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SLI On Life Support For the AMD Platform
JoshMST writes "For years AMD and Nvidia were like peas and carrots, and their SNAP partnership proved to be quite successful for both companies. Things changed dramatically when AMD bought up ATI, and now it seems like Nvidia is pulling the plug on SLI support for the AMD platform. While the chipset division at AMD may be a bitter rival to Nvidia, the CPU guys there have had a long and prosperous relationship with the Green Machine. While declining chipset margins on the AMD side was attributed to AMD's lackluster processor offerings for the past several years, the Phenom II chips have reawakened interest in the platform and they have found a place in enthusiasts' hearts again. Unfortunately for Nvidia, they are seemingly missing out on a significant revenue stream by not offering new chipsets to go with these processors. They have also curtailed SLI adoption on the AMD platform as well, which couldn't be happening at a worse time."
This is pure conjecture, but to me it seemed as if when AMD and ATI became one team and Nvidia and Intel became the other, that it would make sense for each one to offer incentives (read: threats) so that their partner would not bend over for the competition. So its not like its completely up to Nvidia to start improving their standing with AMD because of pressure from Intel. If that made any sense, then I'll drink a couple more beers before posting next time. Out
"It's ok, I'm completely secure as long as my iron is off"
Beginning of the end?
Why on earth if you're NVIDIA do you make it harder to find mainboards to leverage your tech? I'd have expected this move by AMD first, you'd think NVIDIA would be wanting to have their tech available everyplace possible.
Looks like no more NVIDIA for me, time to research what ATI has available. I like my AMD chips.
It is very important to always drink more beers before posting here. Otherwise, there is no chance of a +5 Insightful mod.
NVIDIA tries to jinx AMD, but ends up jinxing themselves. This has been tried throughout the ages and often ends up at the same result./>
Move on, nothing to see here.
Hydraulic pizza oven!! Guided missile! Herring sandwich! Styrofoam! Jayne Mansfield! Aluminum siding! Borax!
Dual GPU solutions are so pointless, a waste of money for little performance gain, that doesn't even work in some games.
The fact is that a very marginally small portion of people actually use more than one video card. And why should anyone really, when modern day consoles cost about the same amount as one would spend on a moderately high end processor + video card, why the hell would most people want to spend an extra 300 bucks or so to have an extra video card at only 25% or less extra benefit in framerate? Only the hardcore ones with the extra wallet is who. As for me, I'm more than happy with my $1000 system with ONE video card, and I know its going to last me at least and extra year or two anyway.
Anyway all I'm saying is AMD has the ability to tie in their own processor + GPU combo, plus let the consumer buy a separate GPU, thus getting their own "SLI". If they play their card right, they can just give the finger to NVIDIA and provide some real competition that this market really needs to prevent us all from paying $200-300 for a decent GPU these days.
The fanboys are coming!
Asus has jumped in bed with Microsoft as of late. With AMD's purchase of ATI and promise of open source drivers and Nvidia's failure to move forward in open source, Nvidia and Asus has seen the last dollar of mine.
As we age, we realize that two completely different foods, peas and carrots, AMD and NVIDIA, can't be eaten together anymore as baby food mush.
Most people who use SLI, namely gamers and workstation users, use Intel processors anyway. Intel has Core i7, with lower-end versions (i3, i5) coming out later this year and next year, and has the publicity power to appeal to the aforementioned parties. AMD just doesn't impress much anymore.
I don't think this is entirely nVidia's doing. It is in AMD's best interest to push ATI cards and Crossfire since they own the company. This can be seen with the recent "Dragon" platform - pushing AMD Phenom CPU, AMD 790GX/FX chipset and ATI 4750/4950 graphics cards as a single solution.
ATI & AMD is just power-housing the craptitude under one roof.
ATI has and always will be a second rate hardware company, and a fall-flat-on-their-face failure at drivers. Crab all you want about NVIDIA but they got the goods and the business strategy that put them on top.
AMD's most important product to date has simply been the act of competing with Intel. Lying about how great their products were forced Intel to make products better than AMDs marketing BS.
When your competition says 'We're #1 at XYZ' you don't get more customers by putting out full page ads saying 'Our competitors are liars!'.. You either lie harder or make your product better than their hype.
