Uh oh, an ATi vs nVidia thing...

[Windogg]

I hope there is a battle and I hope other companies like STMicroelectronics and Matrox really get into the fray. Hell I hope each company tried to one up each other as much as possible. It just means we;ll all get better, faster, cheap, and a helluva lot sooner. Anyone remember when Intel was the only real player in town? Took months to got from 133Mhz - 166Mhz, 300Mhz - 333Mhz etc.. Look at the last year? Who could have ever guessed that 1Ghz+ CPUs would be be in the sub $100 range?

 

[jobberd]

<< It just means we;ll all get better, faster, cheap, and a helluva lot sooner >>



yeah, but think of the poor engineers

 

[randomlinh]

COMPETITION IS GOOD! So all these companies BRING IT ON!!

 

[CQuinn]

Reviews don't tell the whole story, and they can only be trusted as far as the
performance show on a particular driver release. ATI still makes the
emphasis for their &quot;official&quot; releases to be stability over performance.

ATI has greatly improved their driver support in the Radeon line.
They still need to bring up the rear on legacy support for older designs,
but they are at least coming out with drivers now. It will take a
while longer of them continuing to provide this consistency in support
for more people to believe they are finally back on track.

If the R200 ships on schedule, with the anticipated driver support that ATI
has been showing in the past few months, then it will be a good thing.

This will not automatically knock NVidia off their perch, but will bring back
some needed competition to meet the user demand for speed, quality, and features.

 

[rbV5]

What I'd really like to see is nVidia, Matrox and PowerVR come out with a feature set to compete with the AIW line. I would love to have a real choice when I get the next gen, but I love the feature set of the AIW. I'm not sure if there's enough of a market, but it would be nice to have a choice. The AIW R200 is looking good, but I would agree that good drivers out of the box should be paramount.

 

[Courtland]

I think ATI has always been behind, they have some good ides but can never put them out in time, and their drivers really suck. I don't think nvidia will be losing their spot as the high performance chipset provider anytime soon. The OEM market is a different story though, which ATI seems to own right now, but we will have to wait and see what nForce does.