The Future of Mobile Gaming: New Chips from ATI and NVIDIA

Conclusion

What do we think about the next generation of mobile graphics processors? We are excited about them. Which one will you want in your future notebook? No way to tell yet. We can hypothesize and stipulate performance all we want but until the solutions find themselves in notebooks we cannot know what chip will take the performance crown (especially considering that we still do not know how the Radeon 9600 Pro will perform).

To be honest we are a bit irritated at both ATI and NVIDIA's mobile plan of attack. After proclaiming how wonderful it was to find the Mobility Radeon 9000 graphics chip shipping the week after the chip's announcement, we now find ourselves having to wait at least a month and perhaps two before the new line of Mobility Radeon 9600 chips end up in notebooks (it is possible we will see the Mobility Radeon 9200 in notebooks before this since it is essentially the Mobility Radeon 9000 chip at a higher clock speed). ATI went out of their way at the Mobility Radeon 9000 launch to point out that the launch was the first time a mobile graphics chip was announced and shipping with a week's timeframe. Are they no longer practicing what they preach?

As for NVIDIA, we are irked at the way the GeForce4 4200 Go product panned out. Not only did the chip not arrive on time and only find its way into one system to date, the chip looks destined to be replaced soon by the new GeForce FX Go5600. Now we cannot be sure when to expect GeForce FX based notebook solutions ("sooner rather than later" we are told) nor can be sure of the product's longevity once it arrives on the scene (in all fairness it is unlikely that either the Go5200 or Go5600 will be gone as quickly as the GeForce4 4200 Go).

There does seem to be an excuse for the rush to announce the next generation graphics solutions. That excuse is the Pentium M. Thanks to Intel's latest processor, mobile computing performance is all the buzz around technology circles. It is only natural for both ATI and NVIDIA to want to take as much advantage of the buzz as possible. The tactic may be good for the companies marketing strategy but it is not so good for the consumers who are left waiting and wondering.