At the recent 2003 Game Developer's Conference, both ATI and NVIDIA announced their latest graphics processors and product. It is going to be an exciting summer for the video card market and the consumer. Both companies are offering a wide range of products geared from the high-end gaming enthusiasts all the way to the average consumer. This fresh batch of competition from the two rivals is allowing the consumers to get the latest features at even lower prices.

ATI

ATI introduced three new graphics processors being offered in Pro and non-Pro but ends up being eight new products to be introduced into the market over the next couple of months. The one they promoted the most of course was the R350 graphics processor, the direct successor to the R300 used in the high performance Radeon 9700 line of graphics cards.

The R350 continues to use the .15 micron chip process but manages to squeeze some additional performance from the aging semiconductor process. Many of the technical features remain the same between the R300 and the R350 processor including 8 pixel pipelines and the 256-bit memory bus. The major advantages of the R350 come from its increased clock speed over the R300 (about 15% higher GPU clock and 10% memory clock), its addition of new pixel and vertex shader code and its refined and optimized Z-buffer code. There will be 3 versions of the Radeon 9800 cards based upon the R350 core: Radeon 9800 w/128MB, Radeon 9800 Pro w/128MB, and the Radeon 9800 Pro w/256MB. Prices for the initial Radeon 9800 Pro with 128MB of video memory will range around $400.

ATI's new mid-range chip, the RV350, is the most technically interesting of the three new chips as it is a good indication of what to expect from ATI in the coming years. The RV350 was completely designed from scratch using the new .13 micron chip process making it the first from ATI. Since it is a complete redesign from the R350 chip, it actually has a number of features that make it unique from the R350, something we didn't see from the RV300 compared to the R300. The most notable of these was the ability to completely redesign and improve the performance of the pixel and vertex shaders to be more efficient than the R350. Of course the RV350 will only have a 4 pixel pipelines and a 128-bit memory bus compared to the 8 pixel pipes and 256-bit memory bus of the R350, but the RV350 will actually be clocked higher. This means the overall performance will be lower than the 9800 based boards, but still very respectable. Estimated street prices range from a $150-$170 for Radeon 9600 boards and $175-$200 for the Radeon 9600 Pro boards when they are released.

The final new offering from ATI is the value line Radeon 9200 boards based on the RV280 graphics processor. This is really just an update of the older Radeon 9000 (RV250) based graphics boards. The chip still uses the same features and functions of the older RV250, but it now includes an AGP 8x compatible interface. It still only supports DirectX 8.1 pixel and vertex shaders so it will have limited future potential as more and more games are developed around DirectX 9. Expected street prices for the Radeon 9200 boards will be at or below $100.

ATI Processor Information (All numbers based on Pro versions):

NVIDIA

Not to be outdone by ATI's announcements at the 2003 GDC, NVIDIA released information about its mid and value range graphics processors that round out its new GeForceFX line of processors. The initial batch of GeForceFX 5800 Ultra boards are just now arriving to those individuals who pre-ordered them, but it the newly announced products won't start showing up in the markets till sometime in April.

NVIDIA's mid-range offering will come in the form of the GeForceFX 5600 line of boards based on the NV31 core. Based upon the testing numbers provided by NVIDIA during the conference, performance of the GeForceFX 5600 Ultra based boards would be between 60 to 120% faster than the current GeForce4 Ti4200 boards and 25% faster than the current GeForce4 4600 boards. The 5600 line of processor will be fully compatible with DirectX 9 and features the same vertex and pixel shaders as the 5800 Ultra processors. The main difference is only 4 pixel pipelines and a single texture per pipe rendering compared to the 5800's 8 pixels and 2 textures per pipe. Estimated street prices are expected to be around $200.

For the budget consumers, NVIDIA is also planning to release a fully DirectX 9 compliant video board with the same basic graphics features as the higher end processors in the GeForceFX line at a price as low as $79! They plan to do this through the introduction of the NV34 based GeForceFX 5200 line of graphics cards. This processor is built around the older .15 micron process but still posts some respectable features when compared to the higher end GeForceFX boards. While it will be fully DirectX 9 compliant, some key performance features such as color and z-compression will be missing. The performance numbers presented by NVIDIA show its performance to be between 90 to 140% faster than the GeForce4 MX boards, but this is really an unfair comparison because the GF4 MX boards lacked many technical features found in the Ti4200 line. Prices for the reference board are expected to be around $150 with another board to be below $100 but no technical specifications are available on the lower cost board.

NVIDIA Processor Information (All numbers based on Ultra versions):

The Coming Months

With the recent announcement of the various graphics processors and all of them expected to be available in the market by the end of April means that those considering buying a video card right now might want to hold off. Many of the new boards will offer higher performance and greater technology at costs either on par with current boards or in some cases potentially less. The most immediate effect is that the current crop of video cards based on the two manufacturer's graphics processors are dropping. Radeon 9700 Pro boards that were previously selling for as much as $400 can now be found as low as $300 from some retailers.

With all the product announcements there still is little hard information available so far on the real world performance of these boards. Many boards that have been reviewed so far on the net are based on prerelease boards and drivers. In general, the performance of the final production boards tends to be slightly higher due to improved graphics drivers from the manufacturers. It will be interested when the boards finally hit the market and we can start getting some real numbers.

Another benefit from the new product announcements will be in the quality of 3D visuals. With the development of boards that support all of the DirectX features for under $200, a broader range of consumers will have the technology available to use DirectX 9. This in turn will help to influence more game developers to start implementing many of the new features in their upcoming games.

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