As you know, we posted a roadmap about Pascal products in February 2016, but unfortunately it seems that we were wrong of about 45 days / 2 months. According to our sources, NVIDIA has decided to move up the launch of the Pascal GPUs in order to contrast the next Polaris cards (This explain the low availability).

Why? Isn’t Polaris 10 GPU smaller and cheaper than GP104? Isn’t Polaris 10 a mid-low end GPU, and GP104 a mid-high end GPU? NVIDIA has a huge problem, and this is called DirectX 12, as we wrote in this article. The best solution to play down AMD attack is to sell as many GP104 as possible during this 2 months. This strategy could cause two effects:

• my sources talked about September release, but NVIDIA revealed in advance GTX1080/1070 in order to hinder AMD Polaris "Momentum". So generic customer will say: "If NVIDIA has the best GPU, I'll wait for GTX1060 instead of buying RX480". We have seen that this strategy worked very well with the GTX960, in spite of R9 380/380X superiority (except power consumption): high end products drive low end products sales.
• rumors around the web say that NVIDIA has send a very detailed guide, in order to explain how to properly review the GTX 1080 and GTX1070 cards, and specific drivers to reviewers. Because these reviewers no longer hold the cards, the vast majority of them will have to use these data in next Polaris reviews.

Also, Polaris 10’s DX12 performances will be dangerously close to GP104 performances, and NVIDIA has to hide this aspect as long as possible (e.g. showing the Preemption Async feature). It seems that next AAA titles, like Civ 6 & next GTA, will use a solid DX12 backend and NVIDIA has to keep as low as possible the AMD market shares till then, in order to persuade the developers to integrate NVIDIA features in their engines (At the present moment, DX12 PC graphic market is fairly divided between AMD and NVIDIA ... but AMD has the whole console market!).

Surely, a lot of people will laugh about this statement, also because it reminds of our Broadwell-EP/EX rumor. People thinks that it’s unrealistic this thing, because AMD is tiny, because AMD has no money, because AMD is almost dead, etc. Nothing could be further from the truth! AMD has patents, has IPs, has brilliant minds and now has a lot of money thanks to Sony, Microsoft, apple and Chinese partnerships (This money is not listed in the AMD Investor Relations, eheh).

Pubblicato in: News, English News
Tags: directx12 , gp104 , nvidia , pascal , polaris , rumor

Autore: Gian Maria Forni
Esperto in: Esperto di mercati e CPU

Sebbene sia laureato in Lettere e Filosofia, indirizzo Storia Contemporanea, e scriva per quotidiani e riviste di tale settore, ha sempre avuto la passione per l'informatica ed ha collaborato quale moderatore in importanti forum del settore

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