GeForce 7 Series: A Small Family?

June 2005-December 2005

This is kinda funny; I was having a shower this morning, just before I went to work when something struck me hard: Did you realize that NVidia's Geforce 7 series is such a small family of graphics card for almost 6 months?

When I think about this, it is an absolute truth that whether we realize it or not, GeForce 7 only consists GeForce 7800 GTX (June 2005), 7800 GT (July) and 7800 GTX 512 (November), before we hit 2006. The fact that this family can be considered small is that those cards fall into the same category: high-end. There were no G70 cards released to fill gap inside mid-range and low-end category at all during the 2nd half of 2005.

Further thinking reveals that the reason for this scenario is relatively simple: too simple actually that we just have to think like NVidia's marketing people. Just consider this: lack of competition from ATi. That's it, I said it.

We all know that ATi had been bugged with the problems regarding their initial R520 design that forced them to delay the release of the most anticipated '32 pipelines' R520 (we thought so at first!). Finally, they managed to release X1K series in October 2005 after being delayed a few times. Although X1800 series wasn't a '32 pipelines' card as expected before, I praised ATi for offering a full fledge solution that covered low-end, mid-range and high-end on the same hardlaunch day, marking ATi's departure from being labeled as a 'paperlaunch' company.

And I believe that due to this event, NVidia responded back by releasing 7800 GTX 512 in the battle of the performance card. Yet still, there was no graphics for mid and low-end for GeForce 7 series. Once again, we were asked to wait. Opps, I almost forgot that there was 6800 GS (a 6800 GT look-alike in performance) released somewhere in November. While it successfully acted as filler between 6800 GT and vanilla 6800 (at the same time, it nicely fell into mid-range category to blast X1600XT away, during that timeframe!), the fact remains that mid-range, budgeted gamers still couldn't grab a hold at G70 enhanced features over NV40. Once again, majority of gamers had to wait.

Should I blame NVidia for this? Morally, I might want to. This play-catch thing really bothers the majority of gamers, and it created a situation that was not a win-win scenario. When a party failed to compete for a certain period of time, the other party took advantage of the situation. But how can I blame NVidia? This is just a nature of business, pure and simple.

Should I blame ATi? Far from it; they didn't purposely left a big gap in the middle of competition. Whatever fiasco that happened during the construction of R520 was unexpected; it just happened. I think ATi's excellent November launch was an attempt to compensate for the loss of competition during the 2nd half of 2005.

Just one thing: if I was on NVidia's shoes, I would have released 7300 and 7600 (even 7800 GS for AGP market) between June and December last year. That would have me secured the biggest market available without being challenged by any competing products at all. So, I wonder why NVidia didn't do this; they might have their own reason.

In the end, when it comes to a very tight competition like this, consumers are at the mercy of these companies, especially when the competition only involves two parties. When one goes down, we fall onto another party and just hoping that the situation still favour our way. Unfortunately, we don't get to see that a lot.

A third company into the competition will probably balance the situation better.