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NVIDIA brushes aside the latest reports of its chipset demise

NVIDIA has been making the news quite a bit in the past few days. Earlier this week, there was speculation that NVIDIA could be in a prime position to provide chipsets for Apple's next generation MacBook notebooks.

However, earlier today, reports began to spring up stating that NVIDIA would drop its 790i motherboards and leave the chipset business altogether. The reports cited "sources" close to top Taiwanese motherboard manufacturers.

NVIDIA recently contacted DailyTech to quash the information regarding it leaving the chipset business. NVIDIA's Brian Burke made it clear that NVIDIA's chipset business is stronger than ever and touched on these three points:

  • Mercury Research has reported that the NVIDIA market share of AMD platforms in Q2 08  was 60%. We have been steady in this range for over two years.
  • SLI is still the preferred multi-GPU platform thanks to its stellar scaling, game compatibility and driver stability.            
  • nForce 790i SLI is the recommended choice by editors worldwide due to its compelling combination of memory performance, overclocking, and support for SLI.

Burke went on to say that "we're looking forward to bringing new and very exciting MCP products to the market for both AMD and Intel platforms."

While NVIDIA has made it clear that it has no intention of packing up and leaving the chipset business, the jury is still out on whether Apple will use NVIDIA chipsets in upcoming products.

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Purely marketing points...
By Diosjenin on 8/1/2008 2:57:10 PM , Rating: 2
- The last two years-ish on the CPU end have been dominated by Core 2. AMD platform penetration speaks (er, spoke) well of their graphics capabilities, not their chipsets.

- Crossfire scaling is as good or better than SLI in almost every in-game scenario nowadays.

- I was rather under the impression that "nVidia Driver Stability" was a naturally occurring oxymoron in the English language.

And no mention of those pesky data corruption issues...




RE: Purely marketing points...
By Ashrac on 8/1/08, Rating: -1
RE: Purely marketing points...
By Mitch101 on 8/1/2008 3:52:53 PM , Rating: 4
I am going to have to disagree. ATI's drivers are a lot better than they were a few years back (mostly in part to how well nVidia used to be) and ATI probably exceeds nVidia driver releases today.

NVIDIA Responsible for Nearly 30% of Vista Crashes in 2007
http://gizmodo.com/373076/nvidia-responsible-for-n...

NVIDIA = 28.8% of Vista crashes
ATI = 9.3% of Vista crashes
Intel = 8.8% of Vista crashes

Something tells me nVidia drivers don't deserve the better than ATI comment you gave them.


RE: Purely marketing points...
By mindless1 on 8/1/08, Rating: 0
RE: Purely marketing points...
By StevoLincolnite on 8/2/2008 12:03:34 AM , Rating: 2
I love ATI's drivers, they are far more tweakable than the nVidia drivers thanks to ATI Tray Tools.


RE: Purely marketing points...
By B3an on 8/2/2008 4:02:10 AM , Rating: 1
ATI's drivers are not as stable as NV's. I'm impartial here and have used so many of each companies cards.
My 4870 has crashing problems and theres some weird bug where it dont always save your settings in CCC. Had other problems with the 2900 which ATI did not fix for 2 months.

The whole poor NV driver thing is purely from Vista's release, which lasted about 2 weeks. I'd always get the "display driver stopped responding" message. But that was fixed longggg ago.


By StevoLincolnite on 8/2/2008 5:32:33 AM , Rating: 3
I have Crossfire 4850's in my main rig, and it has been humming along perfectly fine without an issue.
I usually just buy whatever has the best Price/Performance for my needs, For Instance I had Radeon 9xxx over a Geforce FX, I had a Geforce 6 over a Radeon x8xx because of the SM3 support, which turns out now to be a wise choice, then I had an x1950pro because it was dirt cheap.
Before the Crossfire 4850's I had a Geforce 8800GT.

