Terrible news for Nvidia

And that will affect my choice of either buying r9800 or newer lower end board because...? The point being made was that older boards are dead ducks and not worth buying. The fact that they may not be available for long doesn't matter as long they ARE available now.

 

I think that the point that was made that for the large public, the 9800 and 5900 will be dead ducks because they will be seen as old cards. Despite the fact that they (well, at least the 9800) are still very good cards for it's price.

 

nVIDIA stocks are going up. It's not enough for nVIDIA to regain most of it's lost market value but it's a start. I hope it keeps going up.

 

Nvidia is mainly up because they announced a stock buyback program.

 

They dont want to be bought...

 

Buying back stock is always a good investment whenever the company feels that stock is currently much lower in value than it will be in the future.

 

unless of course the stock keeps going down

as another user posted. They just don't want to get bought and they know at anytime they could right now

 

I don't know, it'll take nearly a billion dollars for ATI to gain the majority of nVIDIA stocks. Of course, ATI only needs the largest minority(if noone has a majority, which is likely the case).

As long as Huang has 51% of nVIDIA's stock(which I highly doubt), nVIDIA is safe. ATI and nVIDIA can both be brought out but nVIDIA is more likely to be brought out. BTW, I'm not saying nVIDIA can buy out ATI right now, I'm saying a bigger corp could buy out ATI. However, there's no reason for any corp(besides nVIDIA)to buy out ATI unless the owner of the corp is an nVIDIA fan.

This situation reminds me of the time 3DFX could have bought nVIDIA. It also reminds me of the time nVIDIA bought 3DFX. It's hard to tell what will happen next.

 

Left me put some meat on the bone of my dead ducks statement.

The 6600GT is faster than the 9800 and 59xx series graphics cards and being made on the cheap 0.11 micron process will be cheaper to build and cheaper to buy.

Take the Subaru analogy ( ignoring looks as this is of little importance for the video card buyer )

Subaru 5900 200bhp and costs £20k
Subaru 6600GT 240bhp and costs £19k

Now sales of the first to the latter ? You could say that you could make the former cheaper, but it has an expensive build so your margin is less. Better to buy the new Subaru 6400 which is even cheaper still and just about matches performance.

 

Buy back program is just a way to maintain share value and not always a good deal.
You have to keep in mind that while you buy back them you cash will lower accordingly. If you have a look at that Nvidia cash , it went down by 40 % since 5900 launch and if they were to really buy back the shares it would be down by 70 %. It means less choices for developpement, less opportunities to be caught and so on.

 

The 6600GT also only has a 128-bit bus compared to 256-bit bus for the 9800 and 5900, which I would assume make the cards cheaper/easier to design/produce as well.

 

But what about the price of the 2ns GDDR3 ram?

 

Well the old subaru impreza GT turbo is more of a rally car. The second version was tuned down alot to make it a more comfy ride.

So comparing the 256bit 5900 to the 6600GT: the first is faster because it's still 256bit. The 6600GT has SM3 and better AA, so it may look better.

 

Only thing that will happen is the 128 meg 9800pros will drop in price. Most likely to 150$ till ati can put out the rv410 .

That would be a great deal

 

In case you didn't notice, there are two pages to that article. The second contains this:

Those options were likely at a strike price higher than the current $10 a stub, so this is a cheap way of rewarding their employees.