Stalker was a big flop, too much promises, too much hype and it all boiled down to a generic shoot-em-up game. The promosed big expanses were non existant, the RPG elements removed, the open and great trading just a bit upper than dreadful, the graphics old on release and the gameplay average, but still reviewers loved it, probably took a fat paycheck to love it and normal people converted.

One thing is sure it has a particular hardcore following thats loves the game, but lets all admit it its crap. Nothing of what was promised was delivered and even the expansions could not save this flop.

Stalker 2 is somehow in production, this is trully a second chance for the team behind Stalker. Can they make the game they set out to make in the beggining or will they fail again.

I like Stalker 2 to have all the elements Stalker hadn't or remove. I want fantastically smart AI, great and up-to-date graphics when released, vehicle driving, vehicle damage and fuel system and repairs, sleep, dring and food rpg elements, interesting and good trading/purchasing system and vast open space.

Stalekr 2 needs to be Fallout 3 in post nuclear Chernobil with todays weapons and realistic settings and more conventional and realistic settings. The team can't fail this time, with so many great games this is their second and last chance to make something really great.

ATI is going to release its "new" generation of graphic cards the 6000 series soon, probably close to New Year.

This "new" generation is actually the now old 5000 series generation, with a lot of improvements and tweaks ofcourse and better clocks.

Don't expect to see more shaders than the current 1600 shaders on the HD5870, though you can expect some differences in the performance and mainstream market.

ATI team are not fools and they will first introduce the high end of the cards, followed by the performance segment and only after that and few months of idling will they introduce the mainstream and low level segment cards.

The spect for the HD 6870 are as follows:

1600 Shaders

1000MHz core clock

2GB GDDR5 at 5200MHz

256bit memory interface

80 texture units

40 ROP's

HD 6850 specs:

1440 shaders

900MHz core clock

1GB GDDR5 at 4600MHz

256bit memory interface

72 texture units

32 ROP's

Sufffice to say AMD/ATI already won. They have had a line up of graphic cards for almost 6 months now and Nvidia is only yet to release its new generation graphic cards, the G100, Fermi or also otherwise known as the GTX400 series.

Apart from the fact that ATI has been on the market with new DX11 graphic cards almost 6 months and that they've sold millions of them already, Nvidia still has a fighting chance.

If Nvidia's GTX480 ends up significantly faster than the 5870 and the GTX470 around the same level of performance as the 5870 we might see Nvidia being the stronger company in the longer run. Lets not forget that we are going to see a rehash of the current generation, that will have higher clocks, more memory and core improvements.

Still though, this is only if Nvidia's graphic cards end up being faster than their ATI counterparts.

Who is positioned for success this year?

The short answer is both companies. On one hand ATI has a lot of flexibility, as they can produce different cards faster and more easily, since they have the corner tones already firmly in place, but on the other hand Nvidia has more scalability and bigger room for improvement with their graphic cards.

While ATI can make entry, performance and high-end graphic cards faster and easier, Nvidia has a lot of scalability and huge room for improvement, since their newest graphic cards the 480 and 470 are pretty much running too hot, too energy inefficient and are not highly optimized.

So for the first half of 2010 the clear winner is ATI, the second half winner I predict to be Nvidia, if they can manage to overcome the current errors that bug the GTX 480 and GTX470 series.

Its been a while now and both Nvidia and ATI have stick with their graphic cards, only doing small refreshes or name changes with Nvidia.

Though in these economic conditions its no wonder they have not released new graphic cards and they are hoping to sit out the first half of 2009 before they risk it into the market.

The latest graphic card from ATI is the 4890 and 275GTX from Nvidia, both cards are pretty cheap considering we've seen cards go up to amazing $650 especially from Nvidia, so this is a good sign.

But what will it come next, what strategy will ATI have and how will Nvidia respond since they've been the follower in this latest generation of graphic cards?

From what its known the new generation would be based on a 40nm manufacuring process, ATI is going to make 2 chips, 1 will be for the mainstream market, while the other chip for the performance segment.

