Opinion: NVIDIA are quaking in their big green boots, and here's why.
NVIDIA are the biggest and most popular choice in gaming hardware on the market according to the Steam Hardware Survey, driven by their admittedly excellent 8800GT that was incredibly affordable but still had some grunt behind it.
When they first released their DirectX 10 hardware almost two years ago now, they touted it as the next age of computing and urged absolutely everyone to upgrade to them. Of course this was a given; they were first to market with their DX10 parts, and happened to have the best performance to boot.
But recent times have changed the game significantly for NVIDIA - no longer are they riding the first wave of new technology, and are actually lagging behind ATI with next-gen parts. This normally wouldn't be quite newsworthy enough by itself, since we either have one or the other with parts first, but it's how NVIDIA is behaving that speaks volumes more about their tech than any news we've had so far ever could.
Instead of bragging about their upcoming DX11 parts NVIDIA has thrown their press release team into full-blown defence mode, spreading word far and wide in a precautionary (and some would say petty) way to attempt to ward enthusiasts off ATI's DX11 tech.
This isn't always transparently obvious, but with yesterday's leaked news that NVIDIA's GT300 would be significantly faster than ATI's RV870 core it was pretty clearly aimed at stopping those early adopters from ever thinking about going red.
They've repeated a similar performance today that TechPowerUp covered - with NVIDIA's VP of investor relations saying the following:
DirectX 11 by itself is not going be the defining reason to buy a new GPU. It will be one of the reasons. This is why Microsoft is in work with the industry to allow more freedom and more creativity in how you build content, which is always good, and the new features in DirectX 11 are going to allow people to do that. But that no longer is the only reason, we believe, consumers would want to invest in a GPU.
Completely changing their tack from the DX10 launch (where they were first to release), they're now instead attempting to take as much of the focus and excitement about the new parts away. What it boils down to is simple childish behaviour clearly aimed at keeping ATI's DX11 launch sales as low as possible.
The VP went on to wax lyrical about how "going from 120fps to 125fps is not going to fundamentally change end-user experience", apparently ignoring that today's highend gaming systems can barely run Crysis at a decent clip and struggle with other games with the eye candy turned up. This is a fatuous and asinine thing to claim, but it's made even worse when he goes on to tout the benefits of NVIDIA-only stuff like PhysX, 3D Vision and CUDA.
Serious enthusiasts know that while PhysX is definitely cool, only very few games actually support it and even if they do, it's merely used for a few tattered rags and the occasional explosion. 3D Vision is awesome, but only if you have an impossible-to-source-in-Australia monitor and compatible games. CUDA is handy at times, but it's an NVIDIA-only technology that will eventually be replaced by the hardware nonspecific OpenCL.
What this all boils down to is that NVIDIA simply isn't ready to launch their DX11 technology, something backed up by rumours of their less than 2% functioning yields, and definitely shown through their behaviour. It's pretty sad to see a company as big as this behaving in this way, especially when ATI didn't when the situation was reversed some years ago.
Whether or not this will affect your purchasing decision is up to you, and if indeed NVIDIA can pull a new architecture from nowhere and take the performance crown at an affordable price then perhaps all they've been saying will be justified - but then again, it's not every day that pigs will fly.
Issue: 107 | December, 2009