First 9600GT review

[v_rr]

DX10.1 & SM4.1 are right now nothing but words on paper & PR speak. Save that lame duck of an excuse for when there's even a single DX10.1 game on the market.

No one here is discussing DX_10.1 or not.
Just a fact, Sis and ATI cards suport it while Nvidia not. Whats the problem about it?

For the $150-200 the stock to OC cards will cost it's proving to be more than a match for the 38x0's especially when they can expose AMD's poor AA performance. nVidia's performance is causing AMD to lower prices so they can compete which is not a good thing for AMD.

Again ATI has process manufacter advantage. Margins are no problem for ATI and 9600GT don´t change things because is stil a bigger die.
To prove that:

the focus has shifted instead to lower-than-expected gross margin in the fourth quarter - at 45.7%, gross margins were down about 50 basis points sequentially, due to higher production costs for the GeForce 8800 line of graphics chips.

http://blogs.barrons.com/techtraderd...d=yahoobarrons

Despite god Nvidia Q4, this and other factors are bringing shares down.
Nvidia is sufering the same that AMD CPUs are sufering from Intel witch is lower margins to mantain their product competitive because the competitor has manufacter advantage (Phenon 65nm - Intel 45nm).

This case is ATI HD 3xxx 55nm - NV 8xxx and 9xxx 65nm. In Q4 Nvidia had to drop margins. Q1 2008 should be equal to Q4 2007 and Q2 2008 depends on Nvidia 9xxx and ATI RV7xx.
RS780 IGP 55nm will be very very important to ATI to go up in market share and have the maximum margins in this low-end sector.