cM :: MORLEY|DIGITAL

Nearly a year and a half ago I wrote about the unique triple-core processor from AMD.  I felt, and still do, that it’s a great play by AMD to flank Intel’s dual-core and quad-core processors.  My focus in that article was the retail mentality of your average consumer.  Three is better than two.  That’s what a brick-and-mortar buyer will see.

And now that AMD has released its new 45nm Phenom II line-up, the press has responded much more favorably this round to AMD.  But what has received the most attention and acclaim have been the value X4 810 and the X3 parts.  Because of their low cost, overclockability, and excellent performance against Intel’s Core 2 lineup, AMD has once again found a way to position itself against its larger, cash-laden competitor.  And what may be considered AMD’s finest processor is the surprising Phenom II X3 720 Black Edition.

Recently I wrote about Intel’s Core i7.  It simply rocks.  But it simply doesn’t sell.  According to Q1 reports, the X58 chipset - the only chipset that can run the i7, will be 1.8% of its chipset sales.  Let’s give Intel some benefit of the doubt and assume that in the range of 50% of those chipset are mobile, where there is no i7, and the X58 would make up less than 4% of desktop chipset sales.  That’s well within the 5% enthusiast market I continue to talk about. (read these two posts, they’re important to understand my mindset here)

AMD knows this, and so does Intel.  The fight’s between Phenom II and Core 2 until Intel decides to drop an anvil and make Core i7 mainstream.  By all accounts that won’t be until Q4 of this year or Q1 of next year.  Intel’s best selling chipsets are those used by Core 2 processors.

Till then AMD has a very, very competitive product that combines high frequency, performance out-flanking dual-core processors, a great price, and even a bone thrown to the enthusiast with its overclockability.

Combined with AMD’s strong 780G and 790GX chipsets and fantastic Radeon HD 4000 series lineup, AMD finally has the right mix of product to make a stand in this market.  

One company I haven’t mentioned in this mix but should - NVIDIA.  Remember they make chipsets that are readily available, have design wins, and are extremly powerful for both AMD Phenom and Intel Core 2 processors.  They may be having a spat with Intel over Core i7 licensing, but for now it’s not going to hurt them in the pocket book.

[Disclosure:  I run a Core 2 Quad Q9550 in my main rig.  I currently have a GeForce GTX 280 and a Radeon HD 4870 X2 I play with.  I have two laptops with Intel chips and chipsets and one with an AMD processor with NVIDIA chipset.  My media center has an AMD processor with an AMD chipset.  I am a technologist that just loves tech and am brand-agnostic.  I think all these companies make great products that sometimes you just have to use in an manner fitting to their price and performance.  My opinions are my own and do not necessarily represent those of SolidWavePC or Fluid Digital.]

When chip developers, be it Intel, AMD, or NVIDIA, design new technology, they tend to stratify the product in a way that will appeal to various markets.

They do this several ways.  They can speed-bin the parts and cull the fastest performers and market them under a premium label, or they can go the other way and take lesser performing parts and market them to the mainstream.  Everyone, in fact, does both.  Either way they are able to get the most out of their research and development dollars pumped into the product while delivering value to the consumer.

Focusing on the graphics card market for a moment, take a look at AMD/ATI and NVIDIA’s products.  They feature various amounts of stream processors operating at varying frequencies.  These processors are paired up with different types of memory configured in varying capacities and bandwidth.

Now, there seems to be accusations (mostly by fanboys in forums - but also by snide remarks from tech press) levied against NVIDIA right now that they are somehow being dishonest in what is being called a “rebranding” of their G92 chip.  This chip formed the basis of the 8800GT and the 9800 series solutions.  It’s a powerful chip that delivers great performance.  It was derived from the G80 chip, the original 8800 GTX, which was the reigning speed king for 18 months.  Since then NVIDIA has been able to shrink the chip, increase clock speeds, reconfigure the types of memory it works with, and even remove stream processors to create products that are priced to meet market needs and compete with AMD/ATI.  The whole time making more peformance available to more people at better price points.

Now that NVIDIA has had a whole new architecture available to them for several months now, the GT200, NVIDIA needs to be able to do the same thing - stratify.  The 65nm GT200 is used in the GTX 260 and 280.  The 55nm GT200b are utilized in the GTX 285 and 295.  These are high end components that serve a small market niche and are large, power hungry, and expensive.  They’re also silly fast.  

