As is known, the launch of ATI RADEON 9700 graphics processor and R300 architecture caught NVIDIA unawares. The company simply couldn’t offer any adequate response to ATI Technologies’ attack for 8 months. However, in fact, the NV30 chip, which gave birth to the today’s product family from the Santa Clara manufacturer appeared not very successful.
The cards based on GeForce FX 5800 used very expensive 12-layer PCB and were equipped with very expensive DDR II memory working at 1000MHz frequency but featuring very narrow 128bit bus. And the cooling solution of these graphics cards aka FlowFX, which was specifically developed for this graphics card family and was probably intended for deaf people became almost a legend. The worst thing for NVIDIA was the fact that their new GeForce FX 5800 Ultra solution was very often slower than RADEON 9700 PRO or demonstrated very low advantage over the competitor, which was an unbelievable situation for NVIDIA, really. All this resulted into inadequate reaction of the market to this product. In the long run, NVIDIA stopped the production of their new solution having manufactured only around 100 thousand pieces of this graphics processor. However, NVIDIA learned its lesson and took all mistakes of the failed NV30 into consideration. Very soon, in January 2003 a new NV35 chip came out. Compared with NV30, the new NV35 boasts higher performance, and uses 256bit memory bus for the regular DDR SDRAM. NV35 appeared a pretty successful product: having borrowed all the best from the predecessor, it was deprived of the predecessor’s drawbacks.
Read the whole review at
XBitLabs.com