Both companies have fairly good driver sets, When Vista was released, nVidia's was clearly worst, but that's not saying ATI didn't have it's share of problems either when it came to drivers, the Catalyst 8.x Series of drivers have given AGP users nothing but troubles, and only now is that being rectified.

Hell, I consider us lucky when it comes to the Stability and Performance of ATI's and nVidia's Drivers, They could have been allot worse like those of Matrox, S3, SiS or XGI's - where you actually have to hope that something works.


RE: Purely marketing points...
By rudolphna on 8/2/2008 10:07:07 PM , Rating: 2
ive had nothing but problems with nvidia cards and vista. First, the integrated 6150se in my parents gateway was crashing. THEN the Geforce 6600GT i put in it for them was crashing it. this is with SP1 btw. Stuck an ATi 3650 in there and guess what?... Perfectly stable. AMD definetly has better drivers than NVidia does. And i also Love ATi Catalyst, its intuative (spelling?) and i especially like the Overdrive utility. I got my 2600XT from 800 core to 860, and the memory from 700mhz (1400) to 890Mhz (1780mhz). Of course, im using some RAMsinks on it so they dont melt, and it work perfectly. AMD definitely doing better.


RE: Purely marketing points...
By mindless1 on 8/3/2008 6:29:46 AM , Rating: 2
Melt?
LOL

way to prove my point in a roundabout confused sort of way.


RE: Purely marketing points...
By Noliving on 8/1/2008 6:15:38 PM , Rating: 3
Yes but you have to remember though mitch101 that nearly two thirds of all the computers that were running vista were using a nvidia videocard. So it isn't fair to say ati drivers are a lot better because they sold less videocards and so they had less marketshare and so as a result of that had less crashes in vista.


RE: Purely marketing points...
By rudolphna on 8/2/2008 10:09:27 PM , Rating: 4
actually, that is incorrect. Intel has by far the majority (something like 80% of the graphics market. Obviously their drivers are best, since they have so few crashes with such a large percentage of the market.


RE: Purely marketing points...
By Ibrin on 8/1/2008 10:38:32 PM , Rating: 2
And what was NVIDIA's Vista market share compared to ATI? If they had 2x or 3x the Vista market share, then this would be all even-stevens. I know Intel has a huge market share, but those people aren't pushing their systems or playing demanding games.

This statistic only shows you one piece of a complex puzzle.


By StevoLincolnite on 8/2/2008 12:13:39 AM , Rating: 2
Well to be fair, The Drivers are pretty rock Solid, The Mobile Drivers leave much to be desired though, but that can be rectified with the Omega Drivers.

ATI Tray Tools allows tweaking of almost anything to do with your particular card to increase performance or to fix an issue you might be having with a Game.

Also, they are still producing AGP cards, but the support for the AGP cards in the drivers are rather bad.
The latest Drivers screamed "I'm a Teapot!" when I installed them on the System I fold with and that has a Radeon x1950pro AGP on an Athlon XP 1500+ and 1gb of Ram.

I don't have any AGP nVidia cards to see if nVidia is also Guilty of this though.


RE: Purely marketing points...
By PCXLFan on 8/2/2008 5:06:47 PM , Rating: 2
Would a larger percentage of crashes be due in part to having a larger marketshare?


RE: Purely marketing points...
By Fronzbot on 8/2/2008 6:19:20 PM , Rating: 2
Well you should also cite how much of the market uses nVidia chips as opposed to ATI. Saying "ATI is better because nVidia crashes more" is like saying "Toddlers are the best drivers because they cause the least amount of car accidents".

(Obviously a ridiculous example, but you get my point.)


RE: Purely marketing points...
By Fraggeren on 8/1/2008 4:41:56 PM , Rating: 1
Spot on, I agree 100%.


RE: Purely marketing points...
By QueBert on 8/1/2008 5:25:17 PM , Rating: 2
100% here, I'm not a fanboy, but Nvidia drivers aren't great and ATI's aren't shitty. I have a 8600GT right now but I don't find the drivers to be any better than my x800 it replaced.


