“ATi and nVidia both launched mobile graphics chips yesterday, the first aimed at retaining ATi’s leadership of this market segment, while the nVidia part is designed to wrest the crown away from it. […] ATi’s part is the Mobility FireGL 7800, a high-end mobile workstation-oriented chip (hence the FireGL branding) that supports up to 64MB of 128-bit DDR SDRAM. The chip is clocked at 270MHz. […] nVidia’s NV17M is the successor to the GeForce2Go. The new part clocks in at 250MHz and supports up to 64MB of frame buffer memory.” Read the rest of the news report at TheRegister.
Obviously, nobody expects to be allowed to fix the bugs Nvidia put into their Windows drivers, but Nvidia made a big tactical blunder with their adoption of closed-source drivers for Linux. I doubt Nvidia will ever recover from this.
It needs a company with more management vision to present a serious long-term threat to ATI.
ATI needs to get some more QA into their drivers though, still. Although the Radeon drivers (I’ve got a 64DDR VIVO) have been much better than the drivers for the Rage series.
To me, the 3D image quality of the Radeon surpasses the GeForce, and I’ve got a thing for the underdog. đ
Now if only the Rage Mobility-P in my laptop was actually capable of doing 3D hardware accelaration, like the marketing literature said when I bought it. *sigh* Or if Dell would make a Mobile Radeon upgrade card…
– chrish