DirectX 9 For $79, Continued

Marketing hype aside this is a very bold move by Nvidia to get the products out quickly and focus a significant effort in moving forward the development of Direct X 9 titles. Of course the reality is that this was bound to happen, but what caught us off guard however was the pricing. Nvidia is clearly going to be aggressively marketing their mainstream products which are the bread and butter products that most consumer buy.

5600 Performance numbers from Nvidia.

5200 Performance numbers from Nvidia.

What was perhaps more impressive however, was the fact that he shared a little sneak preview glimpse of the next generation product that they are working on. With the GeForceFX just starting to make its way into the channel (according to Nvidia), they already have the next generation GPU up and running. It is so far along in fact that they show a brand new version of the "Dawn Demo", but with a special twist. This time, not only Dawn was prancing around on the screen, but her three sisters as well. Of course it didn't take a rocket scientist to see the amount of potential graphics power that this next generation product could be packing. While he declined to release any additional details, he said "We are not ready to give up the performance crown and out next generation product will take performance to another new level when it is released and continue Nvidia's as the performance leader." Nvidia is clearly he is very serious about recapturing the performance crown and of course this is a good thing.

The "Dawn And Her Sisters" demo running on the next generation GPU. We would love to tell you more about it, but you now know as much as we know.

This is a shot from the demo of Gunmetal that we saw. We were not big fans of it on the Xbox, but the PC version is a totally different story. This game looks really hot on the PC and if it plays as well as the Xbox version, it could be a big hit.

Of course the proof of the pudding is in the eating and until we are able to test the 5600 and 5200 products out, it is difficult to speculate on what kind of performance that they will offer. Clearly, the advantage of all of the cards having the same basic feature set is good news for consumers, but clock speeds and chip yields will determine how much of an effect this strategy will have. As we said above we were able to capture some Nvidia generated benchmarking results for the 5600 and 5200, these according to Nvidia indicate that the expected performance should be good, but we will have to wait and see.

We were also treated to a demo of the new Tron game which has quite a unique look and feel. This captures a lot of what Tron could not deliver back in the days when the movie was released. Looks good and another title that we are going to look forward to checking out when it hits the streets.

Conclusion: The Coming Months Should Be A Good Time To Buy A Video Card!

In an industry not quite ready to declare that happy days are here again, it is understandable the amount of emphasis that is being placed on the value and mainstream market segments. Our own Omid Rahmat, love him or hate him, in his tongue-and-cheek Valentine's Day special column hit the nail right on the head when he said "That means, NVIDIA, for all its faults right now, is a reflection of where the market is going." Clearly ATI has been following Omid's advice and they are ready to jump in and be even more aggressive in the mainstream and value segments with the 9600 and 9200.

The coveted sweet spot of the market, this is where most of you pick the cards that you buy. Yes, we all want a $399 killer super card, but we have bills to pay and wifes to answer to and we sometimes have to settle for something less. The reality of what has taken place here with these launches at GDC is that an aggressive pricing/performance war is going to take place. The battle lines are drawn with Nvidia wanting to maintain its leadership in this arena and ATI wanting to chip away at this market segment.

Of course the benefactor of this is the consumer who is finally going to get a Direct X 9 feature set at an incredible price and with wider adoption of these Direct X 9 cards, clearly the software developers are going to step up to the plate and deliver the new next generation titles that will make these new cards truly useful. At least this is how it is supposed to work, but over the next couple of months some great deals are going to be available on graphics cards, so do the research and as always we will help you with that by giving you through test results to allow you to compare the cards, and help the tech industry out by upgrading your graphics card.