The outlook for Nvidia looked rather dim at that point, but a funny thing happened on the way to AMD’s coronation as the kings of the DX11 generation. They ran hotter and louder but not much faster than the Radeon HD 5870, not exactly a winning combination. Consumers groaned as a nearly unprecedented thing happened: prices on Radeon HD 5800-series cards rose above their introductory levels�and held there.Īt the very end of the first quarter of the year, the first Fermi-based GeForces finally arrived. That same chipmaking process was a major contributor to uncharacteristically long delays in Nvidia’s DX11 GPUs, which left a frustrated AMD with a market largely all to itself�a market it couldn’t fully supply. These new Radeons were quite good products, with a few strokes of brilliance like the Eyefinity multi-monitor gaming feature, but those highlights were counterbalanced by a frustrating series of supply problems stretching into 2010 caused by TSMC’s troubled 40-nm chip manufacturing process. At least, that’s always been my way of thinking, and we’ve had no shortage of intrigue, one-upsmanship, and swings of momentum in the GPU arena over the past year or so.ĪMD grabbed the lead with the debut of its DirectX 11-class Radeon HD 5000-series graphics processors last September, well ahead of long-time rival Nvidia’s competing chips. For a journalist, there’s nothing better than having a good story to tell.