Its been a while now and both Nvidia and ATI have stick with their graphic cards, only doing small refreshes or name changes with Nvidia.

Though in these economic conditions its no wonder they have not released new graphic cards and they are hoping to sit out the first half of 2009 before they risk it into the market.

The latest graphic card from ATI is the 4890 and 275GTX from Nvidia, both cards are pretty cheap considering we've seen cards go up to amazing $650 especially from Nvidia, so this is a good sign.

But what will it come next, what strategy will ATI have and how will Nvidia respond since they've been the follower in this latest generation of graphic cards?

From what its known the new generation would be based on a 40nm manufacuring process, ATI is going to make 2 chips, 1 will be for the mainstream market, while the other chip for the performance segment.

Nvidia on the other hand is probably going to go for a 1 chip design for all cards as always, in which it will bring the big guns first and then slowly start bringing out slower variants.

One thing is certain though, Nvidia will not go out developing an expensive chip and wait for manufacuring improvement to bring slower variants, but it will be a mix of power and cheap to make.

The next graphic cards should be an evolution of the current graphic cards and likely we are going to see more streams/processors/shaders, higher clocks and support for DX11.

Nvidia is likely to follow ATI with GDDR5 technology since its cheaper than going for a 512bit bus.

The biggest improvement that we are probably going to see is in the coolors department, neither Nvidia, nor ATI have particularry good reference coolers and they are quite inneffective, loud and consume quite a bit of electricity.

So I'm going to guess that we are going to see some different coolers from both companies, since ATI cards with reference coolers run very hot, as much as 90 degrees and Nvidia cards are pretty close running at 70 degrees on load.

The final high end cards would be close to these:

ATI 5870:

960shaders

850MHz core clock

3500Mhz memory clock

1GB GDDR5 512bit

Nvidia GTX390:

384shaders

750Mhz core clock

3500MHz memory clock

1700MHz shaders clock

1GB GDDR5 512bit

Lower models would probably have smaller bus, i would guess 256bit or 384bit, less shaders and lower clocks.

Who would have thought that ATI would make such a strong come back, after being almost doomed.

ATI was on the brink of extinction for more than a year, it had no competitive graphic cards so the only way to stay competitive with Nvidia was to keep reducing prices, which meant that they were loosing money, as well as market share.

And then the 4800 series happened. ATI had build the 4800 series on a small manufacturing process with performance audience ita target. This meant low manufacturing costs and more room for maneuvers, but what ATI didn't know is that their 4870 1GB GDDR5 card would come to be faster than Nvidia's GTX 260 card which was priced at $400 then as opposed to ATI's $300 card.

So not only did ATI make cheaper cards, but it had better performance than the GTX 260 and on top of that it sold for a whole $100 less.

Nvidia GTX 260 was build on a 65nm process and with bigger die, which meant it was more expensive to produce and somewhat harder, since its basically a GTX 280 with less processors.

So until Nvidia managed to respond with lowering the price, then releasing new drivers to improve performance, then introducing the 260 core 216, which is basically a GTX 260, just build on a 55nm process, so it meant more processors survived in the manufacturing and then reducing the price on it, as well as releasing new drivers, it all came too late.

ATI has sold more than 2 million 4800 series and introduced new cards like the 4830, 4670 and so on. As this year comes to an end its obvious that the main battle will once again be played with ATI's and Nvidia's new graphic cards, which should be introduced by march 2009.

With the recent announcement of Diablo 3 there have been tons of articles, previews, info and discussion.

Though most liked what they saw, there was small number of fans that petitioned against Diablo 3 graphics and Fallout 3 producer calling Diablo 3 and Starcraft 2 conservative.

Now let's get the facts right.

Diablo 3: A true sequel to the previous games. Diablo 3 still has the isometric view camera, it's still the action-RPG hack and slash addicting gameplay, but with improvements in every category.

For example its now fully 3D with great graphics, redesigned UI looks better and works better, yet still looks familiar to previous Diablo games with the 2 big orbs of both sides and the middle now featured for skill combinations... In a sense its bigger, better and more of the formula that proved so popular. It also has some new features to keep it fresh.

For example although we only saw a pre-alpha build gameplay beta, it already looked better than most of the RPG's out on the market and better than other games out on the market really.

So in a sense its probably somewhat of a mix between great old stuff and new fresh stuff.

On the other side we have Fallout 3 now produced by Bethesda the developers of Oblivion. Now let's see what Bethesda has done and why they dare calling Diablo 3 conservative!?

Fallout 3: A true sequel to Oblivion, not Fallout series. They threw the isometric camera and standard movement controls and made it 3rd person camera with FPS controls.

Apart from the few names from the fallout series they've kept in the game it's totally a new game. Yes it looks great, but what matters is gameplay.

In a sense you could call Fallout 3 - Oblivion on steroids with guns, set in a post-apocalyptic future.

The mechanics work nothing like the fallout series and everything like Oblivion, gameplay works nothing like fallout and everything like oblivion and so on...

Yeah maybe they've should have incorporated some Oblivion things in Falllout 3, but keeping the fallout feeling like its predecessors.

Anyways to talk about conservative it's been Bethesda that's been keeping the same old design from 1994 up till now, making one game actually with different names.

Blizzard on the other hand has made 3 IP's or 4 game universes and 3 types of games: RTS, action-RPG, MMO.

Blizzard has redefined the genre in its respectful fields times and times again starting with Starcraft, Diablo 1/2, Warcraft 3, WOW.

What Blizzard did with the announcement of Diablo 3 is brake the myth that isometric view can't be done in modern games.

Buy buy Bethesda!