RE: Purely marketing points...
By Mitch101 on 8/1/2008 3:30:22 PM , Rating: 5
On the AMD side the 780g is king. While the Gefore 7100 performance is very good the AMD 780g chipset has more audio options for an HTPC.

On the Intel side Intel is making the best motherboard chipsets in a long long time. Even for overclockers Intel chips are excellent. Given most people I know don't do SLI but instead wait for the next generation or two of video cards instead I have to feel SLI is a minor group and Intel would only want SLI because it allows Intel to compete with AMD on the top end.

There is supposed confirmation that Nvidia went to Intel with tail tucked and got an Nehalem license after giving Intel SLI. - You wonder why Jerry isn't mouthing off about Intel's cpu's being obsolete any more? Still most of the top end motherboards for Intel chips from NVIDIA are overpriced and offer no real performance advantages over the Intel parts.

I too had nVidia hard drive stability issues. For a long time I hated SATA drives saying this technology isn't perfected. I returned 3 drives of various manufacturer thinking they were faulty only to get them back and have them within 1-3 months start the mft$ errors again. I gave up and bought some good ole PATA drives and stuck the SATA drives on the shelf figuring it was some SATA/SATA2 compatibility issue even after I did the force to SATA1 stuff. It wasn't shortly after that all the news started hitting about nVidia's chipsets causing drive corruption. NCQ and nVidia drivers were to blame. I even disabled NCQ but since I used nVidia drivers I lost data again. When I got my new Intel Mobo I put those SATA drives in there and they have been flawless ever since. I was ticked to say the least of dealing with data loss for nearly a year because of this.

Now I know of 2 people with failed video one from HP and the other from Dell. Wouldn't you know they have nVidia video chipsets.

nVidia I bought your products for years and supported you since the TNT1 days. You can do all the PR-BS you want I wasted countless hours and lost data because you won't admit some of your products have serious bugs. You can blame manufacturing issues all you want but quality control testing and spot checking your products should have told you there were issues. I expect problems to a degree but what I don't like is a company that wont fess up to its mistakes. Data loss is inexcusable even Microsoft finally came out with thier home server issue as having a problem.

Goodbye nVidia it was nice knowing you when you actually delivered a high quality product without bugs that destroyed my data.


RE: Purely marketing points...
By larson0699 on 8/1/2008 7:46:51 PM , Rating: 2
Why are you comparing 780G to 7100? On the AMD side, it's NVIDIA who actually pulls off 8-channel LPCM audio over HDMI. 3d-wise, it's a toss-up dependant upon which games you play, but 780G and 8x00 are both excellent solutions for HTPC, the LPCM issue notwithstanding.

I'll give you credit for noting the well-known NVIDIA-corrupts-data plague, but in all the NVIDIA system platforms I ever beat the hell out of (this nForce2, a 6100 I had two years ago, and closely watching the current chips) I've not once lost (or seen lost) a bit on account of them. I like my NVIDIA systems for their stability.. and that they OC very well with no impact on that so long as you don't get unrealistic in tweaking.

I even dropped an ATI Radeon X800XL (and the PSU it needed) into the 6100 system when I had it.. Best Gateway I ever laid eyes on without a doubt. Sad to see BTX die because it was a real hit with cooling and chip layout. But my point is that NVIDIA worked for me, and worked beautifully. Maybe my luck is just good instead of everyone else's bad?


RE: Purely marketing points...
By FITCamaro on 8/1/2008 10:42:20 PM , Rating: 2
I had to reload Vista due to Nvidia's chipset drivers screwing up when I tried to do a simple supported task of assigning profiles (wanted it to OC my GPUs when AoC started and then set them back to factory specs when the game closed). The Nvidia drivers caused my system to freeze completely. Uninstalling the drivers completely and then reinstall