Slashdot could have linked to the article the story submitter wrote for PC Perspectives: SLI on Life Support on the AMD Platform: Oh SNAP!.
1: Cock gun.
2: Aim at foot.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
You forgot one important thing: Larrabee.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Until, that is, millions of their mobile GPU chips keel over from heat death due to improper package bump and underfill construction.
And their single GPU chips are so big that they're impossible to manufacture cost effectively.
And that they need expensive PCB's because 512-bit wide memory is necessary when DDR3 has go up against ATI's more advanced DDR5 boards with half the required memory bus width for near equivalent memory performance.
And when two small, cheap, easy to manufacture chips beat out the biggest chip every time.
And when you're trying to get DirectX 11 running for the first time while making a radical architecture shift all while going to a new chip making process against a rival who is already shipping 40nm chips and has essentially had DX11 running in their past three generations of chips.
Yeah, I'm not sure Nvidia has nearly all the goods right at this moment.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Here's a Forbes Magazine interview with the CEO of Nvidia: Nvidia's Plan For Beating Moore's Law: Chief Jen-Hsun Huang on how GPUs could get ahead of CPUs. But read the comments. Readers are not impressed.
There is a general impression now, apparently correct, that Nvidia is not honest and cannot be trusted. HP bought Nvidia graphics chips, and when they were found defective, neither company was completely honest about fixing the defects, articles say.
An Inquirer article, Nvidia cuts out reviewers for the GTS250, says "IT IS ALWAYS funny when an unethical company turns on its own supporters as Nvidia did with the latest 'all new' GT250 cards. This time however, their PR stunts cross the line from unethical to purposely false, and hilarity ensues."
Another quote from the Inquirer story: "This time however, they crossed the line from plausible deniability to flat out deception. In the middle of last week we heard what Nvidia was up to this time around, but just couldn't believe they would be THAT sleazy."
Now that Intel is integrating faster GPUs into its chipsets, there is a perception that eventually there will be little room for Nvidia.
Mod this man(or woman) up!
8==C=O=C=K=S=L=A=P==D~~ cockslapped your grandma thunk
The parent comment was my mistake.
Larrabee doesn't change a damned thing. A beowulf cluster of shitty Intel GPUs doesn't magically remove the stench of failure. It's just a whole lotta more suckage on one die.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
Really the article makes it sound like Nvidia is abandoning AMD chipsets but it's just SLI support. When they started making this decision it looked like AMD was totally dead in the enthusiast market. Even die-hards were switching to Intel chips. It seemed for a while there that the market for dual graphics cards on AMD was nearly dead. Now that AMD has a good chip again Nvidia will probably be scrambling to get a new chipset out for enthusiasts.
As I understand it, you don't really double your performance by putting two cards in. How many people seriously drop the coin to do this? Everything I've read says you'll get better bang for the buck by buying one good card, saving the money you would have spent on the second and then buying an equivalent card in three year's time that will kick the arse of the first card.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
On tearing apart this person's use of words and then basically agreeing with him.
Perhaps you could just agree with his reasoning and point out the flaws in the fine points of his logic instead.
The argument is that SLI is pointless, you both agree, and yet you MUST find ways to pick on him.
Sheeesh.
There are single-slot dual GPU offerings from both camps. If you actually need/want SLI/CrossFire, what's the point of running 2 cards when you can have 1?
If you buy one card at present value and then find that you're just shy of playing your next game, a few years later, at 1080p, it may make sense to buy a second video card to fill the difference. The second one being much less expensive at that time because it is a few years old.
AMD = Value.
SLI = Not Value.
AMD has consistently shown that they want to put a computer at every set of hands on the planet. Geode, PIC, OLPC. Now it would be nice if those computers had fast 3D graphics or GPU parralel processing, but that really seems like an easy way to waste the real power of computers.
I have loved many Nvidia products in the past, but stepping away from AMD seems like a poor choice on Nvidia's part.
Every Asus motherboard for AMD CPUs using an AMD/ATI chipset supports using parity memory for ECC.
It doesn't matter a whole lot for a machine rebooted daily, but for any kind of a server or workstation with many months of uptime, the price difference for the memory is insignificant.
