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40% market share is by current sales not what most gamers are using which Nvidia currently dominates. The reality is most gamers out there are using Nvidia 4:1 to Ati. So while to 40% is important to investors to us it's rather pointless. Even to investors it's still rather ugly because AMD still has no answer for Intel. Their server business that they worked so hard to earn is dead and they can only compete in thrift market with skinny margins. I think Nvidia need not panic as long as they can sort out their fab problems. They been in the lead almost uncontested for 20 months.

While I'm very interested in the 4870x2 I'm having a hard time justifying the purchase. The performance of these cards isn't all that impressive. By years end Intel could be wearing the crown by a large margin.

Über cards should have long life spans like my 8800 GTX in order to justify the price. Today's cards wont be top dogs for more than 6 months. This is good for the masses but makes you think twice before buying a high-end card. Just not sure which approach is better for innovation. What is clear to me is we are going to be taking baby steps for a while.

Why would you go with a GTX260? By the time it hits $300 the HD4850s will be selling for $150 and two of them would blow away even a GTX280. Newegg already has 4850s selling for $179 after rebate.

If the HD4850 goes to $150 the HD4870 would likely drop to $250 which would beat out a GTX260 and even a GTX280 in some benches like GRID.

I'm willing to take those off your hands...or just one, whatever.


As for nVidia, they'll most likely be fine after a little while. I think they'll be able to recover the shock of AMD kicking their asses all over the place after the first couple of months. I just hope the 45nm Phenoms are as much of a surprise and step up as the HD48xx series is.

If you look at Steam's user statistics, you'll see that about 50% of their users use ATI cards. These are statistics over many thousands of gamers (albeit skewed toward FPS players - but those are typically the more demanding titles anyway). Granted, the ATI cards in use are mostly quite old, but they dominate the DX9 landscape, which is still prominent for the average user base. There is no doubt that Nvidia has dominated the DX10 cards, though.

Incidentally, when thinking about Nvidia's profit margins, one should keep in mind that the GTX260 and GTX280 are identical chips with a small bus and memory disadvantage (disabled portions of the chip and less memory) to the GTX260. It probably costs virtually the same for Nvidia to produce each of these cards, so however low the price of the GTX260 can go, the GTX280 can go nearly as low. This of course slashes the profit margins on their highest profit-margin cards and will hurt overall profits considerably, however small a market share such high-end cards actually have.

22% drop in stocks in a single day dont agree with reality. Neither do the consumers.

I think the stock drop market probably has more to do with the $200 million lost due to laptop graphic cards and less the high enthusiast end of the market. The consumers you are referring to (that is, the ultra-high end segment of the market) are not representative of all of Nvidia's customers. Not that I mean to defend Nvidia, as I think they are going to lose this round badly due to their own fault, but it isn't the niche market GTX 280 that caused a 22% stock market drop.

This survey began November 13th, 2007. Last updated: 3:53am PST (11:53 GMT), July 08 2008

ATI Drivers (537821 of 1777015 Total Users (30.27% of Total) )

NVIDIA Drivers (1102450 of 1777015 Total Users (62.04% of Total) )

http://steampowered.com/status/survey.html

I stand corrected. I should have checked that again before quoting what my brain remembered from a month ago (which was horribly wrong!). I'm impressed at the number of users on AMD CPUs, however - over 40%.

Ummm... there are 3 people out there with a computers sporting 127 cores (and another with 30)... W T F ?!

I'd have to question just how valid this survey is (though I don't doubt it can recognize the driver/GPU)

What has AMD realeased as far as processors, It looks to me they have not really token any action lately as far as getting new products out.

I think that is because they are more focused on getting their C.E.O. out than new products.

personally do not think Nvidia will have a problem, all they really need to do is shrink the die size, if they shrunk the die size i would have no doubt that they could easily beat the 4870, and sell it for cheaper.

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Really, the single-most-powerful GPU doesn't mean all that much, since it's just something that's a technicality. The overall PERFORMANCE CROWN is based upon cards, not GPUs, since it's a VIDEO CARD that people use. THAT is the real world, rather than stuff on paper.

No one but the geeks that may not even have the card in question really care about the single most-powerful GPU... We saw this when the trend was reversed, and the R580+ in the X1950XTX was a leg up over any GPU nVidia could throw at it, but people remember nVidia as holding the crown because of the 7950GX2, even though that was plagued by a slew of problems that didn't even bother the 3870X2 and 9800GX2. (among the least of which is that almost no one managed to get "quad SLi" working with it)

Well, as far as can be seen, the bulk of major games seem to scale well with multi-GPU setups, PARTICULARLY at higher resolutions.

As the Tom's article for the 4870 hinted, it's quite possible that due to the shrinking die for the remade GT200, nVidia may have to abandon the 512-bit memory interface, which could result in performance actually hurting; this is what we saw in the move from G80 to G92, where it really wasn't until we saw the 9800GTX start to actually compare to the 8800ultra, due to the step-down from a 384-bit to a 256-bit memory interface.

In other words, the revision of the GT200 may actually wind up being weaker, but will mainly come around because it'll give nVidia a prayer to remain profitable selling the cards.