Yes, and that is exactly what happened with the last generation, including the R520s greater feature list over the G70. I fail to see how the current situation is any different.

Shrinking the G80 to 80nm will not give it that much headroom and it's almost a given the R650 will be 65nm giving it a much bigger advantage over the R600.

Are you being facetious? I can't tell. If not all you have to do is look at how long nvidia has held onto the $550+ GTX price and has not released any other cards since the launch of the 8800 besides a GTS with less ram. They love to milk prices and always have since the fall of 3dfx.

R520 was only 3 months late to my knowledge. It was actually faster across the board as well.
But current situation points to a 7month delay, with a part that only performs on par with the GTX. Not sure what kind of features it might have but from IQ perspective, both are feature rich in that department. Also GTX still has alot of headroom from the driver side of things so i dont see the R600 outperforming G80 later on (like the R520 vs G70), unless R600 is really strong on DX10 apps.

And how do you know that? (the bolded part above)

Unless you work for nVIDIA.. :lol:

R520 was nearly four months late and basically traded blows with the G70, it did have more features however, just like now. So it seems to me that the only difference is the R600 is around three or four months later, granted which does hurt.

It's been seven months since the launch of the 8800 GTX, at this point I would be surprised to see much of a performance boost from driver updates. Besides, nvidia's primary problem is stability within Vista, which is a priority for them above all else.

As far as 80nm not giving much headroom, let's call it a hunch.

It's possible they may be fudging "hard launch" a little with availability in OEM systems purchaseable by the consumer on launch day, but not available in retail as an add in card until 2-4 weeks later.

*shrug* All any of us has to go on is rumors. ATI guy says 10 products will hard launch. Internet rumors says at least 2 of the products are delayed.

Pick your poison with who you believe. Myself, I'll just wait and see.

Regards,
SB

Yes I was, sorry. I just find it amusing that you think Nvidia as a company is unique in its focus on money.

That's not how I remember it...

Oh no, I recognise nvidia is in no part unique in that respect, just more so than ATI (although maybe not so much now with AMD).

:smile:

Is that whey they like to rename some of their previous gen cards with the new gen naming scheme ?

I'm sorry, but i think statements like this are laughable. The 600 XT will be priced according to it's performance/features and how desperate AMD is to gain back market share/goodwill.

Who cares! :lol:

u could be right, but its fair to mention that besides 3d mark and that gpu dot test or whatever its called, there have been virtually no increases in performance in any games on windows xp since the earliest launch driver.

The difficult task for ATI was to create/make R600 - it takes a-lot of time, but R650 should be a-lot easier. So logically can be calculated that R600 might have short life before it will be replaced by R650.

You're entitled to your own opinion, however wrong it may be. :twisted:

The way I read into it is that AMD doesn't think it's a soft launch if they launch some of the products and the others appear a couple weeks later.


Actually, R600 was "technically" only delayed once and will be about 2 months late. Of course, this assumes you go by official delays. R520 had more than one unofficial delay that resulted in it being more than 3 months late (which may be how long it was officially late, I'm not really sure).

As for the 80nm question, it's only an optical shrink. It's not an entirely new process, so it's not going to give the same results as a full process shrink. There will be improvements, and nVidia will milk every last ounce of performance out of it as incredibly well as nVidia does, but it won't be nearly as much as can be potentially gained from the shrink to 65nm. I bolded one word for a reason.



EDIT: Oh, one more thing,

Dailytech on the AMD CC: "On a positive note, AMD reported $197 million USD in revenue from its graphics division in Q1 2007. This represented a 19 percent gain from Q4 2006."

So much for those assuming that ATI is losing money due to this delay. Revenue is actually UP since G80's release, in a slow time of year. Considering how late it is in the last-gen's product cycle, yields are surely good and I think it's safe to say that profits are up as well. I wonder if any of this revenue comes from pre-sales of R600. Frankly, I doubt it. Not that early.

I love how you paraphrased it :)

But hey, I wouldn't put it past them. Talk on all fronts indicates that the delay was due to drivers. They've been talking out of their asses from the moment they made that decision.