Before Core, with the hideously expensive Intel Skulltrain motherboard you could do ECC, which I went with for one customer who needed long term reliability, for a quirky application, with quirky hardware, but for the other 99.9% of us, AMD is definitely the way to go for high-integrity computers without braking the bank.
Part of the NVIDIA chip in my main PC failed a year ago, and I've replaced a few failed video cards for a customer who has many computers running 24/7 in a harsh environment. None of the ATI video cards have failed, only the NVIDIA's.
The problem shows itself more often in laptop video chips due to the more extreme temperature swings they experience, but based on my experience...the NVIDIA problem has not only not been limited to a few laptops put out by one manufacturer...it's also not limited to laptops.
The nvida chipset are faster then AMD I have been using nvidia chipset since nforce 2 and I love it Right now I am trying to find a gigabyte GA-M720-US3 but a can't find it in the USA it has the new nForce 720D chipset
Shows you dont know much about Larabee.
Larabee has nothing to do with current Intel GPU architecture.
Larabee is a bunch of older Pentium cores re-engineered to be REALLY good at the kinds of floating point operations 3D graphics need combined with a really good software setup to actually provide 3D for the thing.
Its all x86.
I know the beowulf cluster is cool and all, but come on now, you're starting to lose geek cred for inaccuracy here. Beowulf clusters are whole machines clustered to act as one - so you can have a beowulf cluster of Wii's, PS3's, and Barbara Streisands, but not a beowulf cluster of Phenom IIs.
Besides, I thought it was assload of CPUs in a GPU package, not the other way around? Intel makes damn good CPUs, no matter how much their GPUs suck (they are adequate, but only for very small values of adequate).
Security is mostly a superstition... Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. - Helen Keller
Acer > Asus... I always get those two confused :/
Until, that is, millions of their mobile GPU chips keel over from heat death due to improper package bump and underfill construction.
That sounds like some wicked conjecture, have any evidence that this is impending?
And their single GPU chips are so big that they're impossible to manufacture cost effectively.
This again seems like conjecture unless you've got NVIDIA's manufacturing balance sheet handy.
And that they need expensive PCB's because 512-bit wide memory is necessary when DDR3 has go up against ATI's more advanced DDR5 boards with half the required memory bus width for near equivalent memory performance.
Don't mistake 'first to market' for 'eternal competitive advantage'. DDR5 isn't ATI's IP, they're just implementing it. NVIDIA can do the same. NVIDIA's DDR3 cards are still beating ATI's DDR5 benchmarks. And while we're at it, do you think DDR5 is increasing or decreasing ATI's costs? Do you think those costs are more or less than NVIDIA's PCB mfg costs?
If my choices are 'increased cost due to bleeding edge technology' vs. 'increased cost due to mfg process', any smart company will stick with mfg process costs unless the competitive advantage of the bleeding edge technology is worth the risk. Since ATI's DDR5 impelementation provides only with buzzword cache.. I'm not so sure you've got a solid point there.
And when two small, cheap, easy to manufacture chips beat out the biggest chip every time.
Except when your drivers suck or your competition can still beat your 0day tech numbers with last years technology.
And when you're trying to get DirectX 11 running for the first time while making a radical architecture shift all while going to a new chip making process against a rival who is already shipping 40nm chips and has essentially had DX11 running in their past three generations of chips.
'essentially had DX11 running'.. thats funny since it was really DX10.1 up until June 3rd. One might add that they have the dubious prize of being the only DX10.1 chip manufacturer. NVIDIA was smart on this one, get your ducks in a row for the major releases, don't just dive for the scraps of the minor release.
Yeah, I'm not sure Nvidia has nearly all the goods right at this moment.
You might want to upgrade your drivers, your video card is clearly glitching if you can't see it.
Impressively, ATI's drivers still suck. You'd think they'd've learned by now. I don't game. I just want a damn graphics controller - a slow and steady, efficient and cool graphics controller - that has drivers that work properly. Easy to get with nVidia. Not so easy to get with ATI. And if you happen to get stuck with a laptop with an ATI graphics chip? Well, all I can say is GOOD LUCK. Bad enough that if you don't have .NET Framework installed when you install the driver, you end up with 5 more hours of diagnosing and repairing a broken installation of ATI CCC that it was ignorant enough to install anyway. Add in the fact that ATI doesn't even support anything older than ~1 year old (they don't support my laptop with a Radeon X1200 even though it's still under MFG warranty). Now that's a company I want to buy products from.
