2006 was a long graphical year of change

THIS YEAR BEGAN with endless delays for ATI's R580 GPU family. This one had a bunch of pixel shaders and 16 pipelines in a new cool design that worked. This was ATI's plan B as it didn't have much luck with the R520. The unlucky R520 (Fudo) was delayed too long to make any big impact.

Nvidia stole some thunder with its Quad SLI which is probably going to turn out to be the biggest fiasco of 2006. The firm made a lot of noise, Cnet got an exclusive, CES gave 'em an award and Nvidia sold a handful of PCs with these cards inside. But it was a dead duck from day one. The Geforce 7900 GX2 will remain the biggest and bulkiest dual chip card to date. Worst of all is that these beasts didn't perform at all. The driver was to blame but even the second version didn't do much better.

ATI's Radeon X1900XTX managed to give Nvidia a run for its money. It endangered the 7800 GTX 256MB and the non-existent or very rare 7800 GTX 512MB but Nvidia didn't rest up. We saw a lot of releases in March 2006 - around CeBIT time. Nvidia introduced the Geforce G71, a refreshed G70 chip. The Geforce 7900 GTX and GT stayed with us until recently and this was Nvidia's move from 110 to 90 nanometres. To date Nvidia hasn't moved any serious product capacities toward 80 nanometre and 65 is still a pipe dream for the graphic companies.

G71 ended up very fast and it sold well. The Geforce 7900 GT was one of the best cards we've ever seen and was the perfect at the $299 price, at least at that time. Nvidia had one more killer called the G73 that got wrapped in 7600 GS and GT marketing names. We don't know how Nvidia did it but this sub $200 managed to outrun a declocked R520 called X1800PRO. X1800PRO was fastest with FSAA and Aniso on but this was the high-end chip versus mainstream and Nvidia didn't even use the 256-bit memory interface as many expected.

End users were the ones to benefit as prices were falling like meteorites. ATI announced its RV560 shrink to 80 nanometres but it failed to do that before September. The big red firm was a whole quarter late, once again.

The RV535 and RV570 together with RV560 managed to be the first 80 nanometre chips on the market and Nvidia claims to have some mobile chips at 80nm but we've barely seen any of these. This was all presented in September but it was the summer that was exceptionally interesting.

Shortly after CeBIT we learned that Intel is getting back into the discrete graphic market, discreetly. Intel did this a few years back with the Intel i740, an extremely hot graphica card but it was cheap and won the hearts of many. As Vista makes graphics more important than any time before, Intel had to get serious about it. The world+dog know that graphics performance on Intel 915/945 and even 965 sucks big time and that the company has to do something. It was accused many times by the gaming industry as being the main drag holding the graphics world back. At the end 2006 we haven't heard any Intel announcement of a CPU+GPU while AMD has already caused a lot of (con)Fusion about it.

ATI finally made Crossfire work better and even Intel announced that its 965 boards will support it as Intel wanted to get people back with the high-end market.

Intel managed to twist the Vole's arm and squeeze G965 in the Vista specification but the rest of the integrated Intel owners including the millions of Centrino setups including a few at the INQ will simply have to forget about Vista Aero glass on the mobile computer. You can throw away your notebook and buy a Vista compatible if you have too much money in your pocket.

Nvidia managed to pull off one more miracle. It called it Geforce 7950 GX2 and this time around dual mobile GPUs managed to leave Geforce 7900 GTX and Radeon X1900XTX in the dust. Unill the G80 hit the market, the Geforce 7950GX2 was the fastest card around. We really like this card as it was the best card around till G80 showed its face.

After Computex roughly four weeks after the mighty CEO personally denied to me that AMD might acquire ATI this big thing happened. This is certainly the event of the year and the analysts at first thought this as a super-bad thing before they saw some light.

AMD needed graphics, it wanted into the handheld business, it wanted chipsets and ATI was the great buyout. It acquired a bunch of great engineers and will push them even harder. This will certainly mess Intel and Nvidia especially in the long term.

Late summer, early autumn ATI released its R580+ refresh. This was more or less the same R580 chip still at 90 nanometre but it was more optimised for GDDR4 memory. ATI was the first to use Samsung GDDR4 memory running at 2000MHz. R580+ got the Radeon X1950XTX marketing name and to date is one of the best buys you can get. Priced at $399 from day one was the best priced high end card in the last few years.

Intel launched Merom/Conroe in Q3 and made a really great CPU. This is the fastest gaming CPU to date and it can help you push the graphic even more. Intel overnight pushed all the Athlon FXes from reviewers' testbeds - at least it did in many cases.

By the end of summer we confirmed that Nvidia is on the schedule to launch G80 at the end of 2006. ATI on the other hand delayed R600 to Q1 2006 and last time we heard about it, the date was February.

Nvidia finally announced G80 and to everyone's surprise GTX had 768MB of memory and 384-bit memory interface while the slower one - the GTS - ended up with awkward 640MB of memory and 320-bit memory interface. No one cared as both cards faster than the fastest thing to date. G80 is definitely the fastest gaming card for today's games. Shame Nvidia has still failed to show a DirectX 10 driver.

G80 ended up as unified Shader card and worked well in SLI. Nvidia only screwed Quad SLI as it failed to bring any performance with four chips on two cards. This was just a bad idea and too expensive and not worthy.

R580+ was the last major launch for ATI and the next one will be done by DAAMIT. AMD took over the graphic player and R600 will be launched as AMD's graphic chip with ATI Radeon brand on it. This is how the future looks.

Nvidia will have the new DirectX 10 hardware before the games come out and we expect a refresh of the existing marchitecture. Nvidia will have mainstream and entry level DirectX 10 before DAAMIT which is traditionally at least one quarter late.

Vista failed to become important in 2006. It generated a lot of interest but at the end business version went out, Microsoft did zero promotions and almost no one even knows that its out. The final Vista build 6000 is out it the wild but the driver support still sucks. Vista will re-launch on the 30th of January 2007 and this might look better for the vole from that day on. Graphic drivers are still not finished and it looks that ATI leads with its DirectX driver but it still doest have the Crossfire or OpenGL support in its last December Vista release. Well this is January.

Nvidia released a 7950 GT card and get G71 refresh in mainstream and these cards well selling really well before G80 GTS got launched. This year will be known by a lot of price adjusting from both camps. We seen a lot of price droppings and a last Yule fastest card Geforce 7800 GTX or Radeon X1800XT is now almost worthless or at $199 or less range if you get one at ebay. If you purchased one you lost two thirds of the value of the card and that is a lot for just 52 weeks.

Buying graphic card is crazy but G80 sounded like a good idea at least at launch but now just a few weeks after the launched Nvidia gave a green light for overclocking. So today you have even faster cards and probably even faster around February 2007 when DAAMIT releases R600.

Three is enough to tango, G71 based Geforce 7900 GT, Geforce 7950GX2 and G80 makes the perfect trio of Nvidia's great year. It was too good for them. µ