and price cuts by lack of demand. If Nvidia could sell their GTX 460s at $250 they would. If Nvidia could have kept the GTX 480 above $450 they would have. Why else would they drop it if AMD is holding steady? I do think Nvidia have the hardcore PC gamer locked, with things like amazing SLI scalability, 3D vision and 3d surround and Physx. Not to mention that 480 is still the single most powerful GPU which is what a lot of users want (SLI has its drawbacks)... 495 is just around the corner to compete with 5970 for the most powerful card money can buy. 3D Vision is niche. Hugely niche. I'll be seriously amazed if it's above 1% of the global market who have a discrete video card. It's nice technology but the cost is so high that it doesn't matter to consumers or to Nvidia's revenue. Any penetration stats yet? PhysX is again nice technology. It's an advantage over AMD where it exists. So few games use it for anything more than particle effects though. How many games use it for player interaction? 3D Surround is not more impressive than Eyefinity, except for the 3D. SLI scaling is better than Crossfire, but I believethe 6xxx series will make it look poor value. All in all, it comes down to whether the technologies sell cards. I'm not seeing a wave of GTS 450/GTX 460 sales, but I have no sales figures. I'd like to be proven wrong if you can find some (I don't want to shoot anecdotes and speculation at you).
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This GTX 495. What is it, and how will it perform?
Scenario: It's a dual GF104
The GTX 460 has a 150W TDP for 768MB. Two of those is 300W, assuming no downclocking. Remember AMD had to make the 5970 like two 5850s to stay under 300W.
You can't enable any more shaders on GF104 or you go over the TDP limit. Hence it will perform like GTX 460 768MB SLI. Not 1GB SLI, because that would go over the TDP limit. Let's apply a typical scaling factor of 185% from a few reviews. That would perform like a 5970.
Now, a single Cayman card will outperform a 5870 by 35%. That's a few frames short of a 5970, and higher minimum framerates with no microstutter. I think people will choose Cayman over that.
Scenario: It's a full GF100.
Well, first of all I don't believe they can make on in quantity. Let's assume they can. It's 6% faster than a GTX 480, putting it behind Cayman per above. No win.
Scenario: It's a respin
It's been six months since GF100 was available. Not enough time to do a full new architecture, and no new process node is available. It would have to be a base layer spin of GF100 or GF104. So maximum performanec does not go up except that clockspeeds might increase to 1500MHz shaders (the design target). Still short of Cayman.
I can't think of a GPU where they managed to increase performance on the same node in the same power consumption by enough (~30%) to beat Cayman, in only six months.
Even if they do, it'll be 530 or 730mm^2 of silicon against 380mm^2 for Cayman. Not a fight Nvidia can win on price either.