One thing to keep in mind at this point is that the GT200 does not introduce any new feature sets.  Compared to the GeForce 9-series, it “merely” features more stream processors and memory bandwidth.  It’s not a DirectX 11 part.  It’s just pure muscle based on the same architecture dating back to the G80.  And that’s not a bad thing in the least.  AMD does the same thing.  The very successful Radeon HD 4800 series are built upon the same basic philosophy as the not-so-successful Radeon HD 2900.  They just tweaked it, shrunk it, dded stream processors, and repositioned it.

So NVIDIA has to make the choice on how to “fill down” their product stack.  Given their GTX 200 naming convention, the obvious choices would be something like the GTS 250 or the GTS 240, which is what the tech press is reporting.  Given that the current GTX 260 has 216 stream processors and the GTX 285 has 240, how would you design the value parts that NVIDIA needs to compete in the mainstream if you were in their product group?

Well, let’s start by subtracting stream processors and some memory bandwidth.  128 stream processors is pretty hefty, wouldn’t you think?  I mean, that’s as many as the recently released HP Firebird has.  And that machine is getting a lot of attention!  And let’s chop that memory bandwidth up - boy those 512-bit traces make for an expensive PCB.  Let’s go 256-bit.  OK…next step.  Do we take our large, expensive GT 200 chip and disable stream processors or…wait a moment, don’t we have a chip that already meets this feature set?

Yeah, it’s the G92.  Which, btw, will get a nice performance boost as well.

It’s good for the consumers.  They now have a product lineup that will make sense from top to bottom, both pricing and performance.  There is nothing nefarious about what NVIDIA is doing.  They are pricing and positioning these new products against their GT200-based bretheren.  And the G92 nips at the heals of the GTX 260, so it’s a smart chip to start with.  Consumers win.

It’s good for the channel.  This economy sucks.  But we still need to move new product.  These parts are new.  They make it easier for us to talk to the customer about value vs performance.  Boutiques, system builders, retailers, e-tailers, and distys win.

It’s good for NVIDIA and their shareholders.  NVIDIA is able to continue to make money on a product that they originally designed over 2 years ago.  Their architecture has legs and as long as they can continue to deliver value to the customer and bring in profits, it will only help them be a stronger company.  And that’s a good thing for everyone because:

It’s good for competition.  Do you think that AMD stands idly by and lets NVIDIA make these movements in a vacuum?  No, they change their pricing and products accordingly.  Who knows, maybe it’ll spark a new mid-range GPU throwdown.  

And who doesn’t like a good cage fight?

Never has there been a better time to be a PC gamer.  With all the great titles available now including Far Cry 2, Dead Space, Left4Dead, etc. I just don’t have enough time to bask in all the awesomeness.  Bolstered in no small part by great PC hardware products from every player out there, 3D graphics have never looked so good nor performed so well.

But all’s not been so in the world of graphics accelerators.  The API showdown of the late 90s that sputtered out in the first part of this decade produced some truly awful and horried graphics accelerators.  The shift from dedicated accelerators to 2D/3D combo accelerators and the emergence of DirectX and downfall of Glide brought forth stupendously dumb products, vaporware, and massive disappointments.

So in this festive holiday season, let’s get our Grinch on and take a trip down memory lane:

#6 Intel i740 - Release Date Early 1998

Intel’s i740 was their first foray into the 3D market. Some research firms said outlandish things like “Make no mistake about it, Intel’s entry into the 3D graphics is a wake up call to the industry and marks a significant milestone for 3D graphics capabilities that will forever change the landscape of the industry.”  Wow, that’s amazing, and I’m sure it was copied directly from an Intel slide deck.  However, the i740 was a massive disappointment.  It was designed to take full advantage of AGP that included AGP texturing, and on board memory was used exclusively for the frame buffer.  This meant the video card had to fight for precious memory  bandwidth with the CPU and other devices in your PC.  PCI variants of this card often turned out to be faster than their AGP brethren because both textures and the frame buffer had to be stored locally, mitigating the rather slow AGP texturing process.  

