Nvidia Touts Physics, But Financial Trouble Ahead

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Santa Clara (CA) - Owners of a GeForce 8-series or higher graphics card can squeeze more eye candy out of their hardware as Nvidia has released a demo pack consisting of a full game, acceleration demos and Stanford’s Folding@Home distributed computing client that showcase the physics and floating point horsepower of the company’s graphics cards. Analysts expect a steep decline in revenue to overshadow the company’s technology later today.

If you own one of the 80 million CUDA-capable graphics cards and have installed Nvidia’s WHQL driver version 175.xx or higher, but just haven’t had a chance to test the PhysX of your hardware, you can now simply download Nvidia’s first "GeForce Power Pack", which is promoted as a promotion package for Nvidia graphics cards.

The competition between Nvidia’s and AMD’s graphics cards is getting more intense again and while Intel is still discussing its Larrabee graphics card only on paper, Nvidia is stepping up its efforts to showcase the capabilities of its graphics technology. The first "Power Pack" has the sole purpose to get GeForce card owners interested in PhysX acceleration: According to Nvidia, in the PhysX-enabled levels of Unreal Tournament 3, the GeForce 9800 GTX+ runs 180% faster than on the AMD Radeon HD 4850.

The package is offered free of charge and includes the full game "Warmonger", an Unreal Tournament 3 PhysX Mod Pack, a sneak peek at the upcoming Nurien social networking service that is based on the Unreal Engine 3, Nvidia’s "The Great Kulu" tech demo, a first look at the upcoming game Metal Knight Zero, a "Fluid" tech demo-a simulation of realistic fluid effects with a variety of liquids, as well as Stanford University’s Folding@home distributed-computing, protein-folding client and a trial version of Elemental Technologies’ Badaboom video transcoder.

Later today, Nvidia will also report its Q2 financial results. Wedbush Morgan analyst Patrick Wang expects a "weak [performance] driven by share loss and ASP pressure on desktop GPU". Wang told investors that Q2 revenue should be about $913 million, down 21% from the previous quarter. Wang believes that the pressure on Nvidia will not disappear anytime soon, especially because of AMD’s/ATI’s strong product launches. Wedbush Morgan does not "potentially expect margins to meaningfully recover until mid-C09, with the arrival of Nvidia’s next-generation GPU architecture (NV70)."

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9 Comments Comment from the forums
  • anhe64
    One more reason not to get a Radeon 4870 eggfryer that only can do games. In addition to physx, they also released a CUDA driver that will speed up transcoding using badaboom.

    download it here: http://www.nvidia.com/content/forcewithin
    Reply
  • frozenlead
    When physx is actually used by more than ten games, maybe I'll consider downloading it.

    @anhe64..I didn't know there was a first reason not to get a 4870 if you can use one.
    Reply
  • anhe64
    O, it's the temperature of those 4870's and 4870x2's. 92C idle and under load it's like an airplane the fan.

    by the way: tomshardware starts to be biased against nvidia in the assumed text. take the title of this article: "But Financial Trouble Ahead". No, they don't they are way in green. AMD is close to going broke so what is the story here?

    or that other article where they copied the stuff from the Inquirer that is written by that Charlie guy who has a personal vendetta with nvidia and only writes BS.

    or their own article heading "Radeon HD 4870: Better Than GTX 260!". They could also write "Radeon HD 4870: Worse than GTX 280!"

    or the last lineup of graphics cards: they skip (stop before) the high-end that is dominated by nvidia

    call me in favor of nvidia but somehow they are not as objective as they used to be
    Reply
  • blader15sk8
    @anhe64

    The article entitled "Radeon HD 4870: Better than GTX 260!" is actually much more appropriate considering the 4870 and gtx260 are direct competitors at their price points. There's also the fact that the GTX 260 saw a price drop after the 4870 benchmarks came out, so the title was even more appropriate at that time.

    Other than that, I agree with most of your post.
    Reply
  • apoq
    I'd also fork out the extra cash just to get a CUDA capable video card. This is getting exciting and AMD should follow suit.
    BTW, are the 8 and 9 series for mobile computers CUDA capable?
    Reply
  • apache_lives
    lol every new card has some bs going down with it - the 8800GT's at first had people worrying about temps and fan speeds, now ati 48xx - get over it, both companies offer strong cards that work (with the exception of perhaps a few nvidia duds ;))

    i thought nvidia and ati were working together with gpu usage etc?
    Reply
  • martel80
    Since CUDA probably produces shader code, it should run on ANY hardware that supports programmable shaders. It is just Nvidia limiting it to the most expensive cards (and only their own brand cards).
    I hope that Larrabee is going to force CUDA to be enabled for ALL the cards (including ATI cards).
    Otherwise, it is just another proprietary crap. But that's the way it's meant to be played, ain't it? :)
    Reply
  • jaragon13
    anhe64O, it's the temperature of those 4870's and 4870x2's. 92C idle and under load it's like an airplane the fan.by the way: tomshardware starts to be biased against nvidia in the assumed text. take the title of this article: "But Financial Trouble Ahead". No, they don't they are way in green. AMD is close to going broke so what is the story here?or that other article where they copied the stuff from the Inquirer that is written by that Charlie guy who has a personal vendetta with nvidia and only writes BS.or their own article heading "Radeon HD 4870: Better Than GTX 260!". They could also write "Radeon HD 4870: Worse than GTX 280!"or the last lineup of graphics cards: they skip (stop before) the high-end that is dominated by nvidiacall me in favor of nvidia but somehow they are not as objective as they used to beGod you Nvidiot fanboy faggot.
    Reply
  • nekatreven
    apoqI'd also fork out the extra cash just to get a CUDA capable video card. This is getting exciting and AMD should follow suit.BTW, are the 8 and 9 series for mobile computers CUDA capable?
    You're assuming that CUDA takes hold over Intel's solution and AMDs recently announced adoption of an open standard.

    No one can argue what will prevail. Not with "NV has a head start", or "Intel won't break into performance markets for crap.". No one, can say for certain based on anything until the market decides, no one. There are just too many variables to say.

    I've got a great sale going right now on Betamax, HDDVD, and Voodoo products for anyone who thinks otherwise.
    Reply