As Nvidia falters, Advanced Micro Devices’ ATI graphics unit is on the rise, spurred by “radical” shifts in the market, according to Mercury Research, which tracks the market for GPUs or graphics processing units.
As Nvidia falters, Advanced Micro Devices’ ATI graphics unit is on the rise, spurred by “radical” shifts in the market, according to Mercury Research, which tracks the market for GPUs or graphics processing units.
With all the support AMD/ATI have been giving to OSS projects in the for of docs, code and devs it’s hard to fault them, unless you are one of those Nv fanboi’s that think that VDPAU is mana from heaven and nothing AMD can do is good.
I’m looking forward to what becomes of the OSS Gallium drivers for the HD series hardware, soon the feature sets should be implemented to a point where it will make sense to start optimizing the code for speed.
I’m also looking forward to what their chipset docs can do for the Coreboot project as well as what OpenCL can do for various apps as I’ve been looking at building a new HTPC.
Thinking that an all DAAMIT system would do nicely with an Phenom 2 e910 quad, a Powercolor Go Green HD5750 and an 890GX mobo with sideport VRam for the HD4290 so as to set the bios to make the IGP only use it’s own dedicated VRam instead of dipping into system ram but using the HD5750 as the output card leaving the HD4290 as a slow, but dedicated OpenCL processor.
Paired up with an SSD, low noise cooler like a Scythe Kabuto and a Seasonic X series PSU the box should be essentially silent while being able to handle most any game that works on Linux either natively or via Wine at 1920×1080.
So here’s to hoping that AMD can have the same success with the HD6 series as they have enjoyed with the HD5 series and their next series of CPUs is able to more then match Intel’s offerings.
With the latest refresh of Mac Pro and iMac they’ve got 100% ATI so I wonder whether we’ll see an ATI GPU’s appearing in MacBook/MacBook Pro’s soon. The biggest disappointment for me so far with nVidia is the crap drivers with no information as to when or if we’ll see some drivers that don’t royally suck.
I wonder though whether nVidia should take a gamble and buy out who ever owns VIA x86 CPU’s given Intel’s refusal to play nice – does nVidia the cash and manpower to pull off such a coup?
I’ve been saying that since the ATI buyout, that Nvidia really should buy up VIA and get into the x86_64 game, it’s not like they haven’t been pushed out of the chipset market by both AMD and Intel, they must be hoping like hell that after chipgate and the GTX4 flop that the Gameboy 3DS(built around Nv’s Tegra ARM chipset) takes off, but history hasn’t been kind to 3D devices, we all know about the problems for anyone that has less then perfect vision when it comes to 3D as well as how bad implementations cause even normal people have headaches after only half an hour.
Only thing is, will the Nano scale up to a 3+Ghz 4+ core without massive investments, I.E. can they even get close to Intel midrange performance within the first 2 years post buyout.
If they could pull it off it would do wonders for the market having a 3rd real option and they would force Intel to actually try to make a GPU, or at least make Intel hire someone like PowerVR or Matrox to try and make them a decent performing GPU since if OpenCL takes off that is where things will head.
slight correction. The 3ds doesn’t use tegra chipset. http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/multimedia/display/20100621111638_Nint…
Ah, interesting, last I had heard Nintendo was looking at the Tegra, so it looks like there aren’t any big players aside from MS using it in the Zune and the now defunct Kin… They can’t be happy about that…
X86 licenses are non transferable. If NVIDIA were to buy VIA, they couldn’t access the x86 license without having to renegotiate with Intel.
” The biggest disappointment for me so far with nVidia is the crap drivers with no information as to when or if we’ll see some drivers that don’t royally suck.”
What exactly is wrong with NVIDIA’s drivers? Same could be said about ATI’s, who actually had a longer and more illustrious history of sucky drivers.