Furthermore, the i740 was one of the first cards to optimize for synthetic benchmarks, getting everyone excited about this low-cost, kick ass solution that was going to change the game.  However, it only provided  competition to the Riva 128 and got absolutely destroyed by the dominating Voodoo II.  Some may say that the Voodoo II was 3D only and required a 2D solution in addition, but remember that most PCs sold back then had built in 2D video to begin with.  And the i740 only had a couple of months before the Riva TNT hit the market.  By January of ‘99, most review publications didn’t even include the i740 in their roundups with newcomers like the Banshee, Savage3D, and Rage128 coming down the pipe.  Personally, I used my i740 merely for a 2D companion to my Voodoo II SLI setup.

#5 3DFX Voodoo Banshee - Release Date Late 1998

With NVIDIA, Matrox, and ATI all with their eye on the prize, 3DFX was the company to beat.  They had mind share.  Their GLide API was considered the best in the business.  But emerging standards such as Direct3D from Microsoft and the cross-platform and highly versatile OpenGL were make strides.  So much so that 3DFX was forced to create drivers to support these competing APIs.  The Voodoo Banshee came on the heels of the 3D-only Voodoo II and was designed to take on 2D/3D accelerators like the nVidia/nVIDIA/NVIDA Riva TNT.  It wasn’t the first 2D/3D combo from 3DFX, the first being the Voodoo Rush, and it’s a toss-up as to which was a bigger failure.  However, the Rush was released in 1997, disqualifying it for this list.

While the Riva TNT couldn’t stand up to the Voodoo II because it had to be clocked lower because of heat (90MHz vs a planned 125MHz, actually making a it a candidate for this list), it shined against the Voodoo Banshee that discarded the second TMU (texture management unit) design of the venerable Voodoo II.  While a hit with the value crowd, it marked the first time that 3DFX started losing market share to NVIDIA.  OEMs by that point were hooked on the TNT’s support for 32-bit color, which the Banshee did not support, and 3DFX would not support until the Voodoo 4/5, released nearly 2 years later.  By that time the nails were being hammered into 3DFX, which was later bought by NVIDIA.  Personally, I think 3DFX should have never bought STB.

#4 NVIDIA GeForce FX 5800 Ultra - Release Date Early-Mid 2003

The first fruit of the buyout of 3DFX, the GeForce FX 5800 was probably one of the most anticipated and most hyped NVIDIA graphics chips ever.  And it was the biggest, most abject failure since the NV1.  Nicknamed “The Dustbuster,” the GeForce FX 5800 Ultra was the noisy attempt from NVIDIA to reclaim the speed crown from ATI’s balls-to-the-wall Radeon 9700 Pro and its successor, the 9800 Pro.  It failed miserably.  The problem was the emergence of the importance of “shader” calculations in DirectX 9.  This threw the simple concept of pixel pipelines out the window. 

NVIDIA hyped up its Shader Model 2.0a features as the “dawn of cinematic computing,” but ended up falling well short of the competition in speed.  Keep in mind this was well after the 9700 Pro was released.  Its poor performance is attributed primarily to two factors.  The first was its mixed precision programming of FP16 and FP32, the former was lower than the required standard, and the latter was just plain slow.  ATI’s 9700 Pro operated at FP24 100% of the time, which was the required DirectX 9 standard.  The second issue was that the card’s performance relied heavily on the driver’s shader compiler.  Properly sorted and programmed, updated drivers could significantly boost the GeForce 5800 Ultra’s performance.  Without them, pipeline stalls and poor instruction order would severely cripple the card in some games.  This required optimization would lead NVIDIA to create one of the most important programs in company history: “The Way It’s Meant To Be Played” - allowing game developers complete access to technical resources to make their games better.  And hopefully better on NVIDIA cards.

Speaking of developers, probably the most embarrassing thing about the FX debacle was Valve’s Gabe Newell making the announcement that in his new blockbuster, Half Life 2, the updated FX 5900 Ultra flagship was no faster than ATI’s mid-range Radeon 9600.  Furthermore, because of this, Valve decided to force FX-series video cards render in DirectX 8.1 mode, its only strong point.  Ouch.

