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[WaltC]

Well, I don't know of course if how you now think the NV30 "turned out" is actually as is turned out, but I'm less concerned about warning "you" about delivering high expectations, than I am about sites like Anand.

(Stands on small soap-box)

In past articles Anand has made repeated allusions to NV30 specs and performance being greater than that of R300, with such proclamations as "Believe it or not, on Paper, NV30 is even faster than the R300".

What I said about this back then seems might come true again.

Until a company officially publishes specs, no respectable hardware site should be making ANY types of relative performance predictions...EVEN just on paper. There's a reason why specs are not officially publicized until relative close before shipping....because they are subject to change, sometimes drastically.

ESPECIALLY with respect to clock speed. I've mentioned several examples in the past where nVidia either definitely, or more than likely, missed internal clock speed targets: X-Box Chip (definite and very significant downclock) , TNT (definite, significant downclock) , GeForce1 (likey downclock, IMO). Based on rumors of specs, I'm fairly certain that nVidia was throwing around clock speeds in the 400+ Mhz range for NV30 this past summer, Giving Anand reason for his high anticipation of the part. (Which Anand will happily pass on to readers...)

And if they achieve that 400+ MHz...great. But the point is, it wouldn't surprise me in the least if they fall considerably short of that target, especially given the TSMC problems.

It would be interesting to see who Anand "blames" for his mispredictions if the NV30 is only "merely competitive or even worse" than the 9700. Will he blame himself for giving public info prematurely? Will he blame nVidia for not "delivering what he expected"? Will he just ignore it all together? In any case, perhaps he will learn something from it...again, assuming the NV30 does not meet the specs that Anand was lead to believe...

Agreed, but I think what really upset the apple cart was the R300 and the really solid products ATI has released with it, along with what have to be the best drivers I've ever seen for an ATI 3D product. I know that I certainly didn't anticipate it--I was thinking along the lines of ATI introducing something maybe a tad more powerful than the GF4 Ti4600. Certainly nothing like the 9700 Pro. And I definitely did not expect the kind of drivers I've been using with this 9700 Pro since September. I actually have to pinch myself to remember that this is a brand new architecture--it runs in my system like a stable old hand who's been around for at least a year and has lots of direct forebears... (Like the GeForce Ti4600 has so many direct ancestors.)

I think both the power and the stability of this product surprised a lot of people (not to mention nVidia--which tried it's old "We'll release a new set of drivers for our current product that will allow it to outrun ATI's newest 3D product at its introduction" trick, only to see it fail miserably to that end and embarrass the company because it was so buggy.) In thinking it could yet "one-up" ATI again on the day of its product introduction by simply releasing a set of buggy drivers designed to pump out good benchmark numbers, nVidia showed exactly how much it had underestimated ATI and the 9700 Pro.

So to a clear extent I think these impressions of nv30 are pent up expectations based mainly on a sort of strange faith in nVidia and what it can do as a technology company. But people don't realize that it wasn't that nVidia was so great technically that caused 3dfx to fail, it was because 3dfx royally messed itself up and mismanaged itself into oblivion. IE, nVidia was not nearly so "great" as 3dfx was just "sorry" at the end.

What's interesting about nv30 to me is that as a brand-new architecture nVidia won't be able to rely on previous driver sets from the GF series to build on, but will have to begin building from scratch all over again. That's assuming, of course, the nv30 is sufficiently different in architecture from the GF4 series, and at this time I have to assume it is. But it may actually be far more similar to the GF4 series than anyone might at present guess. But if it is entirely new then it's going to be interesting to see how quickly nVidia can ramp up driver support for this new architecture--especially interesting to see if it can do it with the speed ATI has achieved with the 9700 Pro.

I believe you are right--though. nVidia will probably suffer from Great Expectations far more than ATI did with the 9700 because no one expected that much out of ATI and the product was a surprise--always a great position to be in. I'd much rather have people underestimate me than over estimate me. So I think nVidia's kind of "damned" no matter what the nv30 turns out to be....