NVIDIA can’t quite keep up with the competition at the moment. The only chance of stealing any attention from AMD’s new series of performance and mid-range cards is by dumping prices. GT200b is the only chip that can compete with AMD’s Evergreen architecture, but it’s way too expensive to be used in any price war. In our review of Radeon HD 5870 we were convinced that NVIDIA would have a hard time competing up until next year.
According to, unconfirmed sources, the graphics card giant has told OEM partners that GeForce GTX285 and the siblings GeForce GTX275 and GTX260 will be removed from the market.
Production of GeForce GTX285 will stop immediately, GeForce GTX275 in two weeks and GeForce GTX260 is expected to go quiet sometime in November/December. Ironically it seems like the dual-GPU model, GeForce GTX295, will get to stay around for longer, but most likely not any longer than NVIDIA’s current stock allows.
The information posted at SemiAccurate is said to be reliable and would they turn out to be correct it means that NVIDIA is giving up the performance and mid-range markets, which puts AMD in a “reign free and solely” position with the Evergreen family where Cypress (HD 5800) will soon be backed up by Juniper (HD 5700).
Even if NVIDIA and partners have great stocks of GeForce GTX cards there will most likely only take a few months before AMD will be alone in the top segment of the graphics card market, almost the opposite of the processor market where Intel is dominating. The phasing out process is of course also preparation for the upcoming launch of the Fermi architecture, supposedly consisting of more than one card.
NVIDIA’s situation is a bit more serious though since the hope lies in the enormous 3 billion transistor GPU that didn’t get the start we were hoping for. The Fermi architecture is very powerful, but the focus on GPU computing and the shear complexity has been problematic and messed with NVIDIA’s launch schedule, not to mention the cost of making it.
We hope to learn more of NVIDIA’s situation but if the latest rumors are true the faked Fermi card at the press conference is the least of NVIDIA’s worries.
NVIDIA’s last hope for performance?
