NVIDIA’s new video cards are set to receive a much-needed price drop in order to compete more effectively with AMD’s 4800 series. As we reported last week, the G200 cards were not selling as quickly as anticipated for a new GeForce release. Whilst this might attract new buyers, we can’t help but feel sorry for those who just shelled out up to £400 for their 280 only to see its price plummet by as much as £100!
Despite holding a significant lead in the enthusiast market, Intel has actually lost a small portion of its market share to rival AMD in the first quarter of 2008. Statistics released by research firm iSuppli show that Intel lost 0.7% whilst AMD gained 2.2% of the market at the expense of its bigger rival and other smaller chip manufacturers. Between the two of them, the AMD and Intel control a massive 92.7% of the microprocessor market worldwide.
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A source from www.overclockers.co.uk – one of the UK’s largest hardware resellers - has revealed to Total PC Gaming that sales of nVIDIA’s new 280 and 260 GTX cards are much slower than normally expected for a new GeForce release. The Radeon 4800 series is being cited as the cause for this, as ATi’s latest cards perform similarly but are significantly cheaper. We will be looking at both of manufacturer’s latest and greatest offerings in our supertest the next issue which will be on sale 7th August.
Last week saw the release of the monolithic GeForce GTX 280, which at well over £400 will only be an option for the richest of PC gamers. Fortunately, benchmark numbers for ATi’s latest card have also started trickling onto the internet, and it’s very good news for mainstream PC buyers. Performance generally seems to be higher than the already-speedy GeForce 9800 GTX, but as the new card is available from just £135, it’s currently a lot cheaper. Performance has also been greatly improved in games such as Crysis where nVIDIA previously had a stranglehold.
NVIDIA’s almost total dominance of the graphics card market continues with the release of the new 9600 GT. The folk at Expreview.com found that two 9600’s in SLI beat AMD’s flagship 3870X2 in almost all benchmarks, a surprising result considering that the X2 costs around £280-300 and the 9600 GT can be found for as little as £112.