I heard from one of the other tech sites, and saw on Anand that Nvidia's been kind of getting their DirectX 8.1 message across. They might be a little concerned that people might think that GeForce3 is DirectX 8 and that R200 is DirectX 8.1, which might be a bad thing. I can see why they'd think that.

So, for the record, and I haven't heard from Nvidia so, I may be wrong on the assumption above, but for the record, Nvidia does DirectX 8.1, too. I don't think I implied that in my coverage, but to put things in perspective, GeForce3 has been around for a while, if not shipping that long. ATI is not going to be putting its product out there until September, at least, and we have to see it to believe it.

I would imagine that means that ATI is going to have one feather more in its cap than Nvidia, just by judging the ATI marketing message on SmartShader. However, and it's a big HOWEVER, the practical, real world advantage of ATI hardware over Nvidia hardware is probably going to be negligible.

I'll stick to this, and say that when it comes to hardware, it's time for a little parity. A little bit of machismo might go on with transistor counts, die sizes, and clock speeds, but apart from that, ATI and Nvidia should get even.

When it comes to drivers, and software that supports each product - and by support I mean games that really hammer the features of ATI and Nvidia cards - well, in that case, I am not sure where the advantage lies. Nvidia has a head start on ATI. That's for sure. Nvidia is pretty aggressive. ATI is doing a good job of getting its marketing message out there, and has the unsaid support of OEMs that want some competition in the graphics market.