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CeBIT '07: The Trend of Changes |
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Written by Enis Sahinovic
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Sunday, 25 March 2007 |
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Page 3 of 6 This year CeBIT should have been remembered by the representation of the new graphic cards from AMD and Nvidia, but after the announcement made by AMD prior to CeBIT that the presentation of the R600-based series is postponed, Nvidia decided not to rush the presentation of the new cards and to wait AMD move since it is still the only company with DX10 cards on the market. However, this does not mean that the fair was marked by some other topic. The fact that AMD and Nvidia had cards ready for CeBIT and that both companies waited for each other move, has created a number of the controversial rumors regarding chips.
Some of AMD - ATI partners demonstrated new cards without benchmark results, but the good news for all those still waiting R600 is that the dimensions of the final versions will be much smaller in comparison to the designer samples seen on the Internet last few months, and there are also talks about revision of R600 chips which will be made in 65nm process, enabling the increase of the frequency of the graphic processor and decreased consumption compared to R600 cards with GPU made in 80nm. AMD is "finished" with the production of high-end R600 cards, but AMD said that the main and the only reason for the postponing of presentation of the first R600 cards is company’s wish to present the whole line of R600 DX10 cards at the end of May which will, according to the AMD representatives opinion, be able to successfully compete with the Nvidia offer. Although we cannot fully agree that this decision is the best for AMD, before drawing any conclusions we will have to wait for the test results.
On the other hand, Nvidia partners were equally disappointed as AMD's, since Nvidia prohibited the demonstration of the new G84 / G86 chips. Keeping boredom at bay was MSI task, this company close to both groups, presented RV610 / RV630 and G84 / G86 cards on their booth. As it was expected, AMD and Nvidia were not happy because of this, but prior to military intervention, large number of passers-by were able to get familiar with the details. Mainstream DX10 cards from Nvidia will appear on the market during April, with models 8500 GT, 8600 GT and 8600 GTS. The first card will enable the entrance into DX10 world and limit the play of DX10 titles on very low resolutions. The players will certainly be interested in the other two cards since preliminary benchmark results we heard sound promising, although the width of the memory bus could pose the problem when playing with full details. GeForce 8600 GT comes as replacement for 7900 GS, while 8600 GTS inherits GeForce 7950 GT.
Both cards have 256MB GDDR3 memory with dual-DVI and HDMI which is optional for all partners. The prices of the new models should be in range between 190 and 220EUR for GeForce 8600 GTS, 130-160EUR for GeForce 8600 GT and 70 to 90EUR for 8500 GT. The time since the presentation of G80 high-end series Nvidia used for technological development, so new mainstream cards will bring improved support for PureVideo HD technology which will use the power of the graphic processor and therefore decrease the load on the central operating processor. The first tests showed that the improved technology on the Nvidia mainstream cards has better results compared to high-end series which is on the market since November. Theoretically speaking, this approach will enable buyers to enjoy Blu-ray or HD DVD content with much cheaper Nvidia graphic cards, and cheap processors from Intel or AMD, but the only problem in this idea is that the HD DVD or Blu-ray equipment for PC are currently more expensive than combination of cheap processor and graphic card.
Nvidia and its partners confirmed that new high-end cards based on G80 architecture are ready (off the record, those are Ultra and GX2 models) and that Nvidia does not intend to leave the leadership in performances to AMD. Among the interesting solutions based on the old chips we should mention Sapphire X1950 Pro Dual cards with two X1950 Pro chips enabling good quad-CrossFire, while PowerColor presented X1950 Pro and XT cards with efficient AC cooling. The first presentation of its products had company Zotac, a part of PC Partner. Zotac presented the first series of the graphic cards and the motherboards which mostly had referential design, but knowing the resources and the abilities of PC Partner, we can expect the breakthrough of Zotac to the graphic cards market.
After presenting its first graphic cards during CeBIT 2006, this year Foxconn presented a number of cards within "OC" series which offers 15% higher frequencies compared to the referential specifications. In this way Foxconn started the fight for the market of enthusiasts. To end the story about graphic cards we have good news about soon release of the graphic mobile processors with DX10 support from companies AMD, Intel and Nvidia. MSI demonstrated notebook computers with G84M MXM modules and Core 2 Duo processor within GX700 model, while the company also had the model (GX710) with RV630M chip and Turion 64 X2 processor.
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