"Derek Wildstar" wrote in message
news:e8hXa.57305$uu5.5615@sccrnsc04...

"-=Matt=-" wrote in message
...


Why release these cards if they are inferior to existing models?

What? Someone here doesn't remember the Voodoo Rush? Or the TNT2 M64?

The bottom line is money. they need it, we have it, any product however
incrementally better gets the OEM contract and everyone makes out, except
the enthusiast gamer.

It's about maintaining the market niches using the big boy bin rejects. The
best ones go into the flagships, the not-so-good ones into the midrange, the
others that fail more than a pipeline here and there likely get made into
MXes. Not like ATI doesn't do the same thing. ;-) Difference is, with
certain ATI cards, you might get lucky and enable the other four pipelines
without issue...

While the enthusiasts drive innovation and dictate mindshare, they do
little
to the bototm line of a company except jeopardize it.

I beg to differ. They are the ones who help push the envelope, as you say.
This is Good for business. Helps drive the gaming industry too,
hand-in-hand. We'll see when Doom 3 comes out which cards leave the shelves
fastest (most of us I'd imagine are already all set. Last I looked, I
haven't jeopardized ANYONE's bottom line! :^) ). Any jeopardy might come in
the guise of a generous RMA policy, for those who cannot accept personal
responsibility as part of a choice to tweak things...

Also, you are painting
with an overly broad brush, there are distinct advanatages to the newer
cards, and raw speed in all instances isn't exactly one of them [in the
mainstream market]

Certainly not if taking the FX5200 series into question. The only things it
really brings to the table are memory bandwidth and DX9...oh, and a swank
PCI version ;P

Look at it this way, it's not that the new cards are so bad, it's that the
older ones are so good.

I think it's that games are coded with these older cards in mind. The GF4
4x00's are still kicking strong. Given more high-level shader language and
per-pixel lighting, these older cards might not look so good, eh? Literally.
Plus, your performance depends a lot on the rest of your system. That opens
up a whole 'nother barrel o' monkeys. It's not really the average framerate
that matters so much as the minimum in actual gameplay. We're getting to the
point where the video card is the bottleneck again...certainly not much
scaling above 1280x1024 with faster CPUs and the cream-of-the-crop video
card. Somebody release the next generation already! Enough of this milking
of existing product cycle!