I hope the industry doesn't make the mistake of supporting a closed API like CUDA that is for practical purposes tied to a single hardware vendor. A small, greedy and unreliable one at that, btw.

The industry needs to at least TRY to support only open CPU and GPU extensions.

I, for one, will continue to support AMD as thanks to them Intel and Nvidia are producing reasonable products at reasonable prices. Without AMD, Intel would make you pay $1000 por a 0.5Ghz increase every 5 years and Nvidia will charge you $5000 for a "workstation" video card 1/3 the power of today's.

Thank you AMD. Nice products at nice prices. That's all I need. It would be nice to accelerate stuff with "propietary" GPU extensions, but NEVER at the cost of being hostage of a single vendor, much less a proven shark like Nvidia.

“it’ll be a GPGPU powerhouse”

But don't forget GeForce is the GAMING line (what you see in desktops and laptops that aren't workstations using Quadro) of GPU's which brings 2/3 of its revenue. nVIDIA showed off GPGPU aspects first, cuz it was relevant to the event they were at, which was about GPGPU, not gaming.

*idiots*

Let me put it this way:

older nvidia based laptop- not a single problem
gtx 260 - not a single problem
new ATi (mobility 4670)based laptop - cant play mass effect 1 and 2, Risen and a few other , older titles.

blast from the past : ati 9600 pro- random "no signal" , 9700 burned and died , Nvidia geforce 2 MX - works fine untill today.

Maybe im just unlucky, but im willing to pay more for a graphics card that actually works.

I admit to being a french speaker.

Still, I do hope NV produces a price competitive product that can compete against ATI in the gaming market.

I hope this because Fermi does look like a very good GPGPU product and that is my primary interest in the thing. If NV can at least hold it's place in the video card market then I Can buy NV video cards and do science on them.

I have a pair of 4890's in crossfire in my gaming box, and I do believe they give me specular reflections on the bloodier chunks of flying globs of flesh in L4D.

But as far as GPGPU programming goes, CUDA is the smack, and I do not think ATI really is competing with NV in GPGPU. OpenCL is very nice and ATI does have an OpenCL stack... CUDA is a bit harder to use but more well known and understood. In my real life, computation matters... NV's new product does look like a very solid product in that segment.

You can blow multiple 1000's on a power7 or what have you or you can buy a maybe $700 NV Fermi video card. I think the economics are clear as far as computation goes.

I just bought a new rig with a HD 5770 so i am not looking to upgrade my video card any time soon, or at least not for gaming that is.

What interests me the most is the CPU like computation side of things. Not only will the new cards be much faster then the previous generation, but they should be much better suited for this sort of thing, allowing more programs to be written for the video cards, and for the programs to use more efficient methods resulting in a massive increase in performance.

For comparison a anti virus program (kaspersky i think) was written to run on fermi, and it performed 300 times faster then the core 2 duo chip they compared it too.

arg gotta go.

How much of a dork do you have to be to refer to yourself as a "gamer".

"Hey guys I'm a gamer."

WTF??!? "Hey dude I'm gaming cuz I'm a gamer!" "Gaming 4 life!"

Don't get me wrong... I love computers and games but it's not a freakin' profession for me.

sheesh... I am eagerly anticipating this because I love the new technology and I think it is going to be interesting, fast and will push forward DX11 game development but please leave me out of the ultimate dork gamer club.

if you add it all up it gives you 98%, meaning there's 2% unaccounted for.

Sounds to me like the % of Inquirer users who are waiting for Fermi due to its GPGPU prowess... :P

Nvidia forcing gamers to pay for features they don't need or care about for gaming.

AMD cards will cost you less to run and will produce less heat. You care about our planet right, do we need to green police to pay you a visit. :)

Theinquirer are manipulating their research.

Those of us, who want to buy it for the purpose that Nvida says we should are left out of the vote. A classic way of manipulate resarch.

Where is my place to put a vote? I wanted to vote too.

Nvidia has been trying to do something different by giving Fermi much better gpgpu performance and programmability so I was sure to be able to vote on buying it for that purpose, which I am going to do. Video transcoding to start with for my video editing.

some of the dumbest smart people i know.

Nvidia should have better drivers and more stability.

It's not like they've released any new cards for over a year to make things difficult is it?

ATI cards can display grey screens at high FPS, and medium cost, let's see nvidia do that eh.
And with ATI when you install a new driver it always crashes to BIOS 2% faster than before, that's speed improvements that count.

</sarcasm

Rather than NVidia fanbois having more money than sense,could it be that,"we put OUR money,where our mouths are"?

On the other hand,NOT all ATI fanboys have much money or sense,even if they think that they are grabbing a 'bargain'.

The question is the age old one of,"Bang for Bucks"?

You "pays YOUR money & you takes YOUR choice".

That means that, even on this cynical web-site, 33% of your readers think it will be a hit
- which is actually surprisingly high!

"but out of an apparently deep-rooted hatred of the colour red."

You mean like the headline color used by yourself ?
*g*