Quote:

Hans wrote: It's not so much attitude, as lack of full shader support in Intel and Sis. AFAIK, neither company has released a graphics chipset with a GPU that can support GLSL/DirectX-9+ shaders. I doubt that these game houses could get their games running on Intel and Sis chipsets at playable frame-rates. Hans

What are you on to about? GMA 3000 supports both of these

---

Edit: Pardon me, I confused things up... I meant the X3000 but wrote 3000...
But even that's wrong it should have said GMA X3100

Last edited by Frek on 07-Oct-2009 at 12:14 PM.

The Dutch version of Hardware.info claims they called some of nVidia's partners to comfirm the news on SA. T

ho none comfirmed they did say "off the record" that things for the comming months aren't looking good.

They (Hardware.info) also believe that the GT300 is going to be very expensive, a card would likely cost over 500 euro and apparently they have no prototypes of cheaper variants yet.

Hope it's all based on a journalist having a thing against nVidia. Tho, my next card is most likely a 5870 with 2GB.



Offcourse, what nVidia could be doing is making sure they don't have a surplus of old stock when the GT300 comes.

Last edited by Seer on 07-Oct-2009 at 10:26 AM.

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@tomazkid

Quote:

True, but that kind of attitude from game houses prevents the games to be played on laptops, where both Sis and Intel are quite common.

Computers come in different abilities, software (including games) come with different requirements, and people come with different levels of interest. I don't believe a game house should only write a game for the lowest common denominator. Certainly if they want to feel free. If SiS or Intel want to get into the high performance GPU market then they should make a high performance GPU. Intel appears headed that direction with Larabee.

@Hans

Quote:

Hans wrote: @Seer Quote: Seer wrote: The fall of a Giant ? Or..? To be fair, they are competing with an even bigger giant thanks to AMD swallowing up ATI. Intel looks like it's also going to be taking a serious shot at the high performance graphics market too, so competition won't die if NVidia don't make it through this. Hans

Intel have been saying that for years but yet keep producing trash that cant even compete with last years high end or even mid end.
The ATI linux drivers are still buggy as well compared to the official nvidia drivers.

I think we need both nvidia and ati...

Last edited by Tomas on 07-Oct-2009 at 12:39 PM.

Doesn't really matter what happens.

If NVidia doesn't hold the "fastest card there is" crown for a while it doesn't matter because the market has already been flooded with high end cards and at the moment there are no games in sight requiring a faster card then Crysis or GTA 4.

If NVidia has to sell or go bust I think Intel will be there to pick it up and in 2 years they will be back so no worries there either. Ati was down and out years ago too and is now back via AMD.

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@Hans

Quote:

It's really easy to rile people up by taking a few facts, pulling them out of context, adding a good dose of speculation, and then feeding it to people who don't know enough about the original facts (e.g., totally not the target audience) to be able to form their own informed opinions.

It's quite sad really that so many people are willing to criticize Charlie - who is one. if not the, best investigative journalist in the IT industry - without even bothering to do something as simple as read his previous work and check how accurate it turned out to be. His record is, in fact, very good indeed. Concerning NVidia he called it right on:

- the GT200 > GT200b die-shrink not giving any performance or power benefits
- mid-range/low-end GT200 versions having to be scrapped
- their 40nm DX10.1 chips being a 'paper launch' with almost none made
- the G8x/G9x mobile and low-end desktop chips being defective
- NVidia's chipset division not able to produce an Intel i7 chipset
- GT300/Fermi running very late
- Fermi yields being so bad NVidia wouldn't even be able to demo one working
- the Fermi board shown off by NVidia's CEO being a fake

and that's just what I can list from memory. There's a lot more.

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@minator

Quote:

minator wrote: @CodeSmith Quote: I'd take that article with a pinch of salt, and find at least one other source that corroborates it. Fudzilla also has a story about Nvidia having a few problems but it's not written in nearly such a sensational style. Not surprising given the guy who runs Fudzilla seems to have a very good reputation. Charlie Demerjian really seems to have something against Nvidia, yes they screw up at times ...now try finding a chip company that doesn't. He used to hate Sony and ran similar articles about them. Trouble is they were so inaccurate it was generally a better idea to believe the exact opposite! So yes, read with a pinch of salt - a large one. I wouldn't count Nvidia out at all, they are about to make a major push into consumer mobile devices with Tegra (an ARM based processor with their graphics core) and a whole list of companies are using it.

NVIDIA's Intel chipsets are also !@#$.

Refer to http://www.behardware.com/html/news/?date=11-03-2009#10121

"If you look more closely, you see that in fact they are strongly disadvantaged by the high sales of nForce cards that, once again, have shameful returns figures. 23.6% for the P5N-T Deluxe and 16.4% for the Striker II Formula, both of which are based on the nForce 780i"

"You’ll have understood, that once again, although it is difficult to recommend one make over another in terms of reliability, such is the disparity in terms of models, it is nevertheless obvious that we do not recommend nForce chipsets for the Intel platform."

