If fermi flops what happens to Nvidia

[Lonyo]

The thread should be titled something like "What if Fermi flops as a gaming card" because all indications are that it will do well in the 3d/rendering market. Considering that at this point Fermi is just a high end card, even if Fermi flops it probably won't even affect Nvidia's bottom line too badly, provided they cover in the $100-250 price range. A few people will buy GTX 470's and 480's for the novelty and pay a premium, even if performance isn't that hot.

What Nvidia will have to do is make sure that both the Fermi refresh and the cut down versions of Fermi are well designed and well situated from a price/performance standpoint. Nvidia's top end cards have almost always cost more than ATI's top (the 5870 debuted at $399; Nvidia's GTX 7800 512MB paper launched at $599 and quickly shot up to $699+ at retail, for example). Nvidia has basically squandered its chance to skim the market in a large way unless Fermi outperforms the 5870 so hugely that it's near 5970 performance). But both ATI and Nvidia make missteps (ATI with the 2900XT, Nvidia with the FX 5800). What's important is that they don't screw up two times in a row.

Nvidia may be forced to become leaner and meaner and come up with a more ATI-like design philosophy for Fermi's sequel.

Actually this thread should be titled "What if Fermi flops in the HPC market?" because that's the place where it actually matters.
As a gaming card it's largely irrelevant from a long term perspective and from a short term one too. And if you believe NV, Fermi's delays haven't harmed the schedule of other products.

 

[shaynoa]

nvidia have pxxxed me off that much im going to get 2 XFX 5870 xxx next week ,dont care about fermi or nvidia anymore,if they have handled this part of the company in this manner it there and then states alot about nvidia ,my 1200 dollars they will not see and i think a lot of people think like i do

 

[Patrick Wolf]

Ooooo, isn't speculation fun?!

I predict this wil be another boring launch and numbers will be on par with the 58xx series.

But I'm hoping Fermi is a beast.

 

[3DVagabond]

Fermi already is a flop being 6mos. late. Nothing will give them back the last 6mos. and I fully expect supply to be very poor for a while longer.

 

[dguy6789]

Nothing will happen. High end cards have never been important, they are very tiny niche products. The only time something could "happen" to Nvidia is if everyone all of a sudden stopped buying their $100 and lower video cards for a very long time.

 

[Stoneburner]

The latest news about NVidia principals comparing Fermi to the 5870 exclusively in the heaven demo with tessellation is cause for concern. I fear there is going to be no downward pressure for the 5850 that is anxious to find a home in my main rig

 

[zerocool84]

What impressed me the most about Fermi is how well it controlled frame rate dips with tessellation turned on in the Heaven Demo.

To me that was pretty big.

Ok and that was tessellation only. We have no idea how the card reacts when there's actually other things going on and not only tessellation.

 

[SolMiester]

Id say those are some pretty farfetched thoughts, seeing as Fermi still isnt here, 6 months after the the fight started.

yawn.....didnt realise GPU designers had matching timetables....in fact they dont!, besides which 5xxx series hasnt been that easy to get, lots of supply shortages

 

[Stoneburner]

yawn.....didnt realise GPU designers had matching timetables....in fact they dont!, besides which 5xxx series hasnt been that easy to get, lots of supply shortages

This has not been true for a long time now. The 5700 series are in good stock and the 5870 and 5850 i keep looking at whenever TD has 15 percent bing cashback are always available.

 

[NoQuarter]

Far as I could tell the supply shortages of 5870 were mostly just on newegg because that's all anyone checked when they wanted to find out if there were supply shortages. Not to say they weren't short in other channels, but Newegg was especially limited because everyone shops through them and created a more severe impression of shortages.

 

[WelshBloke]

Nothing will happen. High end cards have never been important, they are very tiny niche products. The only time something could "happen" to Nvidia is if everyone all of a sudden stopped buying their $100 and lower video cards for a very long time.

Well I think nVidia are going to be fine but they have been reusing last gens high end card as for this gens mid range for a while.

It will be interesting to see how they manage that next gen with the fermi problems.

 

[Lonbjerg]

Nothing...they have got $1.3 billion in the bank.
How big is AMD's debt now?

 

[zerocool84]

Nothing...they have got $1.3 billion in the bank.
How big is AMD's debt now?

You are the new resident troll we have here.

