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[Demophobe]

Now, bear in mind that Nvidia has their sights on the enthusiast market going multi-SLI, which of course, is stupid. Economically, from a consumer standpoint, if they can't come up with a single core GPU that is powerful enough, then suck it up and get on with multi-cores on a single PCB llke ATI have done.

SLI and crossfire have not and will never become a "standard"...both incarnations remain buggy as ever (nice cards, how about some drivers?), even well past the point where it became a mature technology.

All of this messing around with single core, single card design is just buying them time while we get milked for shareholders and R&D. At least ATI are innovating at their own expense. They are technically in the red right now (AMD/ATI that is, and Phenom wasn't quite the kicker it was supposed to be), yet are still first to market with affordable, innovative products while Nvidia milk a basic architecture until it is bled dry (as are the consumers), then release the same tech amped up on speed and call it some crowd-pleasing name. They even reused an old ATI GPU number...9800 with a GTX tacked on.

Nvidia may be king of the speed hill, but they are also making other tops that nobody seems to be looking at too closely. The $200 market was vacant until ATI came back...what does that say about Nvidia, a very wealthy company now and the market leader all through the mainstream drought. It says thay were going for embedded chipset markets and onboard/budget solutions that fill their coffers, all the while paying little heed to gamers who are tired of dropping $600 every 6 months or gamers on a budget. Their all-or-nothing stance toward the market was nauseating.

So, ho-hum Nvidia. Blazing trails only in innovation isn't enough anymore. The computer market is moving to cheaper products, yet graphics remain the same. Get it together and eat some of your own cash for a while. ATI have learned humility the hard way, but it forced them to think carefully about things. Your market moves are unimpressive and your johnny-come-lately act looks pathetic.

[eamo]

Good points Demo.

I won't buy another GPU until one comes out that will run Crysis, or any game of that graphic level, at a comfortable minimum of 40 FPS. All settings maxed. And I don't want to pay more than 250 bucks for it.

For me, a new graphics card at a given price-point should pump out at least 50% more FPS that its predecessor.

There's a smoke and mirrors game going on with Nvidia's model numbers.......I'll let Tomshardware explain.....

The card we're testing today is the very first GeForce 9! The first surprise is that this new generation of cards is not being introduced at the high end, as has always been the case, but rather the midrange, mainstream price point. In reality, there's a very simple explanation for this phenomenon: the architecture behind this card is the same as that introduced on the GeForce 8, and hardly improved with the arrival of the midrange versions (the 8600 GT, then the 8800 GT, as has been Nvidia's custom since the GeForce 6 series).

A few weeks back, we criticized AMD's decision to call its cards based on the RV670 "Radeon HD 3000," but Nvidia's attitude is even more reprehensible given the extremely short list of differences - no new API supported and no reworking of the stream processors - between this GeForce 9600 GT and the GeForce 8800 GT. After GeForce 7800s that at the time already didn't really seem to deserve the name GeForce 6900, the Nvidia marketing department has gone even farther, and seems to have taken us back to the dark hours of the GeForce 4 MX. It's a disturbing sign of the new slowdown in evolution and technological competition that the two makers seem to be engaged in. Still, let's give credit where credit is due: the bang-for-the-buck ratio of the midrange solutions that have emerged since the end of 2007 is exceptional.