Fermi will finally appear next month

I understand fully what you said but think you gloss over the severe problems Fermi has got...sort of "yes it will beat 5870 and you won't have to buy a heat blower(dual gpu card)"
Sorry but even the single gpu fermi is going to be as watt hogging heat blower (why else are they making fermi certified cases with increased ventilation). Also Fermi is almost technically unmanufacturable and certainly financially unmanufacturable. This will be more so for the gtx 480 the only one that will just slightly better the 5870....it will be virtually vapourware.
Fermi's problems will not be easily fixed by a metal respin, they need a full base layer respin which would take until Q4 to do. You mention a shrink, well 28nm is not going to be available till Q1 2011...thats a long time and you gloss over it too easily.
Fermi is lost, the March release will be just of the 8000 - 10000 already produced. It will be a PR stunt, that is why they are going to sell gtx 470 for $299 the same price as the 5850 which it certainly will out perform, Nvidia never offer anything like the performance/price ratio that ATi do...as I said just a one off performance stunt with the cards they already have, they have no intention of making anymore as even if they could fix it this PR stunt would have locked themselves into an unsustainable price point.
You wont see anything else from them till Fermi2 on 28nm next year.
You also make light of the problems this will cause Nvidia, essentially having no product which forms the main stay of their business, discrete graphics, for the best part of a year will severely dent them if not cripple them. Put that together with the problems they have due to lacking a cpu business then this could be the begining of the end for them and not something they can easily cope with as you suggest.

I thought it was pretty clear I didn't think they'd get to 5970 performance (phenomenal and, congrats if they pull that off pretty much means I don't think they can! DUH). I went on to say I just expect them to beat the 5870 in everything and charge an extra $100. What part confused you? You attacked me for saying the same thing as you...LOL. Whatever. Climb down off your high horse...Pray to god AMD can stay in business long enough for any of this to matter :) They can't keep laying people off and expect to keep competing for the long haul. They have to start making money. NV could sell a million cards at a $100 loss this next quarter and still only lose $100mil of the $131mil they just made, which should give them plenty of time to shrink fermi, get temps down, optimize the process (fermi2?) etc. Point is, NV can keep break even or so all through Fermi and hurt AMD until they're just worthless. That's not good for the future of competition. AMD needs to charge more NOW. Once Fermi is out, NV dictates AMD's pricing and how much they bleed. If you think AMD's doing great why aren't they making money? What does it take for them to profit? Debt free is what it takes and they blew that with Intel's deal.

sorry forgot the link

http://www.tweaktown.com/news/14302/more_details_on_nvidia_fermi_price_psu_requirements_and_more/index.html

Unless of course 470 is correctly priced and performs on par with 5850 in which case 5870 would out perform 480 by some at least 4 - 8%.

Came across this article giving the price of GTX470 as $299 US dollars which makes it same at ATi 5850.
Assuming the GTX 470 and 480 have same clock speed then 470 should be 12.5% slower than 480 as 12.5% less cores.
From various benchies 5870 is about 16 - 20% faster than 5850.
So if 480 is equal to or greater than 5870 then by comparison 470 should be faster than 5850.
So why is it being offered at the same price point? Nvidia traditionaly do not offer as good a performance/$ ratio and in particular as they have had bad yield that must be even more difficult?
Think this is just a performance stunt make more loss on those chips already made just to gain kudos....probably wont see anymore availability after this first 8000 -10000 already made until they respin or release fermi2.

ATI will have 3D support next month, with 10.3 drivers. The matter about the glasses, nVidia'a 3D vision aren't the best either, as they rely on infrared light to sinchronize the shutters. Any half assed theater already use RF, which has more range and cannot be blocked by obstacles.
Physix looks great, but takes shader time and I wonder how much people will pay almost double the price of an 5870 (which will have about the same speed of the GTX480), just to have a FEW pretty physics effects.
ATI driver sucks, either in Windows or Linux. It's considerate of nVidia to provide proper Linux drivers, but since world adoption of Linux is near 1% of the market, I don't see a lot of people worrying about it.
What nVidia doesn't have is availability. Even If people are willing to pay $700 in a GTX480, there will be so few on the market (under 10,000) that will not meet the demand from nVidia fans alone.
58xx faced shortages as well, but they are now readly available, not if you are looking for discounted prices, after all, nVidia failed to provide competition to make prices fall.

WTF..."Also if their GTX480 gets anywhere close to the 5970 with lower power that would be quite phenomenal as it's a single chip vs dual monster. Congrats to NV if they can pull that off. I only expect it to beat the 5870 in all benches and priced at $100 more or so. Then again a lot of people will pay more for the best (without ending up with a heater/watt sucker - all dual cards)."

Have you been living under a rock....they are more likely to get +5% of 5870 performance with about 90% heat prodution of the 5970....Yeah it would be great for them IF they could achieve what you say....dream on.

Nvidia's 3D Vision
Linux drivers
Physx

Admittedly they aren't all deal breakers. Still I'd love to have some interesting 3D options with ATI with proper supported glasses and not only 3rd party.

