Universe Games has leaked the details of ATI's RADEON roadmap, with specifics on ATI's Radeon2 and Radeon3 chips.
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nVidia, like, set them up the bomb. It's over, Mac users are fortunate to have nVidia noticing them. I want dual G4 & GeForce 3! Well, dual G4 @ 1GHz apiece, ahem...
Yes Nvidia noticed Apple users.
ATI still have cards for Apple.
Competition is good for us mac users. Not only does it mean we get better video cards at better prices but it means they have to give us the latest and greatest now lest they give up the ball to Nvidia. Same with Nvidia. If they don't deliver to us the latest and greatest now, ATI gets the advantage.
It only benefits us as a whole.
Competition rulez!
This time around it is NVIDIA scrambling to catch up, not ATI. As many of the GeForce 3 reviews on the PC side have shown, the year-old Radeon chip already has and supports many of the features just now appearing in the GeForce 3, such as mesh and tweening support, internal bandwidth reduction and active backface culling early in the pipeline. In fact, in benchmark tests the Radeon holds its own just fine, until you turn on FSAA in the GF3. There is every reason to believe that ATI will learn well from NVIDIA's GeForce 3 mistakes (the biggest being the price, but there are many more problems) and come out with a clearly superior card by September...
Beyond technical issues, there are important political ones whenever Steve Jobs is involved. The GF3 was supposed to ship first on the mac platform, but it looks as if PC cards are already available... As we saw in the ATI debacle, Steve Jobs does not like to have his thunder stolen or dampened by suppliers. Getting NVidia chips was a good political move for Apple to appease customers who believed (mistakenly in my opinion) that the GF2 was far superior to the Radeon. However, if NVidia pulls any more tricks it will probably be in for a wrist-slapping ala ATI.
From what I've seen, ATI and nVidia leap frog each other. ATI has a better card, then nVidia comes out with the better card, then ATI comes out with the better card...Really, it makes sense that this happens, since one company undoubtedly learns from and copies the other, then throws in a few new tricks. The same sort of thing happened in the video game console market, with Sega, Nintendo, and Sony one-upping the other (perhaps with Microsoft taking Sega's place soon). Whoever is ahead now will soon, temporarily, be in second place.
Its not just card specs that count, but real-world use, aka 'how good are your drivers?'
nVidia's Mac drivers are NOT mature yet, and many important features like DVD playback are FAR better on ATI's Mac cards.
But that unfortunate truth gets lost in the press' stampede to deify nVidia. Sorry to say it guys, but, 'Moo.'
No, you missed the point; ATI is catching up at a faster pace than NVIDIA can innovate at this point. They never really "caught up" before, but now that they have a leg up on certain technologies (such as Hyper-Z, which reduces internal memory bandwidth needs) they are in position to be out ahead for the first time.
I've got a radeon, and although I've not used a G-Force 3, I'll say that the 150 fps on my radeon and a dual g4 is about as fast as games need to get. I'm rendering bryce images in 1 minute that take 20 minutes on the same machine with a Rage 128. The fact is DDR is superior, and a dedicated geometry processor is neccessary. Nvidea has a ways to go.
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Nah ha!
Now ATI knows how Apple felt last year