 

[AmdInside]

NVIDIA will be fine because they are making money now and AMD has for the most part better cards in every price point. AMD needs to make money without the help of Intel. I would be more concerned for AMD.

 

[DominionSeraph]

Nvidia may be forced to become leaner and meaner and come up with a more ATI-like design philosophy for Fermi's sequel.

Oh god I hope not. We already had this with 3dfx.
I'd rather there be technological progress than be playing Quake 2 at 60,000fps on my 1k VSA-100 processor Voodoo 5 1.5million.

 

[Genx87]

Oh god I hope not. We already had this with 3dfx.
I'd rather there be technological progress than be playing Quake 2 at 60,000fps on my 1k VSA-100 processor Voodoo 5 1.5million.

Not sure where you are getting the idea Fermi isnt moving the technological bar forward. The question remains if it will be better in gaming than ATI's card right now. I said before I expect it to be right around the SLI solution from last generation in terms of performance.

 

[NoQuarter]

Not sure where you are getting the idea Fermi isnt moving the technological bar forward. The question remains if it will be better in gaming than ATI's card right now. I said before I expect it to be right around the SLI solution from last generation in terms of performance.

Hm, way I read his post was that he didn't want nVidia to make ATI-like chips because then they wouldn't be able to move the technological bar forward as they are with Fermi.

 

[dguy6789]

Oh god I hope not. We already had this with 3dfx.
I'd rather there be technological progress than be playing Quake 2 at 60,000fps on my 1k VSA-100 processor Voodoo 5 1.5million.

If it wasn't for Nvidia, we would have had Tessellation years ago. Every ATI card since 2002 has had a tessellator. If it wasn't for Nvidia, we would have hardware accelerated physics that works on all PCs, not just ones with Nvidia graphics cards. ATI was the first to bring DX9 cards to the market and the first to bring DX11 cards to the market. ATI was the only company that even bothered to make low and mid range cards that supported Direct X 8, Nvidia's were all 7. ATI was also the first to release good main stream Direct X 9 cards. If it wasn't for ATI, we'd still be on Geforce 8800 renames. If it wasn't for ATI, the Geforce GTX 260 192sp would have been a $450 card for who knows how long.

Acting like Nvidia is the only company that pushes technology forward is an absurd notion.

 

[Keysplayr]

If ATI introduced tesselation capable hardware in 2002, why is it Nvidias fault that we haven't had tesselation enabled software until 8 years later? Don't you thinki it might have been prudent for ATI to push this since their very first tesselator hit their hardware? I believe it was called TruForm back then. Why didn't they work with devs to furiously push this technology to its limits for the better part of a decade?
And now hardware based physics as well? AMD refused to support PhysX. Where do you think we would be today in our games if they had? Or do you think ATI jumping onboard wouldn't have made any difference?
Look over the last 3 years bud, and sit there and try to tell me who is the bigger innovator in this field. NO contest. Sorry.

 

[dguy6789]

Tessellation is only finally out now in DX11 because because Nvidia didn't have it ready for the G80 so they asked Microsoft to scrap it for DX10 and they did.

Truform was a great technology for the time. It didn't succeed because only ATI cards could do it and ATI had minimal market share. Only a few games took advantage of it.

Tessellation off on the left, on on the right:

http://www.xbitlabs.com/images/video/radeon-8500/models.jpg

The ability to do this has existed in every ATI card since 2002.

Nvidia bought Ageia and the rights to PhysX. Prior to this, anyone could buy a PhysX card and have it run PhysX. Now to run PhysX you would need an Nvidia GPU. Some people accepted this and bought an Nvidia GPU to use stand alone for PhysX. Nvidia then patched it so you can't do this if it detects ATI in your system. There's no chance that Nvidia would hand PhysX over to ATI. It is their baby, the only thing they have that ATI doesn't have, they aren't going to lose that advantage no matter what.

I seriously doubt they ever actually offered it to ATI, but if they did, they almost certainly offered it for an absurdly high price that they knew ATI would never pay just so they could say they gave ATI a choice. There is no proof they ever offered it. If it ever got as far as ATI cards being able to run Nvidia PhysX, then Nvidia would almost certainly make it artificially perform worse on ATI cards. Intel does this to AMD in the CPU market.

