DarthPiggie :
Unfortunately, High end isnt very profitable because very few people buy it.
What high end does is set the perception of who's on top. So, when midrange cards are released, buyers take the high end into consideration. It's all marketing, which leads to profits; but marketing is bupkis.
I generally go ATI for AVIVO and good video quality as well as decent gaming. I skipped the 2xxx series altogether, not finding it worthwhile to ditch even the lowly X1650 Pro and 7600gs in our two PC's but bought new cards when 3xxx matured.
The 4xxx series looks good and should beat current Nvidia cards, but I expect G200 will be a bit better in terms of pure frames per second in many popular games. So, Nvidia should 'win' by the end of summer.
That won't make the G200 good enough for me. Nvidia hasn't done well enough outside of games to make me want to buy another one after the budget 7600 I tried out in 2007.
I'll admit, the Crysis gamers will be quite happy with G200 and Nvidia will sell quite a few to the FPS enthusiast crowd.
ovaltineplease :
well from what the article today implied; the next big thing is going to be onboard physics for video cards - so maybe that'll be the norm in next gen games
Well, Nvidia has Aegia and Intel has Havok, but ATI's doing some sort of GPGPU physics with the 4xxx series. It will be interesting to see what games support which.
IMHO, physics only works in FPS. In Oblivion, the physics of watching a daedra roll down a hill wasn't so thrilling when that very same physics made it a rather difficult affair to set your table in the house you bought.
When in game physics can differentiate between the rag doll effects people want in FPS and a real world simulation such that you can set your table for easy role playing purposes, then it will be something I'll look for in games.