NVIDIA and ATI need to chill

Large displays for large GPUs.

We have witnessed and, to certain extent stoked, the endless NVIDIA-ATI graphics war.

Currently battles are going on, especially at the high end, where Nvidia's GTX280 has to fight the 4870X2 alone until (if) the GTX290 comes out. And then the vendors' armies shift, lock stock and barrel, to the 40nm front in a few quarters.

Yeah, GTX300 series vs HD5870 series... it will be yet another interesting round. And then both will have to fight Intel's Larrabee.

But, hold on - there's also something called global financial meltdown going on right now. We can argue till kingdom come whether this event was purely accidental or, more likely, an engineered event where a select few behind the curtains will make trillions, as normally happens in most other business ventures called 'wars', 'revolutions' or 'crises'.

The one indisputable fact is that this 'meltdown' will make it a lot harder to justify anyone buying, among other things, a high-end GPU just on the pretext of, say, higher Crysis frame rates.

Spending half a grand US$ - whether that US$ stays on or goes down - on either a GTX280 or HD4870X2 just makes little sense when the house and car could be at risk - irrespective of which hits higher FPS in anything.

So, the so-called 'developed markets' like US, EU and Australia, the prime consumers of this high-end stuff, may have to make do with integrated graphics for a while. It will be a case of "Son, it's better to stay away from the games for a while and do some school work on Linux OpenOffice instead".

So, what's a graphics chip flogger to do then? Simple - find a more convincing 'killer app' to get people to buy those high end - or for that matter, any - discrete GPUs.

One killer app is photo editing at near photo resolution, with real-time 2-D and 3-D effects of any kind right there on the fly. Unlike video manipulation where any 16:10 1920 x 1200 resolution monitor can cover the whole thing plus menu, dialogue box and button space, photos need a few more pixels. Since many cameras these days hit above 10 Megapixels even in the $US300 class, let's go to that direction.