Looking Back at 2000 Part 2: The Graphics Industry

The value of a dollar

If April was the month of high priced video card announcements, June was the month where the more reasonably priced products were announced. Towards the end of June AMD announced what would turn out to be our pick and your pick for best Value of 2000, the Duron processor. At the same time, almost in harmony with AMD's release of a high performing, value priced solution, NVIDIA brought the GeForce2 MX to the public's eye.

The MX offered greater than GeForce SDR performance at a cost that would be close to $120. Combine that with the ability to purchase a $100 CPU that offered 90% of the performance of an Athlon, and you had a killer system for a very small investment.

The GeForce2 MX was also NVIDIA's somewhat unsuccessful attempt to get into the corporate market. By offering TwinView (dual monitor outputs) as a GeForce2 MX feature, NVIDIA was attempting to steal some of the attention that Matrox's DualHead gained in the corporate market. The problem NVIDIA ran into was that they were too closely linked to the gaming market, which has its pros and cons.

On the positive side, they were making quite a bit of money off of the gaming community. On the negative side of things, however, that's not a good selling point when you're pitching a product to an IT manager that is looking for a productive video solution for the company's employees.

NVIDIA's Fall Refresh

As Fall 2000 approached we feared the worst for 3dfx and ATI. In spite of their most recent efforts, there would be no way they could compete with NVIDIA's next-generation core, the NV20. NVIDIA had yet to miss a product cycle, and as they had publicly stated, every Fall they would have a new architecture and the following Spring would mark the release of a refreshed version of that architecture.

As August rolled around, NVIDIA made their second release for 2000 as expected, however it wasn't the NV20. Instead, NVIDIA surprised us all with a second refresh of the GeForce core that was released 12 months earlier - the GeForce2 Ultra. The Ultra was a $500 version of the GeForce2 GTS that was nothing more than a hand picked GTS core that could hit higher clock speeds combined with some very expensive and very fast DDR SDRAM.

The performance of the GeForce2 Ultra was incredible, however the market didn't need another $500 card, the market was expecting the NV20. While some expected the NV20 to be released before the year's end, as we indicated in our GeForce2 Ultra review, the NV20 won't hit the streets until the Spring of 2001, or 6 months from the release of the Ultra. Given that the Ultra was released in August of 2000, you can expect the NV20 to debut very soon, in the next month or two.

The NV20's delay would have been the perfect opportunity for 3dfx, ATI or Matrox to step forth with a higher performing solution that would essentially kick NVIDIA while they were down. At the time, we alluded to the possibility that one of the aforementioned manufacturers was capable of doing just that. Many incorrectly interpreted that to be Matrox, when we were actually hinting at ATI. Indeed ATI had plans to have a fairly large show at Fall Comdex 2000, potentially because of the announcement of either a Radeon MAXX or the Radeon's successor.

To our disappointment neither the Radeon MAXX nor the Radeon's successor made their debut at Comdex, a lost opportunity for ATI to steal some of NVIDIA's thunder, however their reasons for not doing so were quite valid. The Radeon MAXX never surfaced simply because of cost, it would've ended up being a $500 - $600 board that wouldn't have garnered much other than the title of fastest card for a couple of months. The next-generation Radeon was most likely held back for reasons similar to the NV20's delay, the lack of DirectX 8 among other factors.

The one redeeming quality of the GeForce2 Ultra's release was the release of NVIDIA's Detonator3 drivers, which gave a free performance boost across the board to all GeForce based cards, especially those that were severely memory bandwidth limited - most significantly, the GeForce SDR and GeForce2 MX.

Also in the August timeframe were the introductions of the All-in-Wonder Radeon and the quiet introduction of the GeForce2 Pro, a slower, OEM version of the GeForce2 Ultra that board manufacturers eventually made into a pretty attractive solution for the retail market as well.