Nvidia's Fermi might be a boat sorely missed

Analysis: Or, a chip too far.

The graphics card industry is an odd one, as counter to other parts of the computing hardware market individual products aren't always judged on their own merit. In fact for the most part, when weighing up which of the big two companies to pick from when choosing a GPU, most will go with the current market leader. However, the market leader isn't determined by which company makes the best card for your price point, but the one that produces the most powerful high-end card.

This creates a bit of a strange paradigm, as graphics card manufacturers have to push their top of the line performance products to be as fast as possible, while concentrating on the far more lucrative budget to mid-range cards. The vast majority of consumers can't, and won't fork out the several hundreds of dollars required for the absolute best card. This means that getting your mainstream GPU right while doing well at the top end is a strange balancing act that plays out with each new generational release.

Normally the new range launches from either camp take place around the same time, with a little bit of leap-frogging thrown in for good measure. However, with the current 'new' generation of GPUs, that isn't the case at all. ATI has a firm grasp on the market, beating out rival Nvidia to the release date by several months. Will Nvidia's long in-development Fermi hardware allow it to spring back and retake the market now dominated by ATI hardware, or is it going to be too little too late?

Performance numbers from the Green Goblin's camp have started to emerge, and without doubt Fermi appears to be rather quick on its feet, pushing maybe 50 per cent faster than Nvidia's current big boy, the GTX 285. Pretty impressive, and even compared to ATI's top of the line single card it fares pretty well until it comes face to face with the current monster from the boys in red, the 5970, which seemingly will walk all over it. Of course these performance numbers are all conjecture for the moment, but as more start to be released, it's expected that the results will be similar to those already unveiled.

Speculation aside, what we do know is that ATI has a very strong hold on the market place currently. Not only does it have the top performing single GPU card available, but the top dual chip card too. Not to mention mid-range performance parts by the truckload, including the 57XX range and the recently released 56XX and 55XX cards. Since we've already established that having a powerful top end combined with a solid mid-range is the key to money making in the GPU world, ATI appears to be in the perfect position to gain significant market share. Combine this with a release date from Fermi that's still at least a month away and poor availability on the current Nvidia top end cards, and its no wonder ATI proudly announced at CES this year that it had already sold over 2 million of its 5 series GPUs.