nVidia is Forbes Company of the Year

  • Thread starter Thread starter John Lewis
  • Start date Start date
Well, it's a good article that gives exposure to the importance of a video
card in the high-performance PC. Hopefully this will steer a few casual
buyers away from woefully unbalanced PCs where a powerful Core2Duo is paired
with integrated video or a lowly Geforce 7300.
 
Lets hope the card shown at the link below gives ATI a boost. I'm
buying NVidia again shortly but I really don't want to see them with no
competition
Click to expand...

I don't think ATI/AMD is going away any time soon, and there will
always be opportunities for competition in the video card market
(there are no where near as many barriers, if you truly have a better
product, when it comes to GPUs, because the only thing you have to
worry about is the GPU itself and the driver.... its not like CPUs and
the OS market where you have such an extensive amount of CPU dependent
OS optimizations to deal with).

But that said, I've honestly never owned an ATI card. It's been
nVidia for me basically since the death of the 3DFX Voodoo cards. Why?
For a while I was buying Dells, simply because there was a time when
they really did have the best values going...their offshoring
practices which led to substandard PCs and (more importantly) inferior
support changed that. It seemed like every time I wanted a new PC,
nVidia had the superior card, simply as a matter of timing.

Things changed about a year ago (a lifetime in the world of technology
development) when two key events took place:

1. Intel came out with a CPU that completely threw AMD off their roost
2. nVidia came out wth a GPU that made ATI irrelevant

We will see some competition at some point in the future, but today
it's just not there.

Back to your statement about no competition, there was a time when I
would have agreed. But now, after seeing all these silly alliances
between game publishers and GPU vendors ("works best on ATI / nVidia")
etc, and quite frankly being pissed about the fact that some games
were optimized for one or the other (i.e. a penalty to PC gamers for
what was happening in console-war politics), I think standardization
is better.

I don't really want to see one vendor own the CPU platform, but at the
same time it's not good for consumers to invest in one vendors product
only to find that half of their favorite games run better on anothers.

Buying this 8800GTX a year ago was one of the best investments I've
made yet in PC gaming. It was expensive, and a year later they have
an almost-as-fast card available (the 8800 GT) for a lower price, but
I have no regrets and no plans to upgrade in the near future, simply
because it has not been "significantly" topped.

I could look at it like this: Its cost me basically about $18/mo in
depreciation for the last year to have a video card that rips through
all games at awesome framerates (except Crysis, which it plays as well
as anything else available between now and 2010). Even that cost is
not particularly realistic, because the 8800GT still lacks the onboard
memory of the GTX and still performs slightly lower in most games.

How often does that scenario arise 12 months after a purchase?
 
Pious said:
Back to your statement about no competition, there was a time when I
would have agreed. But now, after seeing all these silly alliances
between game publishers and GPU vendors ("works best on ATI / nVidia")
etc, and quite frankly being pissed about the fact that some games
were optimized for one or the other (i.e. a penalty to PC gamers for
what was happening in console-war politics), I think standardization
is better.
Click to expand...


I was referring to the hardware but you're talking about game software
and driver optimisations (and I agree with you on those). Strong
competition in hardware surely drives advances and keeps costs to the
end user down at the same time?

I don't really want to see one vendor own the CPU platform, but at the
same time it's not good for consumers to invest in one vendors product
only to find that half of their favorite games run better on anothers.
Click to expand...


Agreed but again I don't think you're talking about the hardware as I was

Buying this 8800GTX a year ago was one of the best investments I've
made yet in PC gaming. It was expensive, and a year later they have
an almost-as-fast card available (the 8800 GT) for a lower price, but
I have no regrets and no plans to upgrade in the near future, simply
because it has not been "significantly" topped.

I could look at it like this: Its cost me basically about $18/mo in
depreciation for the last year to have a video card that rips through
all games at awesome framerates (except Crysis, which it plays as well
as anything else available between now and 2010). Even that cost is
not particularly realistic, because the 8800GT still lacks the onboard
memory of the GTX and still performs slightly lower in most games.

How often does that scenario arise 12 months after a purchase?
Click to expand...


The 8800GTX certainly has been the card to beat for a long time and some
vendors have lowered to price of them within £20 of the new GTS giving
me a real quandary. But would the GTX still be at the top if ATI had
been more competitive over the last year or two?
 
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