Unfortunately, Dailytech is missing a huge point: The Q4 results for graphics division only included sales from October 25 and on. I am not a rocket surgeon, but $197 million in 3 months is not really better than $166 in two... in fact :runaway:

One doesn't necessarily have to follow from the other: The additional price for DX10-only features is far from clear, but it will definitely bring down the efficiency/mm2 for DX9 applications.

To be honest, the current AMD rumors aren't very promising: they were at a huge disadvantage during previous generation, so they already had some catching up to do. Right now, it doesn't feel like that's going to happen. So once again they'll be at a disadvantage wrt pricing power. (That doesn't really matter for the consumer, but it won't make their bean counters happy.)

You can't dismiss the possibility that it will be indeed ATI's drivers that will put them ahead of 8800 GTX ;)

Remember the OpenGL 4xAA 30% performance increase for X1800 series?

Depends on how you define 'soon'.

Say ATI had planned R600 for January. In that case, the earliest possible upgrade would have to be planned for, say, October, following the standard refresh time lines.

If the delay of R600 hasn't delayed other projects, then October is still an option, I guess. But there's no way you can reasonably accelerate chip schedules, even if they need to fill that space. There are no corners to cut like you can with software.

It may be different if R600 was planned to be released much earlier than January...

You never know until you see the schedule and how far along they are. Suppose they allowed for three respins of R650 in the schedule, but it turns out they only needed two? That's a fair bit of wiggle room there that could easily take a couple of months off the schedule.

AMD is going to want to get that 65 nm XTX out as soon as possible to address that market segment they've conspicuously left empty above the XT pricing. If there's anything they can do to bring that product forward, they will, especially if they are waiting on Nvidia's response to R600.

IIRC, wasn't R600 originally in the frame for last October/November time?

Corporations which aren't in the business of making money will soon be out of the business. I don't call companies which are forced into price reductions and low margins charitable, I call them companies whose management failed. ATI is not offering its cards cheap because it doesn't care about making money, or because it's magnaminous, but because its execution has been managed worse than nVidia.

I mean, for the love of god, this is a publically traded company we're talking about, ATI, now AMD, whose stockholders, investors are demanding returns, whose employees' futures are dependant upon continued profits, where enormous numbers of people are affected when the company suffers lower margins. NVidia isn't anymore "in love" with margins or profits than any other Fortune 500 company. They just happen to have a management that knows how to connect desire with reality.

The idea that they're somehow more evil, greedy, or rapacious is absurd.

I understand you're just giving an example here, but just FYI: any chip leader who comes up with a 3-spin project plan will be sent back on sight by his manager. It's an accepted practice pretty much everywhere to take into account 1 full spin and 1 metal spin. You don't plan for more. And usually, you don't need more.

Yes, but all project plans (in all engineering disciplines) are made with optimistic best case schedules. It's a fundamental law of Nature! More than once, I've seen desperate managers promise bonuses to accelerate chip schedules. It doesn't work: there are almost no corners to cut. If they originally planned for October, there's no way they can reign it in by, say, 2 months.

Possible. But if their 65nm part is ready in July,why bring out a 80nm part? (And once again piss off its buyers, like with R520?)

Some people desire money more than others. Whether those people are shareholders or running the company is another matter. You are correct, most organizations exist to make money, however there are also grades of morality and greed, it's not simply black and white.

This is getting off topic though.

Ick. Noted. :/

So in your theory, ATI's margins have been lower not because they had higher internal costs due to various factors like lower yields/bigger chips, and inability to price their chips higher, but because ATI's management are less greedy and more moral, and therefore, they took actions inline with those values which lowered margins, such as---???

I mean, your comments might seem reasonable if nVidia's margins were high because they employed child labor/sweat shop labor, dumped wasted into local rivers, and basicallly did whatever they could to lower costs by doing things inefficiency. But nVidia's high margins in fact, seem to derive from efficiency and sales demand, and not inefficiency and aggressive anti-labor tactics. Let's face it, nVidia's margins, especially on the G70, stem from aggressive focus on optimizing the architecture to minimize production costs.


I mean, this isn't a case of your local cobbler shoe store vs asian Nike sweatshots.

This might be offtopic, but I don't think one can just let your original comments slide without some rebuttal.