Originally posted by: Extelleron
Originally posted by: bryanW1995
It would hurt intel sales quite a bit to alienate the enthusiast market that they are allegedly trying to get with nehalem. A high percentage of people who want the latest/greatest are hardcore enthusiast gamers. These people understand that acceptable cpu performance with outstanding video performance is the ideal formula in most cases. If intel completely blocks sli from nehalem then that will be a huge boon to amd as MANY enthusiasts will go with shanghai/sli. Some of those might settle for keeping their ageing system longer.
If AMD's R700 cards end up being faster than the GTX 200 cards, which it looks like, then there will be no need to worry about SLI compatability. People will just go with 4870 X2 Quad-CF on X58....AMD quad-crossfire drivers will likely improve, and it will become a competitive platform.
Nemesis has a point in that Intel has the power to shut nVidia out of the enthusiast market. If nVidia can't make a chipset for Nehalem and Intel boards do not have SLI, then the top end of the enthusiast market belongs ATI graphics cards. Either that, or you could go with an AMD CPU + nVidia mobo for SLI. Which one will people choose? It seems both benefit AMD, and don't really hurt Intel.
Originally posted by: HOOfan 1
Originally posted by: allies
You mean since 8800GTX right (1.5 years)? Before that nvidia consistently got beaten in both performance and IQ.
9700 and 9800 over the FX series was the only time ATI held a clear advantage over nVidia....and before 9700 ATI's drivers were an absolute joke.
I wouldn't say that. The X800XT PE was clearly > 6800 Ultra and the X850XT PE > 6800 Ultra by even a wider margin. The 6850 Ultra or 6800 Ultra Extreme never was really released, so you can't count that (even though I don't think it beat the X800/X850's anyway).
The X1800XT clearly beat its competitor, the 7800GTX 256MB, in everything that involved AA/AF. The 7800GTX 512MB was never widely available so you can't count it, and even if you do, it only held the lead for 2-3 months. X1900XTX > 7900GTX, in performance a bit and in IQ by far. Certainly if you look at games from 2007-2008 on X1900 & 7900 cards, the X1900XTX can be ~2x 7900GTX in some situations (i.e. Crysis).
And to BFG, as Martimus said, I am not talking about multi-GPU via software (drivers). I am talking about a multi-die GPU that to the driver is a single-GPU. While I don't think software-based multi-GPU is bad, and it's a good interim solution, in the long run I feel a hardware connection between the GPUs is needed.
And Foxery, actually it will translate into lower power/heat, because it could have been built on a 55nm process if you cut GT200 into 4 die. 55nm isn't yet mature enough for a 400-500mm^2 GPU, which is what GT200 would have been on 55nm. But for a chip 144m^2 in size? It would have been fine, and reduced the die size of the chip, along with decreasing heat output, allowing for higher clocks/better performance.