Nvidia's Fermi might be a boat sorely missed

Martin Sawyer, sales manager at performance PC specialists Chillblast.com, has some harrowing sales figures for Nvidia. In the pre-Christmas rush the firm sold more than 20 ATi performance video cards for every GeForce, and with Nvidia stock now hard to come by the gulf between the two has only widened.

Despite all this, the green team might surprise us all and come out swinging with hardware that captures the market so well that those with new 5 series cards jump ship and go 3 series, and those waiting for the upgrade pay top dollar for the higher end cards; but it is unlikely. However Nvidia has made it clear that it'll be opening with the mid-range cards in an attempt to capture whatever is left of the soon-to-upgrade market, which could pay off. Though, if initial perceptions of the card aren't that it beats ATI's mid range, but are in-fact that the card "isn't as good as the top end", whether fair or not, it could mean that Nvidia will need to start thinking about Fermi v2 before long.

All this is nothing particularly new in the graphics game though, as the back and forth struggle between the big two has been ongoing since the early 2000s, which saw each company vying for position and desperately hoping that the other would drop the ball; as Nvidia seem to have done here. The earliest instance of the all important round object slipping through one of the player's grip was with Nvidia's ill fated 5 FX series which saw ATI walk all over it with the range of 9XXX cards; most favourite of all the 9800 pro.

Things evened out between the pair during the 6800/7800 vs X800/X1900 days, but ATI's popularity and performance crown took a nose dive when it came to facing off against Nvidia's monstrous 8800GTX card. It trounced the then redder than ever company for a whopping two years before it could counter that effectively.

Still, this sort of back and forth behaviour is what you and I as Joe consumer want. Competition is good, because it invokes product progression as well as price wars which mean cheaper products across the board. When Nvidia ruled the roost for a solid couple of years, prices didn't fluctuate that much as it had no need to sell itself to you on value; performance alone was enough. Hell, it took them over a year to release an affordable version of the GTX, the 8800GT.

From then on ATI clawed its way back slowly with the 3 series and eventually retook pole position for a while with the 4870s and 50s, leaving Nvidia playing catch up despite not being too far behind. We're now seeing something similar though a little more extreme, as Fermi has had its launch pushed back from November 2009 all the way to March, showing us the real effects of early market saturation leading to a dominant position in "next gen" trading. ATI clearly learned from their partnership with Microsoft when creating the 360 that getting your goods to market first pays off. The Xbox with its ATI powered graphics trounced the PS3 mostly by being available first. This allowed Microsoft to keep its hardware competitive price wise, completely undercutting the Nvidia powered PS3 at launch.

DirectX saw a resurgence as a viable selling point with the most recent ATI hardware, as it managed to coincide the unveiling of DX11 nicely with the release of its compatible hardware; this being compounded by the near release date of the supporting OS, Windows 7. Some enterprising Inq readers pointed out to me that Vista also supports DX11, but this doesn't take away from the fact that most of those moving to the new operating system will be doing so from Windows XP, meaning new PC builds bundled with a nicely compatible ATI DX11 capable GPU is going to sound much more attractive than one sporting an obsolete standard Nvidia card.

Time will of course tell how this quickly becoming current-gen battle turns out, but either way, Nvidia has to hope that Fermi provides a solid base to springboard to the next generation, as you know that ATI will already be more than hard at work developing its next Nvidia killer.