ART of War, nV vs. ATi your thoughts
- Thread starter Razor1
- Start date
jb said:
So you would say the 8500 was bad luck? ATi put that out and just waited to get eaten by the wolves? There is no place in business for luck. You tell me, MS was lucky to make Windows? Every single thing they did to build windows was not luck. It was calculated. IBM had nemerous oppertunities to crush MS when they were small time. They didn't MS knew IBM wouldn't, they knew IBM's focus was else were, and took advantage of it. This is the same situation with nV and ATi, the top end doesn't really matter much in overall scheme of things. its been noted time and time again, ATi has a slight lead performance wise and they still can't get market penetration. That Steam survay has very much relavence to this, you can say those gamers don't buy the best hardware, guess what not a whole lot of average consumers by the latest and greatest, thats why there are cycles. nV's focus is compeletely different from ATi, they want market share and money. ATi wants money and performance leadership. Money and markeshare goes hand in hand, the other doesn't.
nV knew what the fx was going to do to them, there was no bad luck for sending it out. What if the Fx was a great product, and it came out late. It would have put the r300 down anyways even with the delay.
If you want to say its bad luck, its not the delay that hurt ATi, its the subpar reveiws that hurt the r520, which are still effecting them and that is not luck, ATi could have avoided this by waiting another month or two to get the r580 out.
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Well the 8500 was the first product where they managed to get decent drivers out within a few months of the product's launch.Razor1 said:
if it would have had MSAA and had decent drivers out when they released and not a few months down the rode things may have been diffrent.
Would you say the radeon1 led a better life?
The radeon 8500 was easily was better executed but still not good enough, but better.
btw what was the exact problem with MSAA on the R200 and cards based off it?
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Mintmaster
Veteran
See what above? I just see general statements with no arguments or evidence.jb said:
ATI lost out on the high-end market and that's it. I doubt the 7800GT sales would have been any different because NVidia has priced that part quite aggressively (cheaper process, one quad disabled for high yeilds). Moreover, the X1800XL can't really outrun it anyway most of the time. Finally, the games back then were less complex and less favourable to ATI's X1K series. No COD2, no FEAR, etc.
In the grand scheme of things, it was indeed only a bit of luck. The biggest revenue is in the midrange and value, and that battle is just beginning. RV530 and RV515 were not delayed as much as R520 (it was originally going to launch later), so the impact of the delay was not much in this market, and ATI will lose big here (or NVidia will gain, depending on their pricing strategy).
It was ATI who took a risk in choosing 90nm, not NVidia being lucky. And ATI took that risk because it's not the end of the world if your low volume high end part is a bit delayed. NVidia did okay in the FX days because it had momentum from the GeForce1/2/3/4 days and the "DX9" FX5200 was not much slower than the 9200. Right now ATI has no such momentum, a heavy deficit in the midrange, and a bigger die in the low end. Only the first of the three can be blamed on luck, and even there a lot of the momentum was from the previous gen anyway.
The only thing saving ATI from losses is NVidia's likely choice of higher margins instead of undercutting ATI in price.
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I've never been to a comp usa because there aren't any around me but I have been to multiple best buys and a circuit city and none of them even carried the 7900 or the X1900. Most people get low and to a lesser extent mid range cards from retail outlets, not high end. Many more people are also starting to order online, where the prices are updated faster and currently even.XMAN26 said:
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trinibwoy said:Well the moral of that story is that the general outside was pretty dumb
My point was that in a situation like ATi faced, the source of the problem is not the only factor (let's even assume that ATi had no way of anticipating such a problem). Once the symptoms surface, whose responsiblity is it to analyze the situation and identify the culprit? All I'm saying is how do we know that ATi needed all that time to identify the problem, maybe they could've done it faster, in which case they are also to blame.
I tend to agree with that. Foul-ups that get big enuf to get external attention are almost always not one cause, but several snowballing. I look at the dates involved in trying to work the bugs out of R520 and I tend to think it probably didn't get as much and quality of resources on it as, say, Xenos bring-up. Which is not to say that the engineers who worked on that were incompetent. I don't mean that. I just mean I don't think it was the A team at that point. Maybe it wouldn't have made a difference even if it was the A team, but I do tend to believe in individual excellence in problem-solving.
Nvidia has had a few good successes
1) Nvidia's greatest success was creating SLI chipsets. Now tonnes of people will buy one or two Nvidia cards to go with their chipset.
2) Being first by a long shot to SM3.0.
3) First Multi-threaded drivers.
4) Best performing low end and mid range cards.
1) Nvidia's greatest success was creating SLI chipsets. Now tonnes of people will buy one or two Nvidia cards to go with their chipset.
2) Being first by a long shot to SM3.0.
3) First Multi-threaded drivers.
4) Best performing low end and mid range cards.