I hope ATI goes bankrupt from their ignorance.
Until, that is, millions of their mobile GPU chips keel over from heat death due to improper package bump and underfill construction.
That sounds like some wicked conjecture, have any evidence that this is impending?
I may be wrong, but I was under the impression that this referred to the problem Nvidia had with their mobile chips that led to recalls and product failures. It was fairly well documented. A quick google suggests: this is what he is referring to.
And who buys AMD? People looking to get better bang for the buck. In other words, people who are unlikely to double the cost of the video card for only 50% more performance.
While I think this is a silly move by nVidia (it makes them look bad to their customer base), it probably isn't nearly as dumb a move as it looks at first glance. They probably have a pretty good idea of what portion of their customers use AMD and SLI currently, and it's probably pretty low.
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
Neither the summary nor the article take the trouble to explain what SLI is.
Wikipedia:
Just one extra sentence in the summary would have saved me and countless others the trouble of having to look it up to decide whether I'm interested or not.
Apple, for example, has reported problems: MacBook Pro: Distorted video or no video issues.
Quote: "In July 2008, NVIDIA publicly acknowledged a higher than normal failure rate for some of their graphics processors due to a packaging defect. At that same time, NVIDIA assured Apple that Mac computers with these graphics processors were not affected. However, after an Apple-led investigation, Apple has determined that some MacBook Pro computers with the NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GT graphics processor may be affected."
Here are two lawsuits alleging that Nvidia was dishonest:
Nvidia asked to pay up for defective chips
Quote: '... accuses Nvidia of a series of misrepresentations and omissions that "actively concealed and failed to disclose the unusually high failure rates of Nvidia's mobile video adapters...'
Nvidia hit with second suit over defective GPUs
Quote: '... Nvidia issued a "series of materially false statements that concealed and failed to disclose" unusually high failure rates...'
Then I made a mistake not explaining the mistake! Slashdot should have disclosed that the story submitter was paid to write the article to which Slashdot linked.
The Slashdot editor should also have mentioned that the article to which Slashdot linked apparently unreasonably promotes Nvidia over ATI. See, for example, the explanation of ATI's Crossfire X, which competes with Nvidia's SLI. In that sense, the Slashdot story is apparently an advertisement.
It seems to me that Slashdot editors should make statements whether money or favors were given to run a story.
As I think about it, one thing occurs to me.
ATI wasn't just a graphics company. They make chipsets too. "Well duh!" you may say to me but I think it's not coincidental. I believe AMD wanted to bring one of the two chipset manufacturers in house so they could have better coupling between their processors and their chipsets.
With a chipset business in-house, AMD now has greater control over coordinating the release of processors and compatible chipsets. I really think AMD believes they have no use for NVIDIA chipsets at all.
What does this mean for NVIDIA? I have to believe that making chipsets for AMD processors is becoming more trouble for them than it's worth. They're competing with AMD who is leveraging their combined process to come out with tightly integrated products. That's a tough business model to fight against. And abandoning SLI is just the first step in walking away from making AMD chipsets. Consider also that NVIDIA is at least trying to make their own CPU and I have to wonder if they're not siphoning resources off their chipset unit with the eventual goal of closing down all chipset work for AMD processors.
Yeah, it's 32 cores of x86 overhead.
Why not use a small RISC core alongside the new 512-bit vector unit? No more x86 decoder overhead (non-trivial on a Pentium-level core replicated 32 times), remove the cruft, tighten up the ISA, etc.
Right now it looks like 2x the die area to achieve the same in 2010 as NVIDIA achieved in 2008, and rumoured power consumption figures that make a GT200 look lean and athletic.
However it is a major improvement for Intel, and Larrabee 2 or Larrabee 3 will get it right. Also there are lots of Intel fans who will buy it regardless. My major worry for Intel would be the drivers, these are already rumoured to be why Larrabee is 2010 instead of late 2009 now.
