Quote Originally Posted by kryptobs2000 View Post
How has it scared away Nvidia's partners? I saw Gainward is now moving over to the red camp, but it's not as if they left green, they're just putting their feet in both doors. Besides, I think that says alot more about the 4000 series than any failure from the g92. g92 was and still is a great chip.
It is still a very good chip, I'd say it is about as impressive as the RV770. The problem here is not the performance, but rather the marketing.

Nvidia pushed the 9800 series to sell as many GPUs as possible (this is just normal business). The problem however is that their board partners still needed to sell all those G92 8800 cards. You and I know the difference between the two series is quite small, but 50% of the potential buyers don't. As a result the price of the 8800 cards drops to a very low point. But Nvidia wants to sell even more G92 GPUs, so they launch the 9800GX2. The result is that many people buy a 9800GX2 instead of 2 seperate cards, now the board partners have a buttload of 8800 and 9800 cards. Now Nvidia pushes the G92+ forwards making it harder for their partners to sell their normal 9800GTXs. The low-margin 9800GX2 is just becoming absolete throught the launch of the new GT200 based cards, so these cards have to be sold cheaply.

My point here is that this is indeed business. Nvidia is indeed doing great business. However Nvidia finally understands that they have screwed their partners, so the weird pricing agreement comes in effect to save their smaller/weaker partners.

Makes sense?