今天又看到一篇Anand評NV3X及NV40的文章, 看完疑惑一堆, NV3X真的有這麼爛嗎? 我自己用NV38, 許多朋友用NV35/36似乎也沒這麼不爽呀... 照他的講法不只NV30是錯誤甚至連NV35/38全是錯誤...


CPU 六月號, 28頁, Anand專欄

Anand's Corner: GeForce 6--Finally

I was talking to some developers a while back about nVidia, and at the time, its flagship chip, known as NV35. I asked the developers what they thought about NV35 and they responded with a blunt: “We’re surprised nVidia has managed to get away with they have been for so long.” Indeed nVidia did get away with a lot, although the NV3X series of chips were clearly inferior to ATI’s R3XX family, nVidia honestly got off easy. It got a flack from the community, especially when it came to that dirty word “optimization” and its drivers, but people still bought NV3X parts and nVidia is still alive and well by the end of the 12-month FX product cycle.

The company was a bit bruised, and any egos that were present has since deflated, and it was almost fitting that nVidia should feel the pain it put ATI though so many product cycles in a row, where ATI’s fastest chips just never seemed to be able to dethrone its competition. nVidia lost a lot of ground and credibility with the GeForce FX series of parts, and honestly, most nVidia owners in 2003 were still nVidia owners because they had yet to upgrade their GeForce4s, quite possibly the last good nVidia chip…until now.

Talk of NV40 (nVidia’s next generation architecture) started happening early, and it started off the same way as NV38 did before it, and the same way as NV35 did before that: “We’ve learned from our mistakes, “ “Shame on us” and so forth. The first time you hear it, you believe it, especially with a company with nVidia’s once-strong reputation, but by the third time, you’re unwilling to believe anything. Those three strikes put nVidia almost out of the credibility ballgame with NV30, NV35, and NV38, so I was dubious about NV40’s “we’ve learned from our mistakes” message. (NV3X被三振了??)

Eventually some of the architecture was revealed and it became clear that nVidia had fixed what it said it would. NV40, the first chip in the GeForce6 line (note the dropping of the FX from the name), has a number of improvements that improve performance a lot. nVidia has finally admitted that the NV38 design was really designed to render four pixels per clock, and in some cases, capable of doing eight per clock. (我讀到這面色鐵青…) For a long time nVidia skirted this issue, but now that they are no longer bound by the NV3X architecture, it’s easy to point out flaws (not so easy for the poor saps who bought NV3X cards…我不覺得我是受害者呀…有這麼嚴重嗎??) While NV3X could spit out between four to eight pixels per clock, NV40 is a pure 16 pixel per clock chip, and in some rare cases can render even more.

待續...