Nvidia may be late, but it's no different than AMD having a paper launch of their recent cards (5850/5870/5890) it took months to REALLY be available (anandtech wrote articles about how bad it was). Only now that TSMC has a better process are we fully unconstrained on top ATI parts. Lets also not forget that AMD/ATI don't make a dime. So love them or hate them they're headed out of business until they start charging MORE MONEY for a card or cpu. What part of that do you guys NOT GET? Also if their GTX480 gets anywhere close to the 5970 with lower power that would be quite phenomenal as it's a single chip vs dual monster. Congrats to NV if they can pull that off. I only expect it to beat the 5870 in all benches and priced at $100 more or so. Then again a lot of people will pay more for the best (without ending up with a heater/watt sucker - all dual cards). No I won't be buying, it's too expensive for either most likely and I still have my 5850 on backorder at Amazon for $260 (price is why, not availability - they are everywhere but amazon won't give them out at $260 they promised). AMD won't dominate NV until they are making POSITIVE CASH. NV made money for the quarter ($131mil) and doubled revenue from Q4 year before even though not many cards out there we could buy from them...LOL. AMD needs to fix that or they'll continue to have sparks of greatness followed by NV kicking them againin the long run. You need money to do R&D and you can't do that long with negative income. PERIOD. But I freely admit I like their 5850 and may go to newegg etc if someone gets the XFX 5850 down to $275 or so soon. Still to high for me to dump my backorder on a lifetime wrnty card.

I tried of all the BS.
Lets see the card Benched and end this crap. Fermi will either be competative or will just be crap ,....end of story.

Ati's current chip is great. Can't say that about all there past ones but this year it kicks A$$.

Personally I think they screwd the pooch on this one.

were ATI now, I would "celebrate" nvidias launch by flooring the price of 5970 for a month or so. Just to make the statement. Also, sarcasm missing in article.

Semi-accurate may be inflating things beyond any acceptable measure (as usual), but let's just stop for a minute and think:

Were is NVIDIA's equivalent to ATI's HD5970?

These companies used to go head to head on the hi-end market forever. So, hearing NVIDIA saying "yeah, we got nothing that 'll beat the HD5970, just the HD5870" will always sound strange to me.

Also, don't forget that the GTX480 is an expensive chip to make, so NVIDIA will have a hell of a time trying to sell it with a competitive price in the 58xx section. Or a price that will make 58xx series cheap.

In fact, the exact OPPOSITE may happen. If NVIDIA's GTX480 proves to be an overpriced an hungry power beastie, then AMD might stop for a while and think "Why are we selling these gems for peanuts?" and up the price of the 58xx eyefinity by dozens of $.

I really hope my assumption is wrong an Blurgle is right. But unfortunately, evidence is to the contrary.

As regards the availability, don't expect to actually get the card at the 26th of March. The guys that placed pre-orders might.

I 'll be happy if just some independent magazines get some pieces and run some tests, for some good old fashioned comparison.

PS: Gotta love how NVIDIA said things about gtx480 being 60% faster than the 5870, in order to make the fanboys fantasize about it being able to beat the 5970 (hype), but didn't actually compared it to the 5970 (disclaimer)

Knowing the name and price is barely half of it. How about some performance figures?

http://www.semiaccurate.com/2010/02/20/semiaccurate-gets-some-gtx480-scores/

Obviously you probably should take those with vast amounts of salt.

The details on this site were disected and proven to be false yesterday.
The 480 is listed as having 2gb GDDR and the 470 as having 1gb GDDR.....these quantities are not compatible with their memory bus sizes.
The listings and in all probability the prices are all false and just designed to increase hits on the site.

I'm not a fanboy of ATI or Nvidia, they are just pieces of electronics to me. But IMO this March 26th launch will be a paper launch. Cards in stores on the 26th? Doubtful IMO. Sometime in April? MAYBE. May or June, more likely but quantites limited. Now could be wrong, and if I am that's of course fine. I actually hope I'm not wrong, having Fermi finally out might mean a lower price for the ATI 5xxx series, or at least the 58xx series. But given all the hype, hoop jumps and circus acts Nvidia has done since last year with GF100, I really don't expect March 26th to be much more then a paper launch.

But seriously, I hope I'm wrong and that there's a decent supply of GTX 4xx cards come launch day or at most around early April. But I don't have my hopes up.

If the GTX480 is "the next generation of PC gaming", then what the hell the HD5970 is?

From what it appears on other sites, the Green Goblin's all new superchip will struggle to just match the HD5870 eyefinity, or even the current HD5870.

And if losing the entusiast's Hi-end market wasn't enough bad news, Nvidia will struggle to market an expensive chip like the Fermi at a price competitive with the HD5870 and still make a profit out of it.

Now, how many of you ever thought you 'd see DAAMIT marching towards a monopoly at the GPU market a couple of years earlier? Ahh, chip wars...

PS: Points deducted from Inq's score for not poking bitter humor out of this press release

I just wonder how many cards will be available by end of March? If some reports are right than there are only a couple of thousand ready for retail. Not quite a paper launch but close to it.

If prices like that hold, they better bust out some impressive performance & power usage numbers.

I myself haven't been impressed with CUDA, so that's not going to sell me on this card either. Especially after hearing they're planning on crippling it on their consumer cards. The CUDA programs I've seen have run slower, and made systems much more unresponsive while running than their Stream counterparts. Granted my experience on both fronts is still limited but when I can get an ATI card for $100 less that does 2x the work of a Nvidia card the choice is clear for me.

At 500 pounds, it will be a hard sell...

For 700 pounds, you can get yourself a nice big Samsung LED Tv...

even so, it's about 1/3 monthly salary for me... or closer to 50% when I used to work at NV...

given how late Nvidia is coming to the game this round, they'll really have to up the game. While I won't rule the green goblin out, they've really ended up behind the eight ball with this cock up for a release.