_xxx_ said:
Well that's the thing. I see this happen all the time. One developer spends all day trying to find a bug. He finally asks for help and another guy finds it in five minutes. I'm assuming there was more than one engineer at ATi (I hope!) searching for this R520 bug so it's not exactly analagous, but one experienced and skilled troubleshooter can make a world of difference.
We don't know what assumptions they made while researching this issue and those assumptions could have thrown them off quite a bit. Highly speculative of course, but problem solving is what I do all day, and I see people who are much better at it than others so that's my perspective.
Yes, but I assume they were looking for problems in their implementation more than underneath that. A terrible waste of time in every case, but that's my 2 cents.
In chip design, you'll use modules from a library and for the most part, you'll use auto-layouted basic blocks and it was probably one of those which had the bug. I hope some day someone will give us more detailed explanation on this less than lucky episode.
In chip design, you'll use modules from a library and for the most part, you'll use auto-layouted basic blocks and it was probably one of those which had the bug. I hope some day someone will give us more detailed explanation on this less than lucky episode.
Sometime, it was working well while being in the design stage, i.e., simulation, pre-test, etc. but it completedly fails on doing production or assemble it together! This is due to in designing anything, it always deals with making assumptions which mostly are linear or predictable. Anyway, in reality, it is not always that simple since some parameters those were ignored, overlook and unseen during design assumption made which can blow anything up at the end... that is why research sometime cannot be helpful. The problem will then get known, studied and solved after being catched.trinibwoy said:
Razor1
I give up. If you can not acknowlodge the simple fact that if your compiter drops the ball then it is a lucky break for you as it makes things EASIER for you. Its such a simple concept and I am suprised a smart guy like you can not see that
Mintmaster
I just see general statements with no arguments or evidence? There are tons of threads back last year where you can see what the delay did to ATI. Of corse they would still have some of their troubles today, but not nearly as componded. Just look at ATI fincials back then (there stock took quite a beating), what little market share in the high end they had they lost and its a snow ball effect as being late with the R520 pushing everything back including the mythical engineering man hours that were spent looking in the R520 issues vrs what they were planned to be doing in that time. And no I would not say NV did ok in the FX days. They went from market leader to makert looser. Granted they were able to turn it around with the NV40 but they lost a lot during that time....
I give up. If you can not acknowlodge the simple fact that if your compiter drops the ball then it is a lucky break for you as it makes things EASIER for you. Its such a simple concept and I am suprised a smart guy like you can not see that
Mintmaster
I just see general statements with no arguments or evidence? There are tons of threads back last year where you can see what the delay did to ATI. Of corse they would still have some of their troubles today, but not nearly as componded. Just look at ATI fincials back then (there stock took quite a beating), what little market share in the high end they had they lost and its a snow ball effect as being late with the R520 pushing everything back including the mythical engineering man hours that were spent looking in the R520 issues vrs what they were planned to be doing in that time. And no I would not say NV did ok in the FX days. They went from market leader to makert looser. Granted they were able to turn it around with the NV40 but they lost a lot during that time....
jb said:Razor1
I give up. If you can not acknowlodge the simple fact that if your compiter drops the ball then it is a lucky break for you as it makes things EASIER for you. Its such a simple concept and I am suprised a smart guy like you can not see that
Mintmaster
I just see general statements with no arguments or evidence? There are tons of threads back last year where you can see what the delay did to ATI. Of corse they would still have some of their troubles today, but not nearly as componded. Just look at ATI fincials back then (there stock took quite a beating), what little market share in the high end they had they lost and its a snow ball effect as being late with the R520 pushing everything back including the mythical engineering man hours that were spent looking in the R520 issues vrs what they were planned to be doing in that time. And no I would not say NV did ok in the FX days. They went from market leader to makert looser. Granted they were able to turn it around with the NV40 but they lost a lot during that time....
If the r520 came out and the g70 and r520 got the reviews both did, would that have changed the course of the r580 being released as it was? It wouldn't have thats the point. No matter how you cut it, the r520, rv560, r530, all would not have sold well to begin with, r520 might have done better then the other two. But thats not where the money is. But the other two were it really counts, weren't able to keep up with competitors parts. This is where the Valve survay comes in. Lossing Dell and HP OEM deals. I'm sure there were smaller OEM's that probably shifted too. Now there is a report from Xbit the rv570 which is to replace the rv560 is going to be sampled in May and probably not released till June. Thats very late, the 7900 gt prices are already dropping around that time if the rv570 is still going for $199 bucks its going to be too high to make good sales. ATi is reacting to nV's pressure, reaction is very bad, plans can shift in the battlefield but not for reaction to an opponents attack, but to divert the attack is a better way to go.
The r580 is on time remember that.
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No, R580 was scheduled for the fall refresh.
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