Nvidia's Big Bang II is more of a whimper
WHAT DO YOU do when you suddenly find yourself in second place, trailing badly with no hope for the rest of the year? You stop artificially crippling your drivers and spin it to the users as magnanimous, welcome to Nvidia's Big Bang II.
The good folk at Chile Hardware were the first to notice it on a blurry slide. The obvious inference is to 'Big Bang', aka the SLI introduction, which was a big deal. Big Bang II is simply not. It is the code name for Release 180 drivers, and they are coming from September 08 to February 09.
R180 has five bullet points, 10-bit displayport support, OpenGL 3.0, SLI on multi-monitors, transcoding on the GPU, and some performance 'optimisations' over R177. Come autumn, they will be catching up to ATI on several key checkboxes, this is a big bang?
The only one in there worth getting excited over is SLI on multi-monitors, and that is kind of a sham. Nvidia will obviously tout it as the greatest thing since sliced bread, but they are just unbreaking the driver. They could have turned it on any time they wanted to, it works just fine in the Quadro line (1). Nvidia hurts their most loyal customer base by artificially turning it off in the normal card line. Why anyone thinks they deserve kudos for stopping breaking drivers is beyond me.
In any case, Big Bang II is a small step forward and it brings a few nice features and one very needed one. It is a real pity that their hand had to be forced to stop hurting users for margins though, but that is the way they operate. µ
(1) I wonder what this will do to Quadro sales, and thus NV margins?
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The big deal is not so much multimonitor SLI but Transcoding and the GPU physix on older cards.

Nv screwed up more by not having gpu physix running at launch of the gtx280 for older cards. See if it worked we could all run G80 chips as physix or multi-mon cards. Making them usefully paired with the gtx280 in a intel system even if SLI wasn't possible.

Transcoding is huge too because then a person could have a crap celeron proc and still transcode a dvd in seconds.

I have a G80 chip now and will likely go with a ATI this round, but anyone who wants an extra display will just get another video card. If they can afford 3-4monitors and an SLI rig they can afford an extra video card for multi-monitor.
You'd think this story would already be plastered by the pro-Nvidia, anti-Charlie fanbois.... hehe....

Guess they're not as quick as they think they are....

But then, Nvidia IS in a bit of a pickle, expect Intel to do them in and take quite a bite out of AMD/ATI.

Face it, Nvidia made some bad technical decisions some time ago and is paying the price. That's what happens when your egos don't allow you to admit that you make mistakes. Oh, boohoo, poor Nvidia.
is that a similarly "real" hardware reason for SLI not working on motherboards with an intel chipset? 

after today's news, the notion they are artificially forcing people to buy green motherboards doesn't sound far-fetched...
The REAL big bang 2 would be nVidia enabling SLI on Intel-based motherboards. This cuts into the nforce sales but at the same time they would sell assloads of geforce cards.
So NV introduces a great feature which ATI doesn't have and it's a bad thing? WOW. I wonder what the response would have been if ATI had done this. Next time NV beats ATI's ass it will be twisted too somehow to make NV look bad. Or maybe it won't be talked about like with G80. First it's insulted. When it beats ATI 10-0, nothing is said, nothing happens, "I was wrong OH NO, but I can't admit it, oh no never ever..."
A charlie article bashing nvidia?

And I thought I was going to read something new and exciting on theINQ today...

:'(
You fan boys LOST!! 

Loooooooooooosers!!!
"Big Bank" can only be one thing, SLI support in P35/X38/X48/P45 chipsets, like the "modded" drivers back in the i975-nv7XXX era.
Well ... Nvidia is late on this one... ATI can also have multi-monitors while crossfire is enabled since a couple of catalyst drivers ago ....
Have you actually played with quadro? They are just as broken as the main stream cards. They have an add in board called g-sync that should sync multiple computers outputs together. It works 50% of the time breaks sync on DVI. Don't even think about SLI and sync them at the same time!

There is a reason why the specifications on the internet are so cryptic!
Yeah, that's not the only thing they have intentionally broken, though. And they still haven't fixed it either. Sadly, it's also the only advantage they really have over ATI at this point. Specifically, Nvidia intentionally broke its stereo 3d drivers for the 9800 etc.... First, the stereo drivers ONLY work in Windows Vista. Second, unless you own a Zalman LCD monitor, the ONLY kind of Stereo 3d Nvidia "allows" you to use are the cheap old red and blue movie theater glasses. No shutter glasses. No DLP projector. NOTHING. Worst of all, they don't bother to tell you this before you upgrade your card and OS. Really this is the only reason I have to buy Nvidia cards. Rather, the only reason I used to buy Nvidia. Not anymore.
Sorry guys but I stopped believing in promised future driver improvements some time ago (I'm still waiting for real hardware video decoding on my 6800), especially as nVidia is under to kudos and they've only announced some rough date - if some of this is already available and they want to switch it on why don't they do it now?

