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| Nvidia's Meltdown? |
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| Saturday, 02 August 2008 | |
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Page 1 of 5 Author: Scott Piercy Nvidia's Meltdown In the realm of fanboydom that dominates much of the discussion when it comes to the GPU business on most tech sites, the topic often focuses solely on performance. "My card is better than your card", so on and so forth. Very little of the focus of discussions here ever enter the realm of realistic platform appraisals. Oftentimes, the discussion becomes narrowly focused on ridiculous system scenarios that only matter to an elite few.  It is no great secret at the moment that nVidia holds the high ground when it comes to absolute performance in graphics cards. The companies GTX 280 product sits at the top of most all single card performance charts no matter what game you're throwing at it. But, no matter how you look at it, it is always the mainstream and integrated parts that determine the sucess and profitability of any given generation of GPU products. Though we're sure most nVidia fans are happy with the state of things from a fandom view, most of nVidia's manufacturing partners are anything but happy. Profit margins for board partners are getting slim to non-existent. The manufacturer adoption rate of its 7xx chipset platforms is painfully low. The notebook platform business is in serious trouble. With Intel's Nehalem just around the corner, nVidia might be shut out of the Intel camp entirely in this regard. Is nVidia in trouble? And if so, how bad is it? |