I was hoping to get a good taste of nVidia with their replacement for the GF4, because judging from the past it seemed as if nVidia would easily be able to cook up something that could kick the sh!t out of the R300. I also thought that ATI would have to wait for its R400 before it would be able to give nVidia another chase, I never expected a refresh of the R350 to give the NV30 that chase with even the R300 close behind.
Then I found out about the 128 bit memory architecture of the NV30. The first thing that came to my mind was, "omg, wtf is nVidia thinking?" 500 MHz core and 500 MHz DDRII ("1000 MHz") does sound very impressive, the 256 bit architecture of the R300 is definately the win. No matter how memory efficient the NV30 is, I seriously don't see how it could possibly compete with the high memory bandwidths of the R300/R350. Sure, the GeForce FX will be extremely fast with low resolutions and low AA and AF, but I don't care about that, I want a card that will be able to push the high res and the high eyecandy and still obtain those respectable frame rates (60+). The moment I read about the 128 bit memory architecture, that moment was when I had some serious doubts about the GF FX.
While we can go back and see that the GeForce 2 Ultra and the GeForce 3 shared equal memory bandwidths, we do know which card was superior, even when the GeForce 3 GPU was clocked slower than the GF2 Ultra. In this case what will come of the GeForce FX when its core is far superior with inferior memory bandwidth?
I'm not counting the GF FX out yet, but I do have some serious doubts.
Whatever happens I think my next board will be ATI as I can see hope for nVidia to compete as far as performance goes, but not with price.