Reinvention
It would be fair to say that it's been a tough year for NVIDIA.
Things started promisingly with the acquisition of physics technology specialist AGEIA and the retaking of the overall performance crown with the launch of the GeForce 9800 GX2 but, like NVIDIA's share price, things went pretty much downhill from there.
The pressure first started to show when NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang had a bit of a rant at Intel, prompted by Intel's ambition to become a major player in NVIDIA's barrio - discrete graphics - through its Larrabee project.
Still, we had our first look at NVIDIA's next generation of notebook IGPs (integrated graphics processors)at Computex in June when Rene Haas - NVIDIA's GM of notebook GPUs, who we'll hear more from later - introduced us to the planned launches, which we expected to see by August.
Furthermore we had the launch of NVIDIA's next generation of discrete graphics - the GeForce GTX 280 - which retook the single GPU performance crown. Still, if you look at the review published on HEXUS.net at the time you'll see that our praise was not exactly unreserved - a sign of things to come.
NVIDIA was forced into a series of impromptu and expensive price cuts
AMD had served notice that it was starting to get its graphics act together with the launch of the 780G IGP back in March, but AMD really stuck the knife into NVIDIA when it launched its new generation of discrete graphics - the Radeon HD 4800 series.
AMD's graphics strategy is to offer superior performance at every price point to NVIDIA and the new GPU offered such a price/performance advantage over NVIDIA's new GPU that NVIDIA was forced into a series of impromptu and expensive price cuts. Before long AMD took back the outright performance crown too.