Over the next month or so, there are slated to be several new graphics cards released by both AMD and NVidia. Here is a list of the cards that we know about.
- February 25 – AMD Radeon HD 5830.
- March 11 – AMD Radeon HD 5870 Eyefinity6 edition with 2GB of GDDR5.
- March 26 – NVidia GeForce GTX 480 and 470. Rumor is that it is 5% faster than the Radeon HD 5870. Availability to follow in May.
- March ?? – Trillian. This is rumored to be a cherry-picked, overclocked AMD Radeon HD 5870 to compete with NVidia GeForce GTX 480 and 470.
AMD has been executing nearly perfectly over the past five months ever since they released the Radeon HD 5870. AMD continues to be in the driver’s seat since they have DirectX 11 capable cards that span the price spectrum. They plan on raining on Fermi’s parade with Eyefinity6 and Trillian. Even if they lose the title of fastest graphics card, they can undercut NVidia by winning the price-to-performance ratio.
NVidia is late to the game, with an expensive graphics card that is rumored to consume copious amounts of power, and is rumored to not scale well. That leaves NVidia in a bind, because it is the lower priced spectrum of graphics cards that sell the best, not the fastest graphics card. In NVidia’s favor is the large CUDA/OpenCL developer community. NVidia knows all of their strengths and weaknesses, of course, and already has a game plan. It will be interesting to see how they execute on that plan.
