Computer Graphics World

July 2009 66 ■ ■ ■ ■ Trends & Technologies units, down 21 percent from this quarter last year, and not everyone fared the same. ings probably aren't going to get back to the normal seasonality until the third quarter of this year, and we won't hit the levels of 2008 until 2010, yet people still need to buy things. Old computers will fail, new employees will be hired and need machines, and, of course, software upgrades will be coming along. e soft- ware vendors have jumped on the band- wagon for Microsoft DX and OpenCL in a big way. ere's no longer any discussion about hardware acceleration for software. e vendors are just looking for more ways to take advantage of it. We are still predicting an upturn in the PC market in the third and fourth quarters—for the graphics market, in particular (which serves not just PCs, but aerospace and automotive, industrial sys- tems, medical systems, kiosks, and POS locales). We are optimistic because these are seasonally the best quarters. What is fueling that optimism? For one, new designs from ATI and Nvidia. Yes, we expect ATI and Nvidia to introduce new products that will stimulate buyers' appe- tites. Second, GPUs will be based on 40nm, which will be exciting and performance en- hancing. ird, depleted inventories need to be restocked for back-to-school purchasing and the holiday madness. Also, there is pent- up demand that will send people buying. Another encouraging factor is the eff ect of the stimulus programs worldwide, infusing some extra cash into the market. And, fi - nally, new operating systems—Apple's Snow Leopard and Windows 7—will help stimu- late new purchases in the fall. In other words, the cleaning out of old inventory, in the electronics, automotive, and real-estate markets, should be fairly completed by the end of the summer (and some amazing deals will be available if you are happy with 2008 technology). e shipment levels tell the story about what has happened to the world economy. A lot of folks, though not all (in fact, far from all), have simply put off buying a new workstation. Several, however, have bought new workstation AIBs to retrofi t to their existing machines. A workstation AIB is not cheap, however. ey start at $300 for an entry-level WS AIB and get as high as $1300 for an ultra high-end board—the main diff erence being the amount of mem- ory on the board (512 to 2) and the speed of the GPU and memory. Bench- mark scores track proportionally, so you do get what you pay for, and you should buy as much as you can aff ord. ese workstation AIBs come with a library of software drivers, the communi- cations software between the AIB and the application. And in the case of professional graphics applications, the software inter- face typically uses OpenGL. e OpenGL driver is unique for each application—not just unique, but, in many cases, they are tuned and certifi ed by the software manu- facturer. at's one of the things that con- tribute to the cost of a WS AIB—getting those certifi cations. Less-demanding Applications Not everyone is working in the high end, and not everyone is using applications that require an OpenGL driver. In fact, many, if not most, of the popular DCC and CAD applications today can use Microsoft's DirectX interface. For those people, it may be possible to use a gaming board in lieu of a workstation AIB. And, looking at the market results for such AIBs, we see that maybe a few people had the same idea (see the chart on this page). We see a pickup in fi rst-quar- ter 2009 sales of gaming AIBs that can't be completely attributed to game players because no new killer games have been re- leased lately. Game boards with memory from 800 to 1.5 can be purchased for $200 to $500, and like their workstation cousins, give you great value for the money. ■ Jon Peddie is president of Jon Peddie Research, a Tiburon, CA-based consultancy specializing in graphics and multimedia that also publishes JPR's "TechWatch." He can be reached at jon@jonpeddie.com. Kathleen Maher is a contributing editor to Computer Graphics World, a senior analyst at JPR, and editor in chief of JPR's "TechWatch." She can be reached at kathleen@jonpeddie.com. Q4 '06 Q1 '07 Q2 '07 Q3 '07 Q4 '07 Q1 '08 Q2 '08 Q3 '08 Q4 '08 Q1 '09 Jon Peddle Research Enthusiast AIB Shipments 1.4M 1.2M 1.0M 0.8M 0.6M 0.4M 0.2M 0.0M Q1 '04 Q2 '04 Q3 '04 Q4 '04 Q1 '05 Q2 '05 Q3 '05 Q4 '05 Q1 '06 Q2 '06 Q3 '06 Game enthusiast AIB sales showed a rebound in Q1. (in millions of units worldwide)

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