Nvidia on the other hand is probably going to go for a 1 chip design for all cards as always, in which it will bring the big guns first and then slowly start bringing out slower variants.

One thing is certain though, Nvidia will not go out developing an expensive chip and wait for manufacuring improvement to bring slower variants, but it will be a mix of power and cheap to make.

The next graphic cards should be an evolution of the current graphic cards and likely we are going to see more streams/processors/shaders, higher clocks and support for DX11.

Nvidia is likely to follow ATI with GDDR5 technology since its cheaper than going for a 512bit bus.

The biggest improvement that we are probably going to see is in the coolors department, neither Nvidia, nor ATI have particularry good reference coolers and they are quite inneffective, loud and consume quite a bit of electricity.

So I'm going to guess that we are going to see some different coolers from both companies, since ATI cards with reference coolers run very hot, as much as 90 degrees and Nvidia cards are pretty close running at 70 degrees on load.

The final high end cards would be close to these:

ATI 5870:

960shaders

850MHz core clock

3500Mhz memory clock

1GB GDDR5 512bit

Nvidia GTX390:

384shaders

750Mhz core clock

3500MHz memory clock

1700MHz shaders clock

1GB GDDR5 512bit

Lower models would probably have smaller bus, i would guess 256bit or 384bit, less shaders and lower clocks.

Who would have thought that ATI would make such a strong come back, after being almost doomed.

ATI was on the brink of extinction for more than a year, it had no competitive graphic cards so the only way to stay competitive with Nvidia was to keep reducing prices, which meant that they were loosing money, as well as market share.

And then the 4800 series happened. ATI had build the 4800 series on a small manufacturing process with performance audience ita target. This meant low manufacturing costs and more room for maneuvers, but what ATI didn't know is that their 4870 1GB GDDR5 card would come to be faster than Nvidia's GTX 260 card which was priced at $400 then as opposed to ATI's $300 card.

So not only did ATI make cheaper cards, but it had better performance than the GTX 260 and on top of that it sold for a whole $100 less.

Nvidia GTX 260 was build on a 65nm process and with bigger die, which meant it was more expensive to produce and somewhat harder, since its basically a GTX 280 with less processors.

So until Nvidia managed to respond with lowering the price, then releasing new drivers to improve performance, then introducing the 260 core 216, which is basically a GTX 260, just build on a 55nm process, so it meant more processors survived in the manufacturing and then reducing the price on it, as well as releasing new drivers, it all came too late.

ATI has sold more than 2 million 4800 series and introduced new cards like the 4830, 4670 and so on. As this year comes to an end its obvious that the main battle will once again be played with ATI's and Nvidia's new graphic cards, which should be introduced by march 2009.

With the recent announcement of Diablo 3 there have been tons of articles, previews, info and discussion.

Though most liked what they saw, there was small number of fans that petitioned against Diablo 3 graphics and Fallout 3 producer calling Diablo 3 and Starcraft 2 conservative.

Now let's get the facts right.

Diablo 3: A true sequel to the previous games. Diablo 3 still has the isometric view camera, it's still the action-RPG hack and slash addicting gameplay, but with improvements in every category.

For example its now fully 3D with great graphics, redesigned UI looks better and works better, yet still looks familiar to previous Diablo games with the 2 big orbs of both sides and the middle now featured for skill combinations... In a sense its bigger, better and more of the formula that proved so popular. It also has some new features to keep it fresh.

For example although we only saw a pre-alpha build gameplay beta, it already looked better than most of the RPG's out on the market and better than other games out on the market really.

So in a sense its probably somewhat of a mix between great old stuff and new fresh stuff.

On the other side we have Fallout 3 now produced by Bethesda the developers of Oblivion. Now let's see what Bethesda has done and why they dare calling Diablo 3 conservative!?

Fallout 3: A true sequel to Oblivion, not Fallout series. They threw the isometric camera and standard movement controls and made it 3rd person camera with FPS controls.

