The halo effect
Having the overall performance leadership isn't just about selling a few top-end cards, it's also about the ‘halo effect' - the trickle down of brand kudos that comes with having a widely acclaimed product. This phenomenon has been associated with the resurgence of the Apple Mac brand on the back of the success of the iPod so it's not insignificant.
"It gets people interested in your brand as long as you can support it in all segments," says Del Rizzo. "The 4850 is not selling well in US etail. The 4870 is selling a bit better. Are people going to look at 4870 X2 reviews and say ‘I'm going to buy an ATI card'? A single great product from AMD isn't going to erase years of brand inequality. If AMD is able to deliver for years then maybe, but let's see."
"AMD is primarily a CPU company and they have problems to overcome there, that may inhibit continued success in GPUs. At the end of the day it's about more than just coming to the market with one interesting product."
But NVIDIA's counter-offensive isn't just about slagging off AMD. It has also been trying to make a big noise about all the other things a GPU can do other than just process graphics. Principal among these are PhysX - which allows separate processing of physical events like collisions and explosions within games - and CUDA - which is a programming language for creating applications to run on the GPU rather than the CPU.
That's all great, but the problem PhysX had in the years before NVIDIA bought the company behind it - Ageia - earlier this year, was that there were no games written to utilise PhysX. So it was pretty useless to most. The same accusation has also been levelled at CUDA: where are the applications? "There are 40 games coming out with PhysXin the next seven months; over 20 this year, and you're going to see at least three or four more consumer apps coming out for CUDA this fall," says Del Rizzo.
PhysX in action