Our fleet HP DV laptops with G84M/G86M all failed and was exchanged to Intel and AMD GPUs. My personal ASUS G1S laptop's G84M(aka Geforce 8600M GT) also failed after 18 months, luckily I have 24 months warranty. They exchanged it with yet another G84M (aka. Geforce 9500M GS i.e. another rename BS). How long will this last? Another 18 months? My laptop is already outside of 24 month warranty.

I would NOT purchase any NVIDIA based PC products.

My next
1. laptop GPU is AMD/ATI Radeon HD 5600 based.
2. desktop GPU is AMD/ATI Radeon HD 5800 based.

PS; I have a backup ASUS W3J laptop with ATI Radeon X1600.

Last edited by Hammer on 07-Oct-2009 at 03:44 PM.

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@Hammer

Quote:

Our fleet HP DV laptops with G84M/G86M all failed and was exchanged to Intel and AMD GPUs. My personal ASUS G1S laptop's G84M(aka Geforce 8600M GT) also failed after 18 months, luckily I have 24 months warranty. They exchanged it with yet another G84M (aka. Geforce 9500M GS i.e. another rename BS). How long will this last? Another 18 months? My laptop is already outside of 24 month warranty.

I think a lot of people don't grasp the scale of the problem with NVidia mobile GPUs. A client of mine deployed 21 Dell Precision M90 laptops, which have NVidia Quadro GPUs that use the same chip as the 7900/7950 desktop cards. Sixteen of those laptops have suffered at least one GPU failure (the GPU is on a removable card in the M90, so it's easy to diagnose if one goes bad), some of them have burned through 2 cards.

From what I can gather failure rates on the 84/85/8600 series GPUs are every bit as bad, possibly worse. Needless to say both my laptops have ATI GPUs in them...

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It appears nVidia is pulling out of the AMD Chipset market. They claim AMD's marketspace is too small to make this profitable. In the same breath they stated they'll continue to make Ion Chipsets.

Personally I can't see how Ion Chipsets would be profitable. Intel's Atom platform includes a 945Gxx chipset at a lower cost than the Atom CPU by itself. Adding cost by adding the Ion in a low cost market would seem to me to mean less profits for manufactures.

NVidia is using the 9400M in the Ion chipset. The solution came out fall of 2008. I can see why nVidia would want to use this as they don't have to develop new technology. Just rebrand the old technology when manufacturing costs are lower.

Even this would seem to be short lived. Intel announced moving Atom to a new processor named Pineview with graphics and memory controller moved into the CPU. Again would one want to move to Nvidia graphics on a motherboard if Intel is already including this? Seems the wrong direction for a low cost and low power use platform.

Last edited by BrianK on 07-Oct-2009 at 07:56 PM.

@DrBombcrater

Quote:

- Fermi yields being so bad NVidia wouldn't even be able to demo one working

The CEO was holding a "mock up" as Nvidia put it, but they did demo the chip working.

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@DrBombcrater

Quote:

DrBombcrater wrote: It's quite sad really that so many people are willing to criticize Charlie - who is one. if not the, best investigative journalist in the IT industry - without even bothering to do something as simple as read his previous work and check how accurate it turned out to be. His record is, in fact, very good indeed. Concerning NVidia he called it right on:

Yes, there are facts in his article, but there is a significant amount of extrapolation and speculation in that article, which is exactly what I'm talking about. Claiming that mismanagement is killing the company, for example, is purely speculative, even though it is purported to be fact. Sorry Dr. Bombcrater, but what I wrote still stands.

Moreover, the bit that you quoted from my post was directed toward journalists in general; that kind of behaviour is increasing in mainstream media, and I don't like it. Journalists should be reporting on what has happened, not making predictions on the future, or claiming to know what people were thinking.

Hans

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@Frek

Quote:

Frek wrote: What are you on to about? GMA 3000 supports both of these --- Edit: Pardon me, I confused things up... I meant the X3000 but wrote 3000... But even that's wrong it should have said GMA X3100

That's why I said "AFAIK," I wasn't completely sure about this. I tried to find a GLSL capable Intel chipsets, and couldn't find anything other than complaints that Intel just couldn't be bothered making GLSL capable cards.

Thanks for digging this up.

Hans

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My brother has a machine with a GMA 3000 integrated graphics chipset. It does support shaders but the honest truth is it shouldn't have bothered. Absolutely anything using pixel shading on it runs like molasses.

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Quote:

Hans wrote: @Frek That's why I said "AFAIK," I wasn't completely sure about this. I tried to find a GLSL capable Intel chipsets, and couldn't find anything other than complaints that Intel just couldn't be bothered making GLSL capable cards. Thanks for digging this up. Hans

Yes but you're confusing "capable" with intels ignorance.

Intels chipsets are "GLSL capable", GLSL does not in anyway define any feature requirements on the HW. So the problem is simply that Intels _driver_ lacks GLSL capability, it has nothing to do with the hardware- GLSL is part of the driver, not of the hardware.

