Remember when G80 was spec'ed

[Nandro]

Wasnt NV supposed to go against the grain and use regular vertex and pixel shaders and in some ratio MS considered that fine, then wham! unified shaders. Goes to show you how they always have a backup. This is what I expected sooner from AMD, a guess what....uhhh we do have a quad core chip ready to ship and it rips everything to shreads. Just like we all know NV has the 8900 ready to go as soon as the R600 comes out. You dont think they would just release a produck knowing ATI would best it right away do you? That 8900GTX Dual GPU card is ready and waiting, with scores that will need 2 R600's to be in the same ball park, not to mention quad 8900's with of course a special NV available powersupply substation delivered outside your home.

 

[Burninate]

I would venture to say that ATI also has the next card hidden well up their sleeve to counter soon after the 8900GTX or GX2 comes out. Thats just the way it is. But, I like having so many options, even though I have never owned an ATI card outside of a pre-built system or onboard graphics. AMD is still on track to acquire ATI right? I hope they do some great things together. I may even have to jump the fence to ATI if AMD has some great things to do with them. I'm looking forward to some great dual-core and quad core GPUs on the horizon with AMD chips .

 

[Nandro]

I think ATI is willing at this point to be close enough to make it a decision, not be a clear winner as their future is going to be very different from NV's, and ATI is going to start their GPU's talking direct to the CPU with HT that will be a boon to physics and with quad cores it will even offload some video as well if the cpu is idle. Their solution may be a bit more off, but NV better cuddle up to intel or get to making some CPU's themselves which rumor has it they are doing. NV and Intel together would be bad for us, but ATI's solutions with AMD being one company may be unstopable otherwise long term.

 

[Deadman93723]

I think ATI is willing at this point to be close enough to make it a decision, not be a clear winner as their future is going to be very different from NV's, and ATI is going to start their GPU's talking direct to the CPU with HT that will be a boon to physics and with quad cores it will even offload some video as well if the cpu is idle. Their solution may be a bit more off, but NV better cuddle up to intel or get to making some CPU's themselves which rumor has it they are doing. NV and Intel together would be bad for us, but ATI's solutions with AMD being one company may be unstopable otherwise long term.

I read an article in CPU magazine a couple months ago that was talking about the ATI, AMD merger. It said that Intel wants no part of nVidia and visa versa. Intel actually has a department working on developing a almost totally CPU dependant video card, like they were back in the old days.

I don't see it happening, but I do think that now with the new Intel processors and the Quad core processors slated for next year, we might see nVidia and Intel working together to the point of having the GPU offload more of the graphics processing to the CPU, and the GPU taking over Physics and other less major tasks. I guess I am trying to say as far as graphics and cpu's, things may be reversed from what they are now.

I don't know, anything is possible, right?

 

[Nandro]

Well, the new NV boards have 3 pci-e x16 slots and NV is real chummy with Havok, I could see an aquisition happening there. They will probably do a 3rd card for physics as a possibility as they have said they are going to make SLI configurable to be 1 card Video and 1 physics or 2 video depending on the game where the 3rd slot would be for 2 video and 1 physics. Probably right along the lines of what ATI/AMD is doing. What they need to do with Intel is get the pipeline from video/physics to the cpu in the realm of what AMD had with HT, we can see them preparing this by doing away with the master/slave card setup. A direct connection would allow much greater communication for physics gameplay. Problem is, if the field isnt somewhat level the game makers will not develop for an AMD/ATI only solution. This leaves NV with AMD having to tell them how they plan to do it for their cards to work and thereby allowing Intel to figure out how to counter it on their end.