Apart from the few names from the fallout series they've kept in the game it's totally a new game. Yes it looks great, but what matters is gameplay.

In a sense you could call Fallout 3 - Oblivion on steroids with guns, set in a post-apocalyptic future.

The mechanics work nothing like the fallout series and everything like Oblivion, gameplay works nothing like fallout and everything like oblivion and so on...

Yeah maybe they've should have incorporated some Oblivion things in Falllout 3, but keeping the fallout feeling like its predecessors.

Anyways to talk about conservative it's been Bethesda that's been keeping the same old design from 1994 up till now, making one game actually with different names.

Blizzard on the other hand has made 3 IP's or 4 game universes and 3 types of games: RTS, action-RPG, MMO.

Blizzard has redefined the genre in its respectful fields times and times again starting with Starcraft, Diablo 1/2, Warcraft 3, WOW.

What Blizzard did with the announcement of Diablo 3 is brake the myth that isometric view can't be done in modern games.

Buy buy Bethesda!

Visit:

Far Cry 2 fansite

Nvidia and ATI(AMD)need to start improving their business model.

I remember a time when you bought a graphic card and you could play any game at high settings with high FPS rates for the next 3 years. One such example is Riva TNT 2, it lasted me 4 years, 3 of which i could play any game with at least decent FPS for 3 years and only in the forth year i started having slow frames in games.

So instead of the current model where every 6 months release new products with different name but same speeds or at best only 15% faster than a previous equivalent model.

There are more examples: take the difference from the FX5600Ultra to 6600GT, radeon x600 to radeon x1650XT at least 50% faster products at a decent price!

The previous 3 generation were for example 7600GT to 8600GT=5% increase in speeds, 8600GT to 9600GT=5-10% increase in speeds, x1650XT to hd2600XT=5-10% increase in speeds, hd2600XT to 3650=5-10% increase in speeds and convert the % in frames it comes down to only 4-9 more fps.

Has AMD takeover of ATI really screwed both companies?

-Not both but it really screwed AMD. Instead of investing in additional production fabs. AMD decided to buy ATI so it can purue some crazy idea about CPU-GPU processor or in other words hybrid hardware that will act as CPU and GPU all in one.

 The idea was crazy from start beacose computers are very much in the expansion curently. From 7 billion people only 1 billion are with computers and most computers are only media based or office based. So if a company has 1000 computers that doesent count as 1000 but as 1.

 Curently AMD is in real trouble and there is no come-back from this position.

 ATI on the other hand although 6 months behind nvidia doesen't look so bad but on the other hand from the benchies e saw their video cards are only as good as Nvidia 6 month old offerings.

But still AMD 2900XTX is going to beat nvidia's 8800GTX and ultra. Nvidia is curently developing it's 65nm core named G9. Release date for the next Nvidia GPU's is late Q4 2007.

Top G9 graphic card will feature SM5, 224 stream processors, 1500 stream clock, and 1GB GDDR4 memory as well as 128mb dedicated physics memory. This graphic card should offer 50% faster results than the current 8800Ultra.

 

you can read the full blog here

stupid gamespot doesent allow me to post the text!

And while AMD is 6 months behind Intel in every way speaking and dreams about Fusion  and Fision, Intel is hard at work with it's 45nm processors and is in the first stage in the developing of it's 32nm processors. Further more when AMD actually launches it's Barcelona processors Intel will launch it's refreshed line up with 1333MHz and 4mb L2 cahce processors at decently high GHz.
With this trend of events it's sure to say AMD is going to have UBER Extremly Ultra Super hard work to stay with 15% market-share.
Not to mention that Intel is doing better and better with it's mobile platform processors every second while AMD are having trouble just staying in the mobile business. On top of all this the 2 billions acqusition of ATI isn't easining things and on top of this AMD can't really meet demand and on top of this AMD only has plans to build 2 factories until 2012, while intel will be opening 2 more Brand new Uber Ultra Extremef Super HiGh TEcH factories until 2010.
So buy buy AMD don't play with fire agaennnnnnnnn!