Apple's Intel driver on Mac OS X supports GLSL on all GMAs they ever used- including the GMA 900 and the 950.

Quote:

Karlos wrote: My brother has a machine with a GMA 3000 integrated graphics chipset. It does support shaders but the honest truth is it shouldn't have bothered. Absolutely anything using pixel shading on it runs like molasses.

Well intels chipset is not a powerhouse, but this sounds a bit odd.

Even my netbooks GMA 950 has ok fragment shader performance (considering the speed of the chipset in general), what kills performance however- it totally lacks vertex shader support in hardware.
And as soon as you invoke anything but basic ftransform in the vertex shader it all bogs down to a crawl.

But yeah anyway... GMA is not a powerful chip, but it is adequate for basic usage.
And comparing it to even midrange nVidia / AMD cards is not really fair.

@Frek

Quote:

Frek wrote: Yes but you're confusing "capable" with intels ignorance. Intels chipsets are "GLSL capable", GLSL does not in anyway define any feature requirements on the HW.

Wrong. To be GLSL capable, the hardware must have programmable vertex and fragment/pixel shaders (plus geometry shaders for advanced stuff, but not a requirement for basic GLSL). Not only that, but the shaders must support a certain minimum set of features. This is why some cards are listed as shader model 2, 3 or 4 cards, the GPU has enough functionality to support shader model 2, 3, or 4.

So saying that "Intel's chipsets are GLSL capable," is inaccurate. I'm guessing that Mac OS X's drivers try to fake the missing features in the older chipsets (e.g., unrolling the loops on hardware that doesn't support loops) the same way that ATI's drivers do with their older graphics cards (even a Radeon X800 isn't completely GLSL capable). When that fails, a software emulated backup is used, which is far too slow for a demanding game. It looks like Intel decided to not bother adding GLSL support to their drivers, until they had a graphics chipset that actually had all of the features.

I encountered these issues when I was using a Radeon X800 for computer vision research, I had to write my GLSL code in such a way that it didn't use GLSL features that the card couldn't support.

Hans

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not sure if this is the same material but the headline sure hit me today...
Nvidia Halting Chipset Development

Nvidia has confirmed that the company has essentially placed its Nforce chipset line on hiatus, given the legal wrangling between itself and Intel.

According to Robert Sherbin, the lead corporate communications spokesman for Nvidia, Nvidia will "postpone further chipset investments".

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@minator

Quote:

The CEO was holding a "mock up" as Nvidia put it, but they did demo the chip working.

Not quite, they showed closed boxes that they said had Fermi chips in them but totally refused to let anyone see inside. There's no evidence at all that any of the first run Fermi chips can do anything, other than make nice paperweights. And given Nvidia's documented history of being 'economical with the truth' it's certainly wise to assume anything they say is

Those chips came back from the fab a matter of 3 weeks or so ago (something NVidia has admitted) and I'd be amazed if they could do the necessary testing/debugging and get even a basic driver running on them in that time.

@Hans
Quote:

Journalists should be reporting on what has happened, not making predictions on the future, or claiming to know what people were thinking.

There's plenty of predictions/speculation/guesswork in journalism, there has to be. Check out any newspaper or TV channel for examples. You mention Charlie's assertion that NVidia management is killing the company. That's business analysis - taking known facts and extrapolating future trends using (in this case) the writer's own knowledge of the industry and the company in question. That's a perfectly respectable task for a journalist; open a copy of the Financial Times or Wall Street Journal, although unlike them Charlie doesn't charge you for reading

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@BrianK

Quote:

It appears nVidia is pulling out of the AMD Chipset market. They claim AMD's marketspace is too small to make this profitable. In the same breath they stated they'll continue to make Ion Chipsets.

It's more a case of the AMD chipset market abandoning NVidia. Their last AMD chipset, the 980a, was more expensive than AMD's high-end 790FX chipset and lacked important features - not surprising since it was just the older 780a chipset with a new name. If my memory is correct it was only ever used on one motherboard, and that sold very poorly.

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@Hans

Quote:

Hans wrote: @tomazkid Quote: tomazkid wrote: @BrianK [quote]As for SiS, do they make anything other than integrated graphics? Again not for the gamer. True, but that kind of attitude from game houses prevents the games to be played on laptops, where both SiS and Intel are quite common.

It's not so much attitude, as lack of full shader support in Intel and Sis. AFAIK, neither company has released a graphics chipset with a GPU that can support GLSL/DirectX-9+ shaders. I doubt that these game houses could get their games running on Intel and Sis chipsets at playable frame-rates.

Hans
[/quote]
Depending on the settings, Intel X4500 IGP should be able to play some "Game For Windows" titles at playable frame rates.

Examples
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YmUzRRsjplE
SF IV on X3100 and X4500 IGP

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DdPGbzd4OMY
Flatout on X4500 IGP

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0XLIUlk83kA
BattleField2 on X4500 IGP

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