My ATI

Since the launch of the 5870, I was never really impressed by it. Set with the simple goal of doubling everything in the previous flagship, architecturally it left little for the technology enthusiast to scrutinize, taking what we already knew and just expanding it. This resulted in performance bound by limitations instilled in the design of a graphics pipeline dating back several years, and not a particularly forward-looking one even then. Certainly some tweaks were made, mainly to do with caches and registers and low-level things of that nature, but the overall layout remained, itself strictly a product of a general analysis of current-day graphics engines.

Weathering all expectations was the realization of a meager 40% gain over the 4890, a number that's since ballooned to about 58% average under a more modern selection of games and drivers. Clearly a card that was more a victim of the times than anything else; a ceiling imposed by the limited demands of contemporary software.

Taiwan Semi-(bad)Conduct

NVIDIA has a problem. It's got a bad chip launch on its hands: it's hot and uses a lot of power, it's huge and yields suck, and it hasn't nearly hit performance targets. Worst of all, they're stuck with that for a whole year before the option for a die shrink shows up to fix all their woes.

TSMC has been promising that 28nm would be well ready by this year. But as reported by The Inq and a very good news article by Xbit Labs, they might barely make it out by the end of this year, with GPU-suitable versions only being ready by early next year. Also mentioned in the Xbit article (and here as well), 32nm has been scrapped, so that leaves NVIDIA no other alternative but to wait, and thus so must we.

FX Reincarnated?

I held off writing another blog post for a couple months just waiting for Fermi. I didn't have much else to write about, and as far as tech-related stuff goes, Fermi was the biggest thing on my mind. I've already said pretty much everything else I'd ever want to say about it, and there wouldn't be anything new to comment on until it finally released. (I did think about writing a rambling about Bioshock 2 but I didn't have anything to say about that that hadn't already been said elsewhere.) Since its release, it was just a matter of setting aside the time to do it.

The last six months have been agonizing. I remember the day the 5870 came out. I had WoW running in the background and a webpage sitting there in front of me with a NewEgg listing of all the 5870s available, all of them $380. I had to will myself not to pull the trigger on one, because NVIDIA might have something much better right around the corner, and it might be stupid not to at least wait and see. Usually in the tech world that's always the best policy, but this is one of the few times I'm kicking myself for not indulging in some impulse buying.