I just ran across this article concerning the GT300 and it made my jaw drop. If what they say is true the ATI will be walking all over NVIDIA for some time to come. I'm sure the finalized GT300 will be powerful but given the numerous points made in the following article, that I link to, NVIDIA may well have faked their demonstration and the repercussions to that are enormous.
Nvidia fakes Fermi boards at GPU Technology Conference:
SemiAccurate :: Nvidia fakes Fermi boards at GPU Technology Conference
Meanwhile, the 5870 is already on the market and people are loving it.
NVIDIA was caught off guard by ATI last time around and never saw the power of the 4870 coming. NVIDIA did end up winning the crown but it took some time to accomplish this. ATI supported DirectX 10.1 while NVIDIA poo-pooed it. ATI now has a 40 nm, high-end, DirectX 11 card on the market while NVIDIA is merely discussing it and possibly giving a fake presentation.
Why would NVIDIA fake this? Maybe they didn't want to come up short. Maybe they realize they are already behind ATI as far as the release cycle but they desperately needed to demonstrate that they had the Fermi GPU working so that people didn't shift to ATI. If they openly admitted that they couldn't even use a real and fully working card for a demo then that would most definitely not help their PR war against ATI who already has a card released.
Regardless of the reasonings for why NVIDIA might do this, ATI has, once again, demonstrated to a lot of people, IMHO, that they are making up for past mistakes. I was a 3dfx fan until it died. I became an NVIDIA fan but my interest began dropping during the FX hair-dryer fiasco time period. The NVIDIA 8800 was a beatiful card. Since then I've shifted to ATI. I'm definitely not a fanboy with regard to videocard brands. I go by what card fits my needs. I'm most definitely happy with ATI for the 4xxx cards and what I've seen from the 5xxx cards thus far.
Anyway, sorry if this pulls the thread off-topic. That wasn't my intent. I just feel that this information concerning the NVIDIA Fermi GPU is directly related to the ATI 5870 because if NVIDIA is going to claim it'll kick ATI's butt then it needs to produce a real working Fermi GPU and show us
why we should want to go with the Fermi GPU over the ATI 5xxx cards.