14 DAY TRIAL // Although the beginning of this year announced a deep falling for ATI, it seems that the company prepares a strong revolutionary comeback as it unveils a new weapon in the war for the all-game-graphics supremacy, the 7xx series of graphics cards. While Nvidia was celebrating its early victory on the graphics field, being all over the first pages lately, ATI quietly planned its revenge with the launch of the 7xx series.
By the end of the last year, all seemed hopeless for ATI and everyone would bet on the imminent fall of the company, but things were to make a turn with the launch of X2 cards. ATI took the lead and forced Nvidia to respond with the GX2 cards. While ATI provides full support for three or four-way CrossFireX, though only under Windows Vista, Nvidia's cards lack most of the SLI features. The same happens with the "hybrid" part, where the cards lose much both in power and in frame rate.
ATI planned in detail its comeback, and the R770/R700 cards are expected to enable the company take the lead once again. The idea is that ATI focused on making smaller GPUs, unlike the big ones coming from Nvidia.
The 3870X2 was only a pioneer in the field, but it did the trick. All lies in a simple PCIe switch. With this series, the design consists of a bridge that shares memory, the GDDR5 that is. Your guess is right, there will be two GPUs sharing the same memory set.
There is much to gain through this concept, mainly a simplified design, lower chip costs, as well as a fast reach on the market. The cost is significantly lowered, only about 1.25 for two fully functional products that users will get. The ATI 2x chips will be much smaller and the advantages greater comparing to GT200 which goes again 500mm^2+.
The bridge should keep the GPUs hidden from the system, which looks pretty nice, though it may be a disadvantage when you think about hard-wiring in the Crossfire modes to leave little performance on stake. Yet, two of these cards on the system look more like two GPUs than four. The scaling rate 1 -> 2 -> 4 says it all about the gains.
ATI managed to design a new leading technology that will force Nvidia to react. A similar situation appeared when Nvidia first launched SLI, and ATI was forced to keep up with it at that time. Now things are the other way around.
ATI has been making maneuvers on the PR side too. While Nvidia was loud enough during the past few months, ATI has kept the silence all this time. Rumors say that major planning is undergoing in ATI PR camp and that the troops are preparing for a hot war. Now we all know that the silent ones usually make the most trouble.
The bottom line is that we will witness a strong battle by the end on this year. At one end we have ATI preparing the release of its technological lineup along with a PR team willing to drop some blood to make the job right, while at the other end we'll have Nvidia struggling to keep up with a technology it may not be ready for.
And just to make the bets more interesting, Intel flips sides, and the next-generation CPU micro-architecture from Intel is rumored to come with no support for Nvidia's SLI technology.