#3 S3 Savage 2000 - Release Date Late 1999

I have a strong loathing for this particular card.  See, back in the 90’s, S3 was still a contender.  It was during a time that anyone could snatch the performance crown with their next video card release.  And their proprietary S3TC texture compression was truly cool and made a real difference in 3D quality.  The flame wars of the late nineties over Matrox, NVIDIA, 3DFX, ATI, and S3 were epic.  All you forum fanbois of today are a bunch of weaklings compared to the utter rage that these discussions invariably led to.

But, back to the trash that was the Savage 2000. At the turn of the century,  Hardware Transformation and Lighting (TnL) were the buzz words, with NVIDIA’s GeForce (Geometry Force) SDR and DDR being the cards to beat.  S3 announced in 1999 that they had an answer.  Its awesome clock speed (on paper) of 175MHz meant it had a higher theoretical fill rate than its GeForce competition.  The hype on this card verged on the hysterical.

But it was all too good to be true.  Analysis showed that its TnL engine contained incredibly fewer transistors than did the GeForce chips, which raised some eyebrows, and it shipped without TnL enabled in the drivers.  Combined with a very disappointing drop in production clock speeds of 125MHz (vs 175MHz or up to 200MHz according to some sources), the Savage 2000 was a ho-hum product at launch with unpredictable performance.  To make matters worse, when drivers shipped that “enabled” hardware TnL, it was shown that they had no impact on performance, leading most to believe that hardware TnL was broken, poorly implemented, or just not there at all.  Driver updates ceased in 2002.  It was the last video card S3 designed before being sold to VIA.  Of course that turned out just great for them.  </sarcasm>

#2 TWO WAY TIE!!

Matrox Parhelia - Released 2002

The Matrox Parhelia was long overdue for Matrox.  Their very competitive and very popular G400 was getting long in the tooth.  ATI was gearing up to destroy everyone with the 9700 Pro and the GeForce 4 was the current king of the hill; seemingly untouchable.

The Parhelia had amazing specs.  It had a 256-bit memory bus, but was the first to feature a 512-bit “ring bus.”  Sound familiar?  However, it featured absolutely ZERO bandwidth saving features.  NVIDIA and ATI had LMA II and HyperZ, but Matrox had nothing.  It supported ridiculously high 16x fragment anti-aliasing, which was impressive.  It also had fantastic 2D performance thanks to its 10-bit, 400MHz RAMDAC.  

The problem was that the top of the line 256MB Parhelia at $399 got its ass kicked by the older GeForce 4 Ti 4600.  I mean it got destroyed.  It basically performed at the level of the previous-generation GeForce 3.  Its 4×4 pixel pipeline design offered zero real-world advantages.

But the worst part was that it was supposed to support DirectX 9.0 shaders, but didn’t.  Later in its life Matrox acknowledged that their vertex shaders were not DirectX 9-compliant, as advertised.  But it didn’t matter, the Parhelia sucked in DX9 titles, even without more complicated DX9 shader code to run.

In the end, it was concluded that Matrox engineers simply weren’t as talented as NVIDIA’s and ATI’s.  Ouch.  Matrox continues to pump out professional cards that perform well in 2D and multimedia applications, but never would they set foot in the consumer 3D arena.  Well, unless you count the M-Series announced in June, which FINALLY added support for Windows Vista Aero.  Double ouch.

(Silver Lining: the Parhelia chip founds its stride in Matrox’s HD video editing solution, which I absolutely loved when I worked for BOXX Tecnologies.)

ATI Rage Fury MAXX (Dual Rage128 Pro) - Released January 2000

OMG, a DUAL graphics chip video card? WOW.  Unlike the Voodoo II with its two separate texture management units, the Rage Fury MAXX featured two full Rage 128 chips that worked in tandem on a single card to accelerate 3D games.  The method that this was acheived by was called “Alternate Frame Rendering” - one chip would render one frame, the other chip would render the next.

There were several problems with this.  ATI’s Rage128 chip was crap when it was launched - nearly NINE MONTHS LATE.  The drivers were abysmal.  I know, I bought one for $249 from Best Buy the friggin’ day it came out.  Back to the MAXX though - while the Rage128 drivers had matured, so had the chip, and there was tough competition from NVIDA and 3DFX with the GeForce series and the Voodoo 3 series.  So ATI decided to slap two of them together on one card and call it day.  Believe me, it almost worked.  In late December 1999 the early previews were promising.  It was beating the GeForce SDR at higher resolutions but also at a higher price tag.  By February of 2000, however, the reviews were swinging back towards NVIDIA’s corner, and the GeForce DDR provided better frame rates than the MAXX.  Combined with its lack of hardware TnL and higher price tag, reviewers had a hard time what to make of this card.

