While the introduction to our NVIDIA GeForce 6800 Ultra preview painted a relatively bleak picture for NVIDIA's GeForce FX product cycle, in NVIDIA's terms, business in this market is often relative. Had the market continued in the vein that it had for the GeForce 3/4 cycle NVIDIA would likely have weathered the cycle in a far less, apparently, dramatic fashion however NVIDIA's issues muchly stemmed from some very unexpected competition from a reorganised and resurgent ATI. The product that heralded ATI's newfound success was R300 (Radeon 9700) - the most complicated graphics chip of its time, the first to boast DirectX9 Shader 2.0 support and offering users no less than twice the performance of any previous products. A tall order to live up to, evidently even for ATI themselves...!



Link: Beyond3d