"...the Phenom II chips have reawakened interest in the platform and they have found a place in low end market's hearts again"
Seriously, welcome to 2006 AMD, you're just now matching Intel's 3y old architecture. Unfortunately Core i7's been out for almost a year now, and is kicking --- and taking names.
The most interesting thing will be whether Intel follows its usual practice and releases the source code for all this stuff. And if so, whether its the host side, the Larabee side or both.
Also, with Larabee, its possible to just add more cores and boost the horsepower I believe. And new features (including new DirectX versions) can be added via updates to the software (host, Larabee or both)
This isn't 1992, x86 decode IS trivial.
Own NVIDIA shares do you? Or just a fan boy?
Sorry, but the NVIDIA solder problems have been well documented, so you must have chosen to ignore this.
NVIDIA is going to use GDDR5 on their upcoming 40nm "midrange" parts. ATI actually did a lot of work on GDDR5 with the memory manufacturers, hence they got the technology early.
Quite simply with die sizes, the bigger the die, the more costly it is. AMD/ATI and NVIDIA both use TSMC for their products, so it comes down to die size. The bigger the die, the bigger the chance of a flaw affecting it, so yield drops, never mind getting fewer dies per wafer.
NVIDIA have to use a wider memory bus to compete on bandwidth using DDR3, that costs money, it requires a PCB with more layers, it increases complexity. There's a reason that AMD is selling decent graphics cards for $99 - $199, and NVIDIA have been forced to rebrand their old generation parts TWICE in the past year or two.
And ATI's drivers have been fairly good since they went with the monthly updates (it's not 2001 anymore), and even better since they've been part of AMD. There are issues still - hardware video transcoding is unusable, and thus the $30 NVIDIA hardware transcoder is a better option, for those who use it.
A key part of DirectX 11 is hardware tesselation, and ATI have had that since the 360's R600 chip. DirectX 10.1 includes some non-trivial performance enhancements. NVIDIA has been holding back the market by not being able to support 10.1. ATI have DX11 hardware already, they showed it off at Computex a couple of weeks ago.
NVIDIA aren't the same as the good old days when they had awesome chipsets like NForce2, the best graphics cards, etc. However they do push onwards with GPU computer (CUDA) and PhysX, but OpenCL will overtake the former, and the latter won't catch on unless it is cross-GPU.
32x 2mm^2 isn't trivial when your competitor has an equivalent performance part in under 300mm^2 and you're 600mm^2 *. Admittedly Intel has the fabbing capabilities to just deal with such an issue.
* Larrabee is rumoured to be 600mm^2 however, I presume that's 45nm, and maybe Intel are waiting for 32nm. A 45nm NVIDIA GT2xx chip would be around 300mm^2, even though it is currently made on 55nm and is quite hefty.
My point though is that on 32nm/22nm Intel's Larrabee architecture will make more sense in terms of general purpose capabilities, and Larrabee 2 or 3 will be good. Larrabee 1 is just to get things out there. Btw, there a rumour that L3 won't be x86 compatible - maybe they're moving to a functionally-equivalent RISC core!
My Radeon 9250 is at least 5 years old and it's 100% supported, and getting new features even in the latest drivers.
I guess that's the price you pay for choosing to run Windows.
Totally agree. Nvidia's software team blows away ATI's on a number of levels, including ambition. The probable reason for this: AMD is broke! They probably canned the team or outsourced it to Russia. Sounds like the MBA thing to do if you're a "hardware company." But hey some customers are always going to be smart enough to see the value in it, and we're good ones to have too.
From what I've heard, the decision for nvidia to give up on AMD support was really AMD's decision. AMD no longer provides and technical support for nvidia to design new chipset, and on sales, they are playing the same trick that intel does (e.g., the "bundled" package cost less making any nvidia chipset at a cost disadvantage, and they get volume discount credits for buying AMD GPUs and CPUs, so they'd get 1/2 the volume discounts).
Of course AMD can get away with this because they aren't making any money.
Also from the back-channel, I've also heard that internally, AMD directors and VPs are under great pressure to make the ATI purchase "worth-it". So if that means highly promoting the sales of AMD chipsets over nvidia chipset, well, that's just business. I guess I can't really blame them too much, $5B is a lot of money to justify and if you are sending some chipset sales over to another company, it doesn't really make you look good to your bosses (or stockholders)...