In the end, and the reason that this card is high up my list is because it flat out did not work as advertised in Windows 5.x operating systems, meaning Windows 2000 and XP.  In these operating systems, which did not support the method ATI used for dual AGP graphics, the ATI Rage Fury MAXX only worked in single chip mode.  Face, meet palm. 

#1 BitBoys Glaze3D - Never released

Oh boy there was nothing more fun than taking jabs at BitBoys and their never-released Glaze3D.  Seriosly, this was the first time I had every heard the word “vaporware.”   Its specs seemed to magically morph every time a new card was released by NVIDIA, 3DFX, or ATI to make it look like it was a killer solution.

First announced in 2000, the BitBoys Glaze3D specs would place it as the equivalent of the 3-years-away GeForce FX 5200 Ultra while its claimed performance would place it at the same level as a GeForce 3 Ti 500.  I remember very well their claims of 200 frames per second in Quake III.  They released screen shots of what they said it was capable of and they looked as good as a DirectX 9 video game.  Remember, this was back in 2000.

It was a friggin’ joke which would be released first, the Glaze3D, or Duke Nukem Forever.  I said more than once that if BitBoys every released a consumer desktop graphics card I’d grind it up and drink it in a shake.

While BitBoys claimed that bug-hunting and production issues kept them from releasing the Glaze3D, it didn’t keep them from talking about new vaporware chips they were developing.  Subsequent vaporware featured embedded DRAM for stupid amounts of bandwidth to be used on anti-aliasing, as well as ever evolving support for new DirectX standards.  In the end, BitBoys focused on handheld graphics, and were eventually picked up by ATI in 2006.  So now AMD owns them.  So I guess they showed us.

 

Dishonorable mentions:  

2900XT for being a big, hot letdown and not able to beat the nearly year old 8800GTX.  

The 7950GX2 Quad SLI for being a total bitch that only boutiques and certain OEMs got initial access to it.  Oh, and for not having Vista support till it was completely irrelevant.

3DLabs P10/P9 - what happened to this “game changing” chip?  It made its way into workstations but the big buzz was the purported advanced performance for consumers.  Oh well.

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I gotta tell you what, on the heels of AMD annoucing they’ve sold 2,000,000 Radeon HD 4800 series graphics cards, this video is not only hysterical, but indicates a more confident AMD/ATI - a company that is having a personality disorder right now with their lopsided strengths in the CPU/GPU market.

This video, however, makes digs at NVIDIA in ways that only geeks understand.  Hinting at manufacturing processes and defaults, memory speeds, etc.  The reference to the X58 is dubious as NVIDIA has said publicly that they will certify BIOSs for native X58 SLI support without requiring motherboard manufacturers to license MCP 200 chips - that’s only necessary if you want maximum bandwidth on multiple x16 slots.  But like I’ve said, the value of multiple graphics cards these days are dubious at best.

These “viral” videos are great fun to watch.  But it’s preaching to the choir.  It’s not going to prompt consumer behavior.  It’s not going to drive consumers to ditch NVIDIA and go ATI.  And if your branding campaign only creates awareness and doesn’t deliver to the bottom line, you win a big bag of fail.

A good example of similar marketing that is successful would be the Apple I’m a Mac commercials.  They aren’t successful because they are funny or witty.  They are successful because they communicate the simple premise that Macs are fun, easy, and reliable, and PCs are boring, bloated, and broken.  Of course, I would argue that most I’m a Mac commercials are down right lies at worst, and I chuckle every time I watch them on my ultra-reliable, uber-cool Vista Media Center PC with digital cable tuners.  But the point is that Apple has effectively convinced a large segment of the mainstream market the fundamental idea that Mac = good and PC = bad.  Republicans and Democrats do this all the time.

