Graphics card companies need to step up their game
By Geno 32 Comments
I got my current system nearly two years ago, the graphical component consisting of two GTX 275's in SLI, which is roughly between GTX 570 and GTX 580 in DX10 performance. Each card was ~$200 MSRP at the time. It still performs well enough today, but I've been itching to upgrade so I can truly max out games like Crysis, and the graphics card industry has done nothing but disappoint since then.
As some of you may remember I was quite hyped prior to the Fermi launch, as I expected a doubling in performance over the previous gen. This was all in spite of the fact that it was 6 months late, and Nvidia was experiencing known manufacturing issues. What I got was less than a 40% increase in maximum performance, and a zero percent value increase (for instance GTX 460 768MB SLI would have been the same performance as my current system...but at the same price as when I got it a year ago). The 500 series has improved upon the design since the 400 series, but really it's what the 400 series should have been at launch.
AMD has been equally bad. They released their 5000 series in Q3 2009, with the Radeon HD 5970 being their flagship card. It's nearly Q2 2011 and guess which card is still the strongest performer out of either Nvidia or AMD? Radeon HD 5970. And the current top end card of AMD's 6000 series almost performs worse than Nvidia's 400 series! What the fuck is this bullshit?
Looking at both companies as a whole, the HD 6990 and GTX 590 are still nowhere to be found (and even when released would be monstrously expensive), and 28nm GPUs are estimated to be as much as a year away.
You might ask, "but who needs all that performance anyway"?
This marks one of the longest periods of stagnation in the graphics card industry ever, and I'm quite astonished by Nvidia and AMD's recent ineptness. The new cards are still great for anyone upgrading from a much older system, but relative to the pace a few years ago, progress has practically come to a standstill.
There was a point several years ago when Nvidia was quoted as saying "Moore's Law is dead". Moore's Law is of course the general trend for performance to double every 18-24 months. At that point in time, Nvidia (and AMD) were doubling their performance closer to every 6-12 months. It seems that today that quote still holds true, but in the opposite sense.