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Nvidia's $200 GTX 460 Ups Bargain Performance
NervousNerd writes "Nvidia's first DirectX 11 offerings ran hot and offered a negligible performance difference compared to ATI's Radeon HD 5800 series for the cost. Also missing was the $200 mid-range part. But that stopped when Nvidia released the GTX 460 based on a modified version of their infamous Fermi architecture. The GTX 460 offers incredible performance for the price and soundly beats ATI's $200 offering, the HD 5830."
An announcement doesn't mean much without a release. Also, I'd guess that nVidia will be offering updates fairly soon as well. Basically updates to cards are generally either because there's a new architecture, which isn't happening for either company in this case since that take a much longer time, or a new lithography process. I'm not sure what the companies are looking at next, but Global Foundries has a 32nm node online now. They could be looking at using that.
You have to remember that development continues all the time, and even as a card is being released the next gen, and the gen after that and probably even more than that are being worked on. Takes a long time to bring something from idea to released silicon. So this isn't a race where a company get ahead and the other one can never catch up. Were that the case, well then ATi would be long behind now, because the 8800 series was completely unexpected, and had performance ATi could not match. They had to delay their launch a cycle and still their hardware wasn't a match for it. However, as time went on, they caught up and now have exceeded nVidia in many regards (certainly in being first with DX11).
The only way this would be "too late" in any respect is if ATi already had a better card out. Remember that people do not wait forever to buy parts. You can't say "But something better will come in a few months!" because something better will ALWAYS come in a few months. Do that and you'll never have a system. If someone buys a computer now, and wants to spend $200ish on a video card, the 460 is a realistic choice.
Also note that despite the 480s being hot, and late to the game, it isn't a failure. They moved plenty of units. Not near as many as they'd like I'm sure, but people bought those things left and right.