Barely a year after the arrival of the GeForce 8800 GTX, we have to admit that Nvidia has absolute domination in the high end. AMD quickly realized that the Radeon HD 2900 XT wouldn’t exactly do the job and for better or worse was faced with competing with the GeForce 8800 GTS. Less efficient vectorial architecture and especially low performance antialiasing sunk AMD’s hopes. Consequently, competition was reduced to a strict minimum and Nvidia was content with launching an ultra high end card in order to get the most out of its very sought after family of GPUs.
The situation changes at the end of this year with the arrival of the GeForce 8800 GT whose purpose is to make the GeForce 8800 family affordable. However, this could be to the detriment of higher end cards which are still selling well. So why come up with a less expensive product when the full priced version was selling so well? For several reasons.
The first is that there is an entire series of much awaited and graphic resource heavy games that are starting to arrive : Bioshock, Half Life 2 Episode 2, World in Conflict, Unreal Tournament 3, Gears of War and… Crysis. All of these games are going to cause a large number of gamers to update their systems as well as incite PC manufacturers to integrate higher performance graphic cards in their machines destined for gamers. This could be a relatively large volume of buyers and they can be more easily wooed with more aggressive prices.
The second reason is that AMD is preparing a line of graphic cards that promises to have a very good performance/price ratio as this manufacturer no longer has any other choice. With an architecture that is poorly adapted to compete on the very high end, AMD has to focus on a performances/price solution. While Nvidia easily dominates the high end with its very profitable graphic cards and could have continued to do so,
they still do not want to give up a large portion of the gamers market to their rival. In the end, Nvidia prefers to be aggressive in terms of prices in order to consolidate its position before AMD’s attempt at a "return".
The GeForce 4 Ti 4200 2007 version?
This future clash as well as the enormous potential from the wave of new games makes ideal conditions for the launch of both a high end and affordable graphic card. And as Jen Hsun Huang, the President and CEO of Nvidia, explains in this photo, it’s rare when all of these conditions are met enabling them to offer the viable commercialization of such a product. Amazing games and high performance graphic cards for less than 300€, at year’s end PC gamers are going to be spoiled.