As far as innovation goes and who is leading it for the last 3 years, you're merely pointing out the first time since 2001 or so where ATI has had a major mistake as far as graphics is concerned, which was the HD 2900 and to a lesser extent the HD 3000. Need I remind you that ATI had the better product every single generation between and including the Radeon 9700 and the X1900. ATI's big mistake happened over 2 years ago by now. It's history just like NV30. ATI has had the better overall graphics lineup since the Radeon HD 4000 launch in 2008. It's 2010 now and that still hasn't changed back towards Nvidia's favor. We're waiting on the great Fermi to save the day.

 

[Genx87]

If it wasn't for Nvidia, we would have had Tessellation years ago. Every ATI card since 2002 has had a tessellator. If it wasn't for Nvidia, we would have hardware accelerated physics that works on all PCs, not just ones with Nvidia graphics cards. ATI was the first to bring DX9 cards to the market and the first to bring DX11 cards to the market. ATI was the only company that even bothered to make low and mid range cards that supported Direct X 8, Nvidia's were all 7. ATI was also the first to release good main stream Direct X 9 cards. If it wasn't for ATI, we'd still be on Geforce 8800 renames. If it wasn't for ATI, the Geforce GTX 260 192sp would have been a $450 card for who knows how long.

Acting like Nvidia is the only company that pushes technology forward is an absurd notion.

Nothing stopped devs from using ATI's tesselator. Nothing except AMD stopped AMD from being able to use PhysX on AMD GPU's. Bringing a card out for a given standard developed by a 3rd party is not innovative. It is being the first to market with a standardized product. Is it innovative if Ford is first to market on a new govt safety requirement??????
I think you are being really silly in thinking if it wasnt for ATI Nvidia would never bring out a new card.

 

[Lonbjerg]

You are the new resident troll we have here.

Pot, kettle ,black.

Did you find any errors in what I wrote?
No?
Did think so...good luck with your Ad Hominem.

 

[solofly]

if Fermi flops then nVidia will have to use an even more aggressive renaming scheme to push old hardware at uneducated buyers.

They will also likely up their marketing budget to create more bogus statements passed on as fact about GPU performance.

Or worse.

HAHAHAHAHA, if I had more room I would put that in my sig... well done!

People are like sheep, all they know best is how to follow one another...

 

[lurk3r]

If fermi flops we're all screwed, Ati will double their prices again and not spend a dime on research until they have to.

 

[evolucion8]

Pot, kettle ,black.

Did you find any errors in what I wrote?
No?
Did think so...good luck with your Ad Hominem.

Stop it man, you are trolling here and attacking personally in the other thread, you need to stop taking videocards personally and go outside, chill out.\\

If ATI introduced tesselation capable hardware in 2002, why is it Nvidias fault that we haven't had tesselation enabled software until 8 years later? Don't you thinki it might have been prudent for ATI to push this since their very first tesselator hit their hardware? I believe it was called TruForm back then. Why didn't they work with devs to furiously push this technology to its limits for the better part of a decade?
And now hardware based physics as well? AMD refused to support PhysX. Where do you think we would be today in our games if they had? Or do you think ATI jumping onboard wouldn't have made any difference?
Look over the last 3 years bud, and sit there and try to tell me who is the bigger innovator in this field. NO contest. Sorry.

ATi's market share was smaller at that time than now, and yet a couple of games came out with Truform like Serious Sam, a big hit. And it looked much better, also Unreal Tournament, but I don't remember which version it was, from there is where the dildo gun joke came from.

If it wasn't for Nvidia, we would have had Tessellation years ago. Every ATI card since 2002 has had a tessellator. If it wasn't for Nvidia, we would have hardware accelerated physics that works on all PCs, not just ones with Nvidia graphics cards. ATI was the first to bring DX9 cards to the market and the first to bring DX11 cards to the market. ATI was the only company that even bothered to make low and mid range cards that supported Direct X 8, Nvidia's were all 7. ATI was also the first to release good main stream Direct X 9 cards. If it wasn't for ATI, we'd still be on Geforce 8800 renames. If it wasn't for ATI, the Geforce GTX 260 192sp would have been a $450 card for who knows how long.

Acting like Nvidia is the only company that pushes technology forward is an absurd notion.

And their lack of DX10.1 adoption which came very late with their budget cards.

Probably nothing, their 5800 series was garbage and they lived through that, ATI's 2xxx and debateable 3xxx series werent so great either and they still pushed on through... after being bought by AMD but still...

AMD bought ATi before the HD 2x00 series launch.