» Sun Dec 20, 2009 3:51 am
nVIDIA is facing a potential firing squad in its future in the form of integrated higher quality graphics within CPUs from AMD this winter, and IBM some time in the future, which have the potential of cutting the most profitable part of the add-on graphics card performance range out of their future sales. AMD has integrated an HD 6850 into its Fusion processor, the mobile versions of which should be appearing in laptops in mid-November. There is also another Fusion, with the equivalent of an HD 5570, roughly, integrated. That will leave the highest high end still open for upgrades, but that isn't a profitable price point.
The desktop Fusions are due out in January, so exactly what kind of pricing will be involved isn't yet a matter of public record. The promise is that it will be such a small bump that eventually all of AMD's processors will be of similar nature.
The threat has nVIDIA concentrating on the massively parallel CPU market, which is why their high end cards have such huge chips on them, and why their GPU drivers are so difficult to work with (and why the high end cards run so hot, and svck down such large amounts of electrical power). Many older products of theirs keep on being recycled in order to fill in the lower range gaps in their product range, because developing low end and Medium range cards based on the latest Fermis and their forebears has been so difficult for them.
It is the forebears and the current generation that you have ignored so far. The GT200 started with the high end two and a half years ago or so, and ended up taking about six months to fill out the mid range and low end. The GTX400, or "Fermi" was released last winter, and took until quite recently to fill out its mid-range and borderline members.
If the parentage of the 320s is, indeed, from the 9600 design, that was one of only two original 9n00 cards. All the rest were 8n00 cards with better firmware for cooling fan operation, and a transfer to a thinner, more efficient die wafer. But that was also roughly three years ago, and instead of a card sitting at the top of the Mainline ranks, close to the borderline of the High End, where the 9600 GT was, being a modified 8800 design, I believe that a 320 sits down at the bottom of Medium now, with AMD's HD 55nn cards. That doesn't provide much cushion for any minor increases in game demand, such as the next Crytek game will include.
If you understood the previous naming scheme, when the hundreds digit was the key number, for nVIDIA we have "20" = 400, "30" = 500, "40" = 600, "50" = 670, "60" = 700, "70" = 770, "80" = 800, and the leading digit of three is the generation marker for the 200s and the 400s (where the 300s are some kind of who knows what generation). Generation markers never represented performance so much as they do feature sets.
P. S. Because Intel has failed so many times to produce anything game-capable in the way of graphics, nVIDIA has breathing room, and AMD all by itself isn't going to steal the Low and Mid-ranges away any time soon. Intel's Sandy Bridge CPUs, due this coming spring, will also feature two new video function designs, integrated in the processor cores. The lesser one is not going to be any better than what is now offered by Allendale, which amounts to a mere "bump" of added performance over the IGPs of the prior Intel video generation, which could more or less match the nVIDIA 9100 onboard chip, but not the AMD Radeon HD 4200 onboard chip.
The second Sandy Bridge video design is supposed to finally overtop the AMD HD 4200, but not by any great margin, and there are already new AMD onboard designs in new chipsets about ready, using the HD 5n00 generation feature set, and performance far ahead of where the second Sandy Bridge IGP is expected to be.
Gorath
