{your oppinion}what happen to ati if nvidia release their strong FERMi card and defeat 5970?

i think ati will release new ati card to_

HD 5990 with 3 gpu's

ha ha ha

:LOL:

Lol, nothing I think. It will all depend on the price points that Nvidia chooses. Nvidia has recently released the mobile 300 series line and it's nothing impressive thus far (rebranded 200 series).

The ATI cards have been on the market for quite some time, and Nvidia's Fermi doesn't look like it's going to get here soon. But I hope they do release a kickass card, competition is good for the consumer.

This.

Personally, I'm fairly sure Nvidia will release a Fermi based card that beats the 5970. However, there are still a few issues with this. First being, the 5970 is so high in performance in most games that a better card is currently not something that is even needed. Unless you really, really want to play Crysis at very high resolutions with everything on high. And I don't think that many people actually play Crysis anymore, except for Crysis Wars and mods, which are more optimized than the original game, which while a pretty good game, was intended as well as a very large tech demo.

Second, as said, is price point. Personally I'm an ATI fan (though currently having issues with a card, *grumble*), but it doesn't really bother me to say that Nvidia will probably release a card that beats the 5970, because even though it beats it, it will probably cost more as well. Whether the price/performance (in that insanely high end of the market) will be worth it, time will tell. I also can't afford anything near those, so it bothers me less. =P

As said by gibbersome, I as well hope they release some kickass cards, and at reasonable prices, as I'd love to see the 5xxx series get some price cuts.

Great thoughts. Running a game at 30fps with max details on Crysis has become somewhat of an obsession for many gamers. The Holy grail of benchmarks you could call it.

IMHO it's almost a given that the green teams next top card will beat the 5970, but I also wouldn't be at all surprised to see it selling for $600+ regardless of MSRP. History has shown that at the top of the food chain price:performance ratio is least potent, especially on Nvidia cards since they know people buying top of line cards probably aren't concerned with that issue.

The GF100 supersonic sled demo is very impressive, but if it needs 3 SLI'd GF100s to do, I'm not sure that it'd be worth it (seeing as the GF100 will probably retail between $600~1000+ each).

Another question though, is whether GF100 will hit the budget/mainstream market very well. It seems pretty well established that these will be large, hot, power sucking cards at the high end.

Nvidia typically hasn't really had that great of design nor support for budget/mainstream cards, but it is, of course, a huge market, with HTPCs on the rise and generally less people having so much money to throw into their computers, these cards will be even more competitive. Do you think that Nvidia will be able to get these monster Fermi cards to scale down well enough?

To answer the question (lol):

I think that they'd probably just up the clock speeds on the 5970 to the 5870 marks if not higher to get a card that meets or beats the GF100.

That is Nvidia's conundrum. Right now the high demand for ATI DirectX 11 cards is keeping the pricing high, great for ATI. The 5xxx series cards have become quite popular with gamers, both for desktops and laptops.

But soon enough the supply problem will be resolved and the cards will be available for cheaper. It won't matter if Nvidia has their Fermi cards out in time, their initial pricing is going to be high as it has been in the past. And then they'll run into the same supply stability issues as ATI, keeping the prices for their cards high, while ATI cards continue to flood the budget and mainstream markets.

Fermi cards will eventually scale down, but not anytime soon.

I'm pretty sure that this is not something new.  The person who usually releases the first card will get beat by the next guy, who will then get beat by the first guy.  It's just your classic gfx competition.  Nothing really new here.

Lol, indeed. I have a feeling I'm going to be having this very same conversation a year from now...

However, it seems like after a long time, gaming hardware has finally exceeded the requirements of even the most demanding games out there. Maybe it's because we can now get 100 FPS on Crysis maxed out (Origin PC review posted earlier today).

gibbersome:

100 FPS on Crysis maxed out

The settings were high not very high and 0xAA... still awesome performance though!

nvidia will have to spend a lot of many and so will the consumer in order to have a card that can throw the 5970 off it's thrown.By the way i am also a HUGE amd/ati fan.

I am getting ready to upgrade my computer, and now Nvidia has my attention, and I may switch from ATI Radeon.

Soupstyle:

To answer the question (lol):

I think that they'd probably just up the clock speeds on the 5970 to the 5870 marks if not higher to get a card that meets or beats the GF100.

I believe that currently there is an ATX limit and that is 300W. In order to meet the 300W limit, AMD went and binned Cypress chips specifically for the 5970, in order to find chips that could operate at 725MHz at only 1.05v (source: Anandtech). They can only wink and tell you the card can go higher (and give you the tools to do it).

For Fermi to beat the 5970, I think it would have to be more efficient. As in more graphical power per watts it consumes. They probably will have to do the same thing ATI did.

The cycle will just continue. ATI will probably do a refresh with a die shrink. That would decrease power draw and heat. With this new headroom, the will increase the clocks. Then they will release another architecture or something like that. For the most part, they will just keep switching places as performance king.