Fermi, late party crasher?

For those who doesn't know. Fermi is the codename for the new nVidia GPU released, or graphicscard since the specs were with memory and everything, now this was suppose to come and blow the competition away(ATI/AMD), now one thing I would like to say, I'm a very optimistic guy, almost to a fault, but when someone is delaying a release of something, even I'm not positive, and you will start to see the fanboys who will cheer the product even if it fails. Let's go back some years.. Back to the end of 2002 and the beginning of 2003, ATI had at that time already released a new impressive GPU the 9700 series, or R300, this card did actually blow it's competition away, nVidia had the Gefore 4 TI series, and they didn't really stand a chance, so nVidia were about to release something new and interesting, but it was delayed, and a lot of the same things were said about it as there were said about the Fermi, and the same fanboys where all happy about it, I were skeptical, although not as much as I were with Fermi, and trust me I weren't any ATI fanboy, I had a Geforce 4 TI 4200 at that time. So what happened with nVidia back then? well they released the Geforce FX 5800 later known as the DustBuster!(not by nVidia of course.), this was the definition of fail, the card tanked, it was hot and needed to use a noisy 2 slot cooler, the first of it's kind so this thing was light green when you saw it, and there were made jokes about it, and one that stuck was DustBuster. And of course it didn't blow the competition away, in some tests it even got beaten by the Geforce 4 TI4600, nVidia were quick to release the FX5900 and started competing on price which was the only reason I ended up buying a FX5900 in the end.

before that I wanted 9700 Pro or the later released 9800 series. Don't get me wrong, I had a whole lot of fun with my FX5900, it was the time of Bios flashing on graphics cards, which in normal terms mean, renaming you graphics card, the thing is usually when more cards are released, like the FX5900 and the FX5950, there's a big chance they are sharing the same GPU, and you just need to either overclock them using an application, or force them into to "thinking" they are this other card. The main difference between FX5900 and FX5950 was the amount of memory, 5900 had 128Mb usually, and the 5950 had 256Mb usually, well I bought an Albatron FX5900 with 256Mb memory, so I was pretty happy when I succesfully got it to boot up with the name FX5950, and it wasn't as easy as it sounds, because I had to make sure the timings were right, there's a lot to fiddle around with. but yes, moving along.

So when I heard the same about Fermi, I was expecting the worst, and here's why, when someone delays a release it's not because they are trying to improve it, it's usually because they are trying to fix it, and usually it's a rush to fix it, so yeah expect bad results, the same happened with Intel, when the Prescott was released.

But the Fermi came out, so how does the results look? well not as bad as the FX5800 for sure, but not great either, only 10% better in some games than the Radeon HD5870, and 150$ more expensive, plus a much higher power consumption, in fact someone showed that you were better off if you bought 2x HD5770 and ran them in Crossfire(Dual card mode), now there is another side to this, the Fermi is also used for nVidia's HPC(High Power Computing) or CUDA project, wich is using the GPU to make calculations many times faster than any AMD or Intel CPU ever could. And the Fermi does pretty well in that, and that's all great, but if they focus too much on that, ATI will take over the gaming marked, Intel tried lately to make their own GPU and Intel is the biggest tech company out there, even they had to abandon it because you simply can't jump into the market like that, many have tried, over and over again we see they won't succeed, Via, Sis, and Intel, all companies that looked like they had something interesting, but either had something that failed or abandoned it altogether. So nVidia might make the best HPC processors ever, but that won't help them keep up in the gamer marked.

Some people might notice I'm focusing on high end cards here, there's also the mid range, but yeah there's almost no competition, ATI/AMD dominates with the only DirectX 11 midrange cards out there, now DirectX is basically what effects you will see used in games, one good example of this is Doom 3, play it in DX8.1 and you will notice the lack of some effects like heat emissions and such, while in DX9 they will be there, and they will run nicely since the card is optimized for it. I hope we see some midrange from nVidia but something tells me they just aren't focused on that part of the market anymore, but we shall see, I want competition all over the place.

So yeah, I think nVidia need to get back in the game because someone who isn't a fanboy wouldn't buy a Fermi/GTX480, unless they really have too much money and don't mind their power bill being raped.

Currently ATI/AMD seems most attractive although I am a little sad they won't be seeing more competition on high end because currently the HD5870 and HD5970(wich is in fact faster than Fermi) are priced too high, and yeah some competition would probably have changed that, you can't really blame a company for making a nice profit when they can.