I’ve been trumpeting Radeon superiority in this video card generation for months, but it seems that the seesaw is tipping the other way now and NVIDIA is back on their game. Doubtless the cost-for-performance of the 48xx series early on caused NVIDIA to panic and drop prices, but now that the platforms have matured a little bit, drivers have been updated, and new games are being tested, it seems that GeForce is once again taking the lead.

I’ve just read two head-to-head reviews of a GTX 260 and Radeon 4870, one at DriverHeaven and one at Bjorn3d, that suggest that at the enthusiast level (~$300), the GTX 260 has as much as 10-15% performance lead across the board. That’s huge, and what with PhysX and CUDA ascending, I think I know what my next card will be.
[via Rage3D]

I think you have to be a real hardware geek to find this stuff funny, so it’s no surprise that it made me smile. Although it’s not exactly credited, it’s pretty clear that this is a low-key effort by AMD to discredit NVIDIA — the cartoon casts a bediapered dinosaur as NVIDIA’s troubled last generation of video cards and makes fun of their limited and faulty hardware.

Whether it’s “official” or not is hard to say, but it’s fun no matter what.
[via HardOCP]

AMD’s 4000 series has been exceptional in that not only has it exceeded NVIDIA at the high end while keeping the price down, but the budget offerings going all the way down to <$100 are good performers for the money as well. The new HD 4830 slots right in between the 46XX series ($70-80) and the 4850 (~$170). At around $130 or less, the Radeon HD 4830 provides DirectX 10.1 support and pretty decent performance. There’s a good review over at Hot Hardware with more info, but it’s pretty much what you expect. Support for everything you need and every dollar’s worth of performance but not more.

The graphics card market is stuffed to the gills right now and you can find competition and clear choices practically at every $10 interval. If you’re looking to upgrade, just set your own price, be it $100 or $500, and seek out the best deal for that money.
[image credit: Hot Hardware]

In systems where both energy limitations and heat flow are major considerations, passive cooling has been an increasingly popular solution, though not always the best one. Heatsinks are often just not enough to do the job, but as they become more sophisticated they are closing the performance gap with active heat reduction like fans or piping. Celsia has made the heatsink into something more complicated, with water vapor and micro-scale grilles aiding in spreading the heat around faster and better.

AMD is teaming up with these guys to make something nice for its high-end video cards. That’d be another leg up on NVIDIA, as they’ve already pretty much got them beat in price and performance; efficiency and low heat would be icing on the cake.
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Every so often, hardware makers strike out in a new direction, improving their product in an almost random manner — double the shader processors! stick two cards together! — and sometimes it actually has good results. The big move happening right now is a vast increase in the amount of RAM available to the video card, even though that’s not really what’s limiting game performance these days.

But if you trust HardOCP (and I do), that doubling of video RAM makes for a simply better gaming experience , and at a relatively small premium to boot (a 512MB 4870 costs ~$275, a 1GB 4870 ~$300). Although games are pushing more on the performance front than the RAM front, it helps to have that cushion of space for swapping, caching, and so on.

Direct X 11 is on track for a 2009 release, according to AMD’s little slide up there. You’ll also note that the company expects Windows 7 in 2009, too. That’s cute.

And how many Direct X 10-only (or even DX10-enhances) games have there been since its release, what, two years ago? Doesn’t look like too many to me.

Also, just what is “HD+” supposed to mean?

via Gizmodo

AMD’s ATI Radeon HD 4550 and 4350 graphics cards are a wet dream for gamers on a budget by delivering DirectX 10.1 graphics and an HDMI port with 7.1 channel audio while keeping the price low. The $55 HD 4550 is equipped with 512MB of DDR3 memory with a 96 GFLOPS of power. The smaller but still potent HD 4350 packs 256MB of memory for $39. ATI claims that this type of power has previously not been available at this price point and I think they are right. These are a heck of a deal when they launch sometime in October ‘08.

PR

When a serious hardware problem occurs, the buck always passes a few times before it finds a solid resting place. In the recent case of NVIDIA, it was remarkably simple, as the company itself (it seems) was responsible for pushing the bad solder that was cracking. But now we have several thousand Radeon 3800 cards that are faulty, and the finger is not quite so easy to point.

Of course, first we look at AMD. What the hell, guys? They’re quick to point out that the faulty cards were all from a single distributor: Diamond. So! The culprit is found! Wait though: Diamond didn’t manufacture the cards. They have a stable of OEMs who make the various lines of tech they distribute. Fortunately for blame-seekers, the faulty ones were traced back to ITC/GeCube, so that’s the end of the story, right? Actually, blame could go back up the ladder if it turns out Diamond tweaked the card too much or didn’t do enough quality assurance, and it seems AMD never checked them either. Alienware, who received a significant chunk of the faulty cards, has replaced Diamond as a partner, and to be honest I would be wary of them as well. If you’re the proud owner of one of the 15,000 or so faulty cards, Diamond will gladly replace it, so at least you have that, but it sounds like there’s enough blame to go around for everybody. Not nearly the level of SNAFU achieved by NVIDIA, but this kind of bad PR may be harmful to AMD’s big comeback.

The ATI Radeon HD 4600 is out of the gate and already talking a big talk.  Allegedly the new, low price card can outperform both the HD 3650 and the 9500GT while still keeping the cost under 80 bones for the GDDR3 flavor. Plus, the HD 4600 is now one of the least expensive DirectX 10.1 and OpenGL 2.x supported graphics card. The graphic-creating power comes from a 55nm manufacturing process and the same 320 stream processors of the HD 3650. The basic 512MB, GDDR2 version is available for $69, with the upgraded GDDR3 edition going for $79. AMD even has plans to ship a 4670 version, complete with 1GB of memory later this month for an undisclosed price. As for the performance claims, we’ll wait for the benchmarks to hash out the details.

