Who gives a stuff about ATI and Nvidia's pipelines?
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WHILE THE RUMOUR and speculation about Nvidia and ATI's next gen graphics card technology is intense, we need to ask ourselves how many of us really care about it?
Some people will be interested in the new technology. Sure, some of us will be happy to brag about our latest .l33t. 3DMark scores to our friends, and some of us will just play the games at a slightly higher resolution, and in six months time be miffed again over the relatively poor performance compared to the next next generation card.
Who cares what the technologies these companies use? I am amazed at the number of people on public forums who debate the ins and outs and corporate strategy of these companies, and make accusations these companies have missed out a generation of GPU/VPU to make sure they beat their competitor.
Some people feel so emotionally attached to these companies they seem to defend everything they do. We have fan boys on certain forums, some screaming ATI, and some Nvidia like rabid soccer fans. I don't always understand the nature of these people, but bashing publications who write it the way they see it? Come on guys, play fair.
Remember Nvidia and ATI are both commercial organisations and have the full intent of making as much money selling graphics processors as possible. Each wants to be on top.
Don't get me wrong, this stuff gives me a real kick. But when it comes down to it I have to say the final benchmarks are all that matters, and being able to buy the damn cards before people start talking about the next one.
ATI and Nvidia are both large companies. They both make a lot of money each year, and to most users' surprise they are not stupid. Sure, Nvidia has had its ass kicked with the 9700 and 9800 series of cards and ATI has done well. I doubt we will see either going out of business anytime soon.
A certain amount of spin and speculation always surrounds these graphics products and both try to get the upper hand by discussions with press and try to foil and spoil the plans of competitors. But most publications manage to avoid the spin and try and dig the real truth.
I personally don't have a nanoscale x-ray system in my lab to be able to find out exactly how many pipelines and what the exact architecture of the graphics core is.
All the time I hear from people who feel so strongly about these companies that they accuse me of biased in favour of one, and biased against the other.
I am already eagerly awaiting the hate mail which will without doubt fill my inbox.
The two most exciting graphics products to launch this year are certainly the R420 and the NV40. Without doubt, in the next six months, we will see some speed bumps on the cards, and some manufacturers attempting to boost their sales by bolting watercoolers and fancy LED fans to the cards. But at the end of the day, when the weary cows trudge home and dust clouds the sky, all I want is raw speed. When I am playing UT2004 and fragging at a crazily high resolution I don't sit there and think: "Wow these pipelines really give it some!"
I personally will be taking a week off work to play Doom III, Half Life 2, and Stalker when they finally are released. I don't often have time to play games, but these three are worth making time for.
Technology is interesting, but sometimes I find myself trying to justify why someone has released a new speed bump on a CPU I love revolutionary changes and I think both companies have these in the "pipeline". ยต
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=14956
