Intervista con Creative

I can tell you now with 100% certainty that Creative Labs Europe will not produce 3D Labs, ATI, Matrox or Trident based videocards anytime soon. The upcoming graphics cards line-up will be from NVIDIA with of course NV30 in sight. This of course will mean no ATi Radeon products in Europe as many of you expected (Creative Asia does though). We posted this interview to clear up the situation surrounding Creative Europe versus 3D Labs and their new product line based on the NVIDIA NV30 silicon.

Now that's putting me in a really difficult position because as you know NVIDIA are pretty consistent with their "we don't talk about unreleased product" position but here is what I think I am safe in saying … (bear in mind I have seen specs and simulations not actual hardware). Based on what I've seen NV30 will retake the performance crown from ATI by a significant amount. Obviously I can't comment on clock speed etc. but its fair to say that we should see a significant jump based on the fact that NV30 is on 0.13 and 9700 Pro squeezed every last cycle out of 0.15. With regard to pricing all I can say is you should use previous pricing as a guideline for estimating SRP's. There has always been a price premium associated with having the absolute bleeding edge and in the past process changes have lead to higher development costs and thus higher street prices. Against that we have the recent trend for binning chips by speed and producing a range from a single chip and I would expect that trend to continue. Sorry I can't be more specific but being totally honest there are no final decisions yet and all I can do is use past experience as a guideline.