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But Apple is beginning to lose focus.  While the G4saurus video is cute and funny to people like me and most of you who read this blog, it’s really just AMD/ATI’s engineering group giving NVIDIA’s engineering group the metaphorical finger through their marketing department.  Apple has done basically the same thing with their latest I’m a Mac commercial - their marketing department is giving Microsoft’s marketing department the metaphorical finger after Microsoft’s relatively successful, relevant, and above all positive  response to the I’m a Mac commercials.  Of course you know I’m talking about the commercials where people from all walks of life state they are a PC and they are all different.  It’s simple, it’s relevant, and it’s positive.  It doesn’t stoop to Apple’s level and I think they’re quite enjoyable.  But it doesn’t prompt consumer action.  That’s where Mojave comes in.  Just check it out for yourself, I don’t need to expound upon it here.

My point is, while AMD has delivered the funniest viral video I’ve seen in this business, they need to come up with an effective campaign that not only creates awareness, but brings more customers to the table.  And that means they need a successful Phenom II launch, stay focused on the platform story, and continue to keep the channel happy.  Wait, where’d marketing fit into all that?  ;-)

The days of needing multiple graphics cards in your PC are officially over. While game engines have become more complex, and Crysis still confounds most people’s PCs, the fact is that we have reached a pixel density plateau when it comes to monitor sizes and the GPU battle grounds are being fought at 1680×1050 resolutions or lower¹. And the simple fact of the matter is that at that resolution nearly every game on the planet can be enjoyed by the mainstream gamer utilizing a single graphics card. The hardware side of the gaming industry has gotten that good.

But don’t tell that to AMD or NVIDIA or even Intel. Don’t tell that to the system builders, but would somebody please tell that to the tech journalists? The fact is that multi-card technology, not multiple GPUs on the same PCB, allows chipset manufacturers to stratify their offerings (read: charge more money), promising more performance and more “expandability” – but costing you more money.  The fact is that these technologies are aimed squarely at the 5% uber-enthusiast market and system builders who need to win synthetic benchmarks by 3% in order to pay their salaries that month. 

Expandability or upgradeability are the buzz words that these companies use to lure you to their higher end chipsets. They want you to think you need a second or third graphics card. But most effectively, they communicate to you that you are buying “future expandability” that will “future-proof” your PC. And they’ve effectively brainwashed the mainstream tech media into believing the same thing. It’s hard to find a review of a gaming system that doesn’t include the ability to add a second graphics card where the reviewer doesn’t “ding” the builder for it. 

But nobody has ever really studied the usage patterns and buying behaviors of customers who purchase multi-video card capable motherboards and SLI or CrossFire capable graphics cards. It is that question that intrigues me, and it is simple logic that leads me to the conclusion I have written in the opening sentence of this post. 

The main problem is, if you aren’t gaming at XHD resolutions that 24”+ monitors support, spending money on two high end graphics cards is a complete waste of money, and buying two mid-range graphics cards is pointless as a single high-end card that may feature two of the same GPU on one PCB can easily meet or beat it for around the same combined price. Factor in the total cost of ownership of forgoing a more expensive chipset designed for multi-video card support, and you really need to make sure you’re spending your money the right way.

Additionally, if you’ve spent your money on an XHD monitor, and only have a budget left over for a single high end graphics card, never mind the fact that you perhaps bought an unbalanced configuration, but the odds of a better single card solution being available by the time you can afford that second card are high. Why do you think EVGA offers a 90-day trade-up program? It’s essentially an insurance policy against the age-old truism that your system is obsolete the day you buy it. 

Don’t take my word for it. Kyle and Brent at [H]ard|OCP have been shoving the term “real world benchmarks” in our faces for so many years now that every piss-ant rag on the internet and in print uses the terminology without really understanding what it means. But if you really look at what [H] video card reviews show, you’ll find that at 1680×1050 resolutions and lower, my premise holds. From there it’s a simple matter of adding up the total cost of ownership to reach the playable settings (meaning a smooth gaming experience.) So be sure that you aren’t blindly buying a dual or triple-graphics capable motherboard for $200-$300 when a significantly cheaper, and perhaps a bit more boring, solution will suffice, allowing you to spend more money on a powerful, single video card that will better serve your needs. 

1. Source: Valve Steam Hardware survey, November 2008. 96% of players have resolutions set to 1680×1050 or lower. Sample size: ~1.7 million users.