Larrabee is being built by a bunch of engineers that used to work at 3DLabs. They know what they're doing.
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
The X1200 series was launched in 2005. Just because you bought a 1969 Chevy from a dealer and they warrant it, do you get pissy that Chevy isn't still making parts for your car? It's an OpenGL 2.0 series card, DirectX 9.0c. They simply aren't doing any new development for it. It doesn't support Vista or Windows 7 features... why wouldn't they drop support? They're still giving you the drivers for the card which install and work fine. They even give you a package with just the driver, not including the ATI CCC that you despise. It's just good business sense to concentrate your developer energy on cards that are supported and have a more advanced architecture, all the HD 2xxx and later cards are OpenGL 3.0/DirectX 10+ and so on.
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
A bit OT, but I'm curious as to why the best deal for half decent motherboards around here seem to be NVidia chipsets and onboard graphics, and AMD processors... Should AMD/ATI be cranking out chipsets that allow board makers to do better/faster/cheaper boards with combos from the same manufacturer?? Just seems odd. All the PC's in my house (one Linux, one Hackintosh, a couple of Windows ones for the kids, are all NVidia/AMD setups, bought over the past few years.)
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
Not liking NVIDIA's stupidity lately with the mobile chipsets and hemming/hawing/lying, but they STILL have better binary drivers than ATI.
Here's a question for ATI fans: why can't I drive 2 separate monitors with different resolutions in whatever ATI's xinerama equivalent is? TwinView can handle that. Last time I tried with the ubuntu binary driver install, it put pillarboxes on my 1920x1080 screen to match res with the 1600x1200 screen, and that's just wee-t0dd-ed. The windows 7 catalyst driver seemed to have no problem with that configuration.
The opensource driver for ATI also seems to handle it OK, but I get ridiculous pointer tearing all the time.
(been NVIDIA for like 10 years until this last card, a Sapphire 4870 1GB.. Maybe when Hackintosh Snow Leopard comes out I can put it on my box..)
Um... don't know where you're getting your info, but my X1200 is in a laptop "designed for" Vista Home Premium (and that means Aero and DX10 I believe) - I promptly installed XP and ordered it with a blank hard drive. It now runs Windows 7 but ATI's fail comes in its lack of stable drivers; this thing has seen more crashes than a racetrack, and it's not Win7's fault.
Also, it was only being developed in late 2006, have a look-see. See where it says that it's "to be named X1200"? How could something be expected to get a name that already existed at that time? Probably launched later in 2007.
Finally, no, this laptop was manufactured in 2008. It wasn't the dealer that warranted it either - it's the manufacturer that I still have a valid warranty with. So, yeah.
>>How many people seriously drop the coin to do this?
My motherboard has SLI support (I bought it in December 2004, on the off chance the numbers would make sense in the future.) But when it came time to replace my 6800, it make more sense to buy a 7900 (which was like 10x faster) rather than a second 6800, which probably would have entailed needing a PSU upgrade as well.
When it came time to replace my 7900, it made more sense to get an 8800 than a second 7900. When it came time to replace the 8800, it made more sense to get a 200-series.
At some point, I guess, I'll need to get a new motherboard (though I can run all games just fine, with my CPU upgraded about 2 years back to a 4800+ X2), but since I can run all games at a decent FPU, why bother?
But when I do, I might get SLI support on it anyway. Future proofing.
Not necessarily.
Not sure about NVidia's card's, but right now two of AMD's 4850s are cheaper than and just as fast as a single 4890. It's the best deal around the $220 price point.
Source: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/radeon-geforce-price,2323-4.html
Member of the 7 Digit UID Club
There's no legitimate reason for nVidia to continue to make chipsets, and that's why they're exiting the market. SLI only requires nVidia chipsets due to driver and BIOS lockouts, the Intel X58 chipset proves that Crossfire and SLI can co-exist on a platform without any nVidia hardware whatsoever. In the integrated market both AMD and Intel have compelling onboard graphics that can scale well with the addition of one or two GPUs.