This is just FUD - in the vague hope that it might get a few people to wait a little bit longer - pretty desperate stuff.
Not sure what you're smoking, but your rant doesn't make any sense. I'm quite cheerfully using shutter glasses, an Infocus DepthQ DLP projector, a pair of big Christie HD projectors with polarisers and various other stuff in a lab setup for stereo, works fine. Still, RANDOM capitalisation FTW, EH?

Oh, and another Charlie foam-flecked rant? What are the odds..? All we need is a nonsensical "Gibberish_Ultie" Drashek comment, since the fanbois already did their bit. Charlie's kinda losing it, which is a shame, as he used to be a good and entertaining writer. De-stress dude, come back making sense and have people laughing with you rather than at you, some people miss you.
You seem to be missing part of your article. You completely forget to say what a good idea it'd be if every NVidia employee were killed, or almost as good, committed suicide and killed their families.
lol, this is a pathetically aggressive post... Kind of unprofessional if you ask me. You can be critical without sounding obnoxious.

To address one of the points in the article, I very much doubt that they will advertise dual monitor support with SLi, since dual monitors are rare... Probably even more so than SLi itself.
This is why NVidia refuses to open-source their drivers. That would make these *hidden cripple-switches* visible.
... to watch the fanboiz fight it out...

How about this for a view, with logical argument?

I have Nvidia and ATI cards, I've hopped back and forth between them almost as much as I've hopped back and forth between Intel and AMD.

If I was to go shopping tomorrow, it would be Intel and ATI.

Why? Well bangs per buck solve the CPU question, and driver support solves the other.

I have a media center machine I decided to try with vista, only to find that the onboard video chip appears not to exist according to the Nvidia website. Try as I might I can't find any drivers for it. I'm stuck with the default Vista ones, and they don't support the Scart TV out. Pretty essential for a media center machine!

On the other hand both the ATI graphics chips in my old laptops, one of which is P3 era, show up in the options on the ATI drivers download site, and I could get vista drivers for them if I so chose.

There is nothing I dislike more than a manufacturer rendering your old hardware unusable just because they can't be bothered.
nVidia have well documented problems with their drivers, particulaly when paired with 7800 and 7900 series cards. Lots of people still have this series of kit in their machines, because they do the job well.

nVidia continue to do nothing about these problems. Thus, I'm going to get me a 4870 to play with!
I don't get it anymore... We are spoiled with mega vidcards that chunk out high FPS (besides that Cyrsis game) at pretty high resolutions, why do we need 180fps over 150 ? for future games ? I rather buy a Gfx card each year or 2 years to be future proof... as technology moves too fast...

Maybe it's a good thing that newer driver implements loads of other stuff and is not solely based on pure performance...

And realy Charley your article is almost a complete copy of another hardware site... I always liked the inquirer but your bashing is really getting into sad proportions... was your ex wife an Nvidia employee?
Get a life man and be objective... if it's not too hard ofcourse...

and I also believe AMD/ATI pulled a similar one on us last year or was it the year before with a new catalyst driver...them marketing guys are so great yet they mess with our minds and leave sometimes a bad taste... history repeating maybe ?

The roles have turned, ATI wins best bang for the buck and performs great.. very good for the market and the end user...
I would agree with you, I'm needing to trade my 7800GT in for a 4870. XD
I'd like to know how much of this is known facts, rumours, and pure speculation.

Got to like the Eliot reference, though.
Which is far ahead of Ati's CTM.
OpenGL 3.0 support shows that Nvidia is not only committed to games, as ATI is.
If their Driver has OpenGL 3.0 support this year, that is a very, very big deal for developers writing cross platform code. Aloth the GeForce 8 series, nVidia had GL extensions for the new card features, but the GL 3.0 support gives that one can now use those features without targeting just nVidia cards. If nVidia does 3.0, then ATI will soon as well, which means that as a developer starting sometime later this year I can target GL 3.0, and have my new 3D code (i.e. geometry shader, etc) run under Windows, BSD and Linux flawlessly and be able to run 2 years from now without changes... 3.0 support is a really, really big deal for developers.