While the world oohs and ahhs to tiny laptops and green benchmarks, there is a sort of blind eye turned to the excesses of extreme gamers. This interesting article points out that as everyone else is going lighter, smaller, and more efficient, video cards are getting bigger, guzzling power, and even multiplying themselves.

A cutting edge card will draw nearly 300W at maximum, which is what we were running our entire computers on a couple years ago. Certainly performance has increased more than proportionally, but if extreme gamers are buying 1000W power supplies for their rigs, there’s something crazy going on. While hardly anyone in the world is running quad-SLI Radeon 4870s, the increasing necessity for a separate video card is driving up total power costs all the way down to the budget sector. It’s not quite “burning the rainforest” bad but as we work as a culture to reduce our energy footprint, this might be a good place to start.

The video card scene right now is like watching a boxing match. AMD dealt NVIDIA a solid shot to the face with the 4870 and 4850, causing NVIDIA to lower their prices in an evasive maneuver. NVIDIA has responded by throwing cards at the budget segment under $75. AMD of course disparaged this move, saying it was “quick and dirty,” and said something I feel is insightful:

“If you have the performance high-ground, you can price your products according to performance,” Baumann said. “If you don’t have the high-ground, you have to price them to products around you.”

And AMD is practicing what it preaches. The 4870 was such a good performer they could put it at the perfect price point, and NVIDIA had to accommodate them, and now NVIDIA is pricing around AMD’s offerings because they can’t hit them straight on. It’s a low blow, but what with increasing demand for graphics performance in low-end hardware, it may be the punch they needed to throw.

AMD is, I think, releasing press releases just for giggles. This one is pretty insubstantial, but it linked the neat demo video above so it’s worth mentioning. Essentially, AMD is attempting to extend its current (and possibly short-lived) dominance by emphasizing how well the conquering 4800 series works with DirectX 10.1. I have to say, the lighting tools shown in the extremely long ping pong ball demo above are pretty nice — the occlusion is subtle and the global lighting is effective. I dare say my next video card purchase will be a Radeon.

AMD wanted to get out of the DTV market for a bit now and just found a buyer. Broadcom, maker of chips and bits inside of broadcast equipment, is paying $192.8 million in cash to acquire all of AMD’s assests for the digital television bisiness.

AMD’s DTV assets include Xilleon integrated DTV processors and reference designs, NXT receiver ICs, the Theater 300 DTV processor, and a line of panel processors that perform advanced motion compensation, frame rate conversion and scaling.

We aren’t sure how this is going to affect the PC DTV market, but hopefully, Broadcom will keep the AMD/ATI ball rolling and pump out more digital tuners for our computers.

SLI rendering has gained a lot of popularity lately, even to the point where people are making SLI rigs of pre-SLI’ed cards like the 9800GX2 and the 4870X2. The problem is that drivers and motherboards aren’t really set up to take advantage of two cards. Sure, it works a lot better than one card, but Hydra feels that it’s time mobos got an integrated SLI controller that works out all the SLI business in hardware. At the moment the cards have to either be in constant communication so each knows what the other has been assigned to do, or they switch off frames, which also requires them to constantly update each other, wasting memory bandwidth.

Hydra’s “Lucid” technology does all the SLI-organizing work in hardware, and is so good at it that it can work with a Radeon and a GeForce at the same time as easily as it might with two of either. It breaks up the scene, assigns and keeps track of the parts each card renders, and reintegrates it once the cards do their calculations. Man, that’d be nice, I hope it really works.

Advanced Micro Devices is apparently getting set to split up into two companies, according to TG Daily. There are two fluffy, happy, candy-cane strategies currently in place, one called Asset Light and one called Asset Smart. It looks like each may become more than just a strategy, though, as they’re expected to split into two distinct companies in a matter of weeks.

The two companies are rumored to be a development company and a manufacturing company. It’s speculated that the development company will be run by new CEO Dirk Meyer and that former CEO Hector Ruiz might be tapped to run the manufacturing company. Ruiz recently stepped down as CEO but remained on AMD’s board.

Grains of salt, here, as nothing’s been set in stone. We should know more in the coming weeks, though. It’ll be interesting to see what happens to ATI as well.

Hope you didn’t buy an Nvidia GTX 260 or 280 in the past month, since their prices were just slashed overnight. The GTX 280, once retailing for $649, will now set you back only $499. Meanwhile, the GTX 260, once $399, is now $299. Or, in scary percentages, that’s a 30 percent and 25 percent drop, respectively.

As Devin mentioned in last week’s podcast (and previous posts), Nvidia is under pressure, price-wise, from ATi this generation. For a while there we were all like, “ATi, what gives? Your cards stink.” Its upcoming 4870 X2, which is rumored for an August release, is essentially as powerful as the GTX 280. How was Nvidia supposed to sell a GPU for $150 more than the 4870 X2 if they were essentially the same thing?

Seeing these prices, the thought of serious PC gaming seems so absurd to me. I’m fine with a 360 and my MacBook for the occasional hour of WoW

Damn, when I first heard about the GeForce 260 and 280 I thought it was checkmate. No one expected much of the new line of Radeons in the first place given ATI’s lackluster offerings lately, and combine that with the improvement in the 65nm 280 — I think I was justified in thinking so. But the Radeon 4850 came out a little later and jaws dropped. It offered nearly the performance of the 260, and at a huge discount. Now the 4870 has dropped and it nearly tops the 280, at half the price.

NVIDIA is taking evasive action, but to be honest it may be too late for this gamer. I switched over to a GeForce in my last system build, but if ATI is able to pull this kind of performance out of this chipset for such an incredible price, I may swing the other way next time I’m window-shopping at Newegg.