Now that AMD and Intel have competitive chipset offerings and nVidia doesn't need the chipset business to keep propping up GPU sales via SLI, there's no reason for them to keep fighting for a piece of a not very profitable market. If they exit the desktop/laptop/netbook chipset market with the current generation and refocus on GPU and embedded development, that improves their financial outlook.
It seems like nVidia is in a very precarious position right now, their GTX200-series GPUs are expensive and power-hungry compared to their AMD competitors, and it looks like AMD is going to execute a die-shrink to 40nm and an architecture change to DirectX11 with their new Evergreen GPUs approximately 6-9 months before nVidia makes a similar transition. This means that for about half a year, AMD is going to have significantly faster, more energy efficient GPUs that cost a fraction of what the comparable nVidia GPUs do to manufacture. nVidia needs to not run out of money before they manage to get their GPU out and capitalize on all their R&D investments.
Well considering laptop warranty and drivers are provided by your laptop manufacturer and not ati maybe you should be calling them?
Desktop is where its at for graphics cards - laptop ones still suck..
Larrabee is being built by a bunch of engineers that used to work at 3DLabs [wikipedia.org]. They know what they're doing.
But not necessarily how. Especially in the zoo that is good driver support for PC gaming. If Larrabee isn't good for gaming, it takes a few remote niches and that's it.
3DLabs... The old Permedia and friends boasted advanced features but sucked in practice, so 3DLabs exited the PC gaming business just before it exploded. Then they bought Intergraph and committed to a set number of refreshes for the Wildcat series, which was wildly successful. Then they returned to their own planned designs (VP and Realizm) and promptly lost their marketshare to Nvidia's Quadros and later also ATI's "FireGL" Radeons. So they got bought by Creative of all companies and that of course was the end. (Meanwhile on the software side they contributed heavily to the fiasco that was the OpenGL 2.0/3.0 project.) "They know what they are doing" has difficulty emerging here.
BTW, Wikipedia is great but it's full of errors. The original FireGL cards used IBM's geometry and rasterizer chips. (Another sad story there... It was an innovative German company, doing well, beating Wildcats in some apps, but then the completely clueless Diamond bought them. ATI bought the ruins for the still prestigious name and the considerable driver tuning expertise, but nixed the hardware engineering.)
I get my info straight from the horse's mouth, the AMD developers and from wikipedia.
I can't believe you fell for the advertising. The RS690 is a DirectX 9.0c part. It has 3D working with the current open source drivers, which none of the new generation chips do due to the architecture change needed for non-software DX10 support. I have an X1250 (also an RS690) in my desktop... I really do know what I'm talking about. The X1200 is just the very last chip in the previous design, it is not DX10 compliant, and it was dropped from the driver because they're just not making any more improvements to that codebase. What is out there now is as good as it gets.
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
Pasta is as pasta does:
"Release date(s): February 2007"
Which, by your own link, pretty much directly shoots down your entire previous statement ("The X1200 series was launched in 2005..."), and all the garble that follows it. Also, the issue isn't that it's only DX9, but rather that ATI's drivers are unstable as hell and that, as you said yourself, they have no plans to improve their shoddy work. Isn't that just great?
In fact, the entire point of this whole off-shoot is that ATI has poor drivers. All you've done is confirm that: ATI puts out poorly written drivers, gives them only to OEMs (which typically just sit on them and never release the updates to the users), then when the chipset becomes "obsolete" (less than 6 months after OEMs stopped putting them in new computers), they stop fixing the bugs in their unfinished product. Absolutely excellent.
If nVidia became the only remaining GPU manufacturer due to ATI/AMD's collapse, I couldn't possibly be happier.
I have 2x285 in sli.
Sure, i could of just bought 1, but I didn't. I bought a 1920x1200 lcd monitor.
I like playing with everything maxed out, (including aa) with 60 fps.
only a couple of games dips below 60 fps, like crysis and NFS Undercover.
Could of I gone with a smaller lcd and one card and still have a great gaming experience?
Yep, I could of. but i didn't.
so you that don't do sli, or get sli, or don't game, or are just stupid, understand this:
Don't hate because you don't have sli, can't afford sli, don't game, or just don't understand what i'm saying.
