There are some benchmarks flying around now, possibly out of Cebit. IIRC the 480 is roughly equivalent to the AMD 5870, a card that has been out for 6 months already, is broadly available, AMD is manufacturing at a higher yield than reports that nvidia's new chip. Come march 26th launch date, availability of the 470/480 is likely to be poor, as with any new card release, and likely have high prices. I'm still waiting until the launch for proper reviews than rushed previews. As mentioned by the rumours, nvidia having a bad time manufacturing the chips means they are likely making a loss on the cards if they want to sell them at competitive prices. Within the 6 months of release, AMD has also released all the market variations of the 5-series chip, but I haven't read of any variations on the fermi chip outside of the 470/480.

Looking to the future, AMD have their 'Northern Islands' codename chips coming later in the year which if they continue their current trend should be good chips, Nvidia seem to really need a revision 2 of fermi that makes it more efficient to manufacture and run. It's looking at a wider picture of the company, but for nvidia's sake I hope the Ion, tegra and tesla chips are profitable for them. All companies have long development times behind the scenes, so hopefully what comes after fermi is competitive.

Yes, the geforce 5 'dustbuster'.

AFAIK Nvidia has deep pockets, so I don't think they're in major long term problems, But R+D and manufacturing bleeding edge chips is OMFG expensive (looking at the figures on semi accurate), so I don't think many will be pleased if fermi is something they were hoping to rely on for revenue for a long time as they could with 8800 derivatives. Hopefully they have other, better chips coming, and a good revenue from other products.

Nvidia seems to be trying really hard to diversify out of the hardcore market with products like Ion, Ion 2, and Optimus on the laptop front, and Tegra/Tegra 2 on the Arm mobile SOC world.

Those things seem to be taking off a bit, and may help them make it through this bad product cycle for them.

I'd hate to see them fall out of the high end graphics race.

It will also be interesting to see the outcome of the next gen console cycle design wins with MS/Sony/ and maybe even Nintendo. It's rumored that Tegra 2 will power the DS replacement. That could keep them in the money for a long time if true.

Charlie Demerjian Is A Douchebag does not inspire confidence. The site is new to me but following HardForum threads on different subjects never have anything good to say on the guy either.

Not saying he's wrong, just to keep it in mind.

Yea semiaccurate is a nonsense site, they've said this same crap about every nVidia card released in the past while.

From a consumer perspective, healthy competition keeps prices down. NVidia's current troubles mean that ATI prices keep edging up from where they were when the 5800 series hit the market. I'm not really in the market now, but if 5850s were a little cheaper, I might just spring...

Kind of makes you rethink the negative commentary that came from all sides when AMD purchased ATI. Everyone was quick to predict a quick doom/gloom outcome to that marriage. Yet now AMD seems to be managing the new products pretty well, or at least avoids making roadmap and design mistakes that Nvidia continues to commit.

OK. This is starting to make some sense to me. I have been wondering to myself in the past few months where all the Nvidia cards have gone. I've purchased both ATI and Nvidia over the years depending on who had the best bang-for-the-buck at the price point I was interested in. With one exception in the last 4-5 years, the winner has been Nvidia. I was a bit concerned when I started seeing all of the out-of-stock notices for Nvidia G200-based cards at Newegg. I looked today and out of the 26 models of Nvidia 260, 275, 285 and 295 cards listed, half (13 exactly) were out of stock. (Actually, there are no 275s even listed, which is of course what I own. I console myself that I bought it at $205 with a rebate.)

My thought was that Nvidia had bet the farm on Fermi being released in January 2010 with cards available soon thereafter. They were just letting the old stock work its way out of the manufacturing channel to make room for the new chips. That made business sense to me. However, when is was clear that Fermi was going to be late, I thought Nvidia either just failed to or was not able to ramp up G200 production to keep it going to cover the gap. What I did not understand is that apparently the manufacturing process of the G200 is so costly even at 55nm (instead of 65nm) that the profits aren't there to fight ATI's 5700 and 5800 lines at the price/performance levels they would need. That is, they can't afford to cut prices to compete. They can't - as the joke goes - lose money on every one but make it up in volume. Nvidia made the decision not to compete when they couldn't win. It seems to me that they could pump out some more G200s at the current prices since demand appears to still be pretty strong (as the prices of the Nvidia 260 and 285 cards have risen in the last few months). Ramping up production costs money, too, though and may not cover those costs to make it worthwhile even with decent, but knowingly short-lived, demand.

So they are still betting the farm on Fermi. I've read some of the doom and gloom reports about Fermi, but until it's actually available to manufacturers to work with, it's all just conjecture. I'm not ready to write off Nvidia just yet. Looking at the Steam hardware survey, it's clear Nvidia has had the lead for a while, but that represents money already received. What I am wondering is what they are running on now. I know that the ION chipsets and their brethren are going strong. Is that enough? I'm sure they've got cash in the bank, but how much?

A thread on Ars has some speculation that the rumors may be deliberate false ones, planted by NVidia to try to lull ATI into complacency. Apparently, there were very similar rumors just before the 8800 series hit, and as we all know, that line just absolutely wrecked anything ATI could field for about two years.

Their belief: Fermi might really suck, but don't count on it. We've been fooled before.

My advice: Always check who writes these news articles, especially when they are about video cards, and absolutely when they are rumors about Nvidia.

Mr. Demerjian has been able to get people talking against Nvidia for years now. I remember on one laptop forum, after the reported 8600m problems that were happening, more specifically those video cards overheating, Mr. Demerjian posted story after story about how "the problem might go deeper than it seems" and how the bad products actually reached ALL 8xxx series video cards, laptop and desktop versions. Of course nothing came of it. But people would still argue to death that Nvidia cards were going to explode because of a news article they saw... which linked to Mr. Demerjian as the source.

It's actually pretty funny to read his articles. The only proof he ever states is either insider info which he so openly shares, or links upon links of stories he has posted. I mean, open up the link in the first post. It ALL links to his own stories, save one, linking to Anandtech about Evergreen history.

I guess if he makes a bunch of links to seeming "sources" it's easier for people to believe. I'm not pointing out anyone is silly for reading this article and believing it, I'm just pointing out how long this has been going on for and his background.

Pretty much this. Charlie is an exaggerator (like most sorts of press) but there's always truth to his articles otherwise the company and he would be on the receiving end of cease and desist's, defamation lawsuits etc. etc..

Not everything the Inq and wherever he is now said came to pass but a lot of it sure did.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geforce_8#Problems

Apparently the NDA drops on the 26th march, and the card now ships on 4/6th april, which some are calling a delay.

I'll wait for results from a site I can actually read. Those results came from an Arabic site.

If the numbers are actually true, that means they're still competitive; the new NVidia stuff will be a little faster and will probably have slightly better drivers, but will run louder and hotter, will take a bigger power supply, will cost more to run, and will be significantly more expensive.

That's not a slam-dunk for ATI by any means, but I still think I'd recommend them for most people in this generation.