First of all, whats a steam player? lol
Nvidia doesnt have a market for high end cards???
If your looking for a Top of the line product, especially as far as supported technology goes, Nvidia is the only way to go...
Just because ATI put gpu's on one card doesnt mean Nvidia couldnt do it if they wanted to.
Besides the 5970 last time i checked the 470gtx and 480gtx were at the top of most benchmarks.
Lets keep fanboyism to a minimum. :)
Myself I am an Intel fan, some people are AMD fans.
When it comes to graphics most people go with Nividia for the simple fact it says plays best with Nividia on the loading screen. They pay alot of money for that 10 second add.
Myself I prefer ATi ( Soon to just be AMD, since they are dropping ATI as the name).
In the end a graphics card is a graphics card, you research them before you buy them. if not you can get total crap.
I'm no fan boy but Nvidia allways seem to top the benchmarks, i don't know why everybody thinks nvidia is in trouble, they have allways been more popular and allways beat ATI in the top benchmarks.
They go back and forth, ATI normally has the chips out first. DX 11 before Nividia. Part of the reason why Nividia is performing so well right now is the fact they bought out Physx and have a Physx chip on all of there cards. Which keeps processing the physics processing off of the GPU and processor. Increasing the performance of the card.
Actually AMD still has the benchmark tops with the Asus Ares, and last I checked the 5970 is still the best performing "single card" solution. Though it doesn't really matter, at all. What matters is which Gpu is best "you".
Although the GTX480 is awesome(Well all Fermi is, except GTS450, ouch..), it's just a bit too power hungry for my liking.
I like both companies, I buy whichever is best, and the ATI48xx was best when I bought my card. There's nothing in the world more insane than brand loyalty, it's like some twisted form of intellectual materialism!
I admit I prefer AMD to Intel, but only because of the performance for the dollar, not because I think AMD is superior in any way, well except for budget computing.
I plan to grab a AMD 6000 card, and a GTX460 for physx, can't wait. Best of both worlds.
So.. If an AMD fanboi and Nvidia fanboi had a baby, what would that be?
To be honest, i think part of the reason ATI has done well is because of how they market the cards. For example: when my brother bought his last video card, he asked my opinion on them. The fact that the ATI card was marketed with gddr5 made him want it for that reason. After i explained that there is more then just memory type to consider when buying a video card he acutally ended up going with the Nvidia. I would guess a lot of people that buy graphics cards are not quite as tech savy as most members on this forum and would buy into marketing easier without closely comparing them. It could go both ways, i just think ATI benifits more from it.
Just my opinion..
As far as the 5970 goes, i believe it was the gtx470 in sli will actually out perform (in some benchmarks) the 5970 for less money.
When I said I wasn't an Nvidia fanboi I was merely trying to say that I was making an effort to be objective.
Effectively I am a big fan of Nvidia and have used their cards exclusively during my brief (10 years)history with computers and I'm using one now and love it.
I was just musing on what I see as a gloomy business forecast for the company.
If, as I understand it, and from the Anandtech preview of Sandybridge plus claims for AMD Fusion Chips with integrated Radeon graphics, the low end of the GPU card market will likely disappear, that looks very bad for Nvidia.
Intel have shown in court that Nvidia do not have a chipset licence. This means that one of their fallback products, ION, will remain a GPU rather than a CPUGPU. Likewise with Atom processors being supplanted by Pineview from Intel.
Similarly with CUDA. It's a proprietary API and will only remain crucial as long as Nvidia cards are top dogs.
It wasn't Nvidia's fault that TSMCs 40nm manufacturing problems delayed the release of Fermi but it did and that has allowed ATI to really take the top end with their HD 5000 cards.
Also the 470/480 have not been a great success. They are blisteringly fast but also blisteringly hot, power hungry, very expensive and very noisy.
My friend got a 480. It's incredibly fast but he's had to buy a new case and watercooling to use it.
Another patent dispute means that Nvidia has to pay a 2% royalty to Rambus for every product that has a DDRx or GDDRx memory controller.
Nvidia posted a net loss of $141 million for the last quarter.
I really hope I am completely wrong in this analysis and, as has been said, the demise of Nvidia has been forecast for the last three years.
Despite this it has come blasting back with the 460 card and that is the one I would buy right now if I was buying.
Another possible saver is Tegra2 which could be a killer product for smartphones or tablets.
Perhaps that plus Kepler and Maxwell will be a saver but, as is being discussed on another thread, pc gaming appears to be in decline anyway. My local supermarkets no longer even stock pc games whereas 2 years ago they had their own section.
I really, sincerely, hope I am wrong on this as I think the competition between the two companies is a very good thing.
Here's the Steam User Survey I was referring to in my previous post, Best wishes, John
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