Oh, just so ya know, 1 card I get about 23fps per sec in crysis, with it dropping into the teens a bit. I get about 43ish average with 2 cards. Not quite double the performance, but close.
Seriously, i've seen more whining and misinformation about sli from peeps that don't have it.
Lots of smart gamers are buying the cheaper cards for sli and getting very acceptable performance for gaming.
Not to mention that thru cuda you have access to some nice processing power for various apps. Alot of people buy cards to sli for folding farms.
Sli is not BS tech, it's decent technology that does what it claims.
Of course, my experience has been great with my setup, but it is like a heater. Dual cards hitting 150+F each, cpu gets up to 125F. I do have a better case I have to move it to, since summer is starting.
Be seeing you...
Could you explain about the "drivers still suck" part?
I bought a radeon 4850 and it auto-scales the fan to keep the card cool, and it runs my games faster than the 8800GT I had before it.
The Nvidia 8800GT I got had the fan speed locked at 30% and required 3rd-party software just to prevent the card blowing itself up through overheating. On top of that, it's "nTune" software caused my comp to enter an infinite-reboot loop that even Safe Mode didn't get around. Had to reinstall the OS before I figured out what had caused it.
From everything I've seen Nvidia is the one with some severe software and driver problems.
Oh, and ATI lets you download the driver without the Catalyst Control Center, afaik. I gave up on boycotting the .NET framework a long time ago so I just get the CCC too these days, but YMMV.
I don't think there's any debate that SLI with two top-of-the-line cards is the best performance available. But in any other scenario (ie: low or mid-range) SLI is never an cost-effective solution. Except in some contrived cases like "someone gave me 2 GPUs for free".
AMD/ATI isn't even competing in single-GPU (or CPU) high-end chipsets anymore, so you're already better off spending your money on Intel/Nvidia if you're a high-end consumer. Much less the ultra-high-end where dropping $800 on dual GPUs is considered a sane option to play videogames.
With all that considered, AMD spending resources on SLI is kinda pointless, isn't it?
That doesn't mean SLI is stupid, it's just not that market AMD is targeting with their products.
Laptops, man, laptops. Even ATI's desktop graphics are kinda suck, but at least they can be worked around and you can download new drivers from ATI's site. Laptop chipsets, you can't get anything from ATI for. The "drivers still suck" part? Crashes, instability, and poor planning. nVidia's control panel doesn't require .NET, and neither should ATI's. ATI's control panel intrusively adds itself to all context menus, takes forever to load, and is a pain in the rear to use (I tried showing my Business teacher how to use it to turn on the projector on her new class computer, and I think she blew a fuse).
.NET thing is merely an issue with execution. Their setup program is botched. It detects that you don't have .NET Framework installed (as is typical when setting up a new computer), but instead of offering you the option to install it later due to that error, it plows through the installation anyway, and leaves you with a totally screwed up installation that takes hours to untangle and correct, even after installing .NET Framework - it then gives you cryptic error messages on each startup about a missing assembly (something like MOM.Implementation) until you uninstall the whole driver, delete the ATI folder, then reinstall the drivers and control panel. All because it decided to install despite the error. Yeah!
My current issue with ATI is unstable default drivers provided with Windows 7 for my X1200 integrated GPU. ATI denies the existence of both Windows 7 and this GPU, even though the laptop is only about 6 months old. Can't go into hibernate because it always crashes coming out, and about 1 in 10 times I resume from standby, the display doesn't come up and causes a BSOD about 20 seconds later. Win7 64-bit is just an unusable nightmare for many of the same issues, only greatly magnified. I've even had it crash while Windows was running - and I don't even do any gaming on here!
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nVidia, for me, just works. I don't do a lot of high end graphics, I just want a card that works well, and nVidia has always given me that. I've had an opportunity to play with an X260 card, and I quickly found out about that poor thermal management problem. It would stick at 30% until it's about to melt metal, then finally kick the fan up higher. They seem to have fixed that issue in later revisions of the card. The software doesn't control the fan speed; the card's BIOS actually controls that. There are mod tools to download the BIOS, modify the parameters, then reflash it, to keep it cooler. But yeah, that's not a great solution, and they should have done better. But at least they don't make huge mistakes all across the board like ATI seems to do!