I don't know why people is being so conservative with their expectations about these cards. They look almost double as fast as current Ati cards, based on the specs shown here. You can believe them or not, that's another story, but looking at them and not expecting at least a 75% performance increase is really pesimistic. If the specs are true, these cards have the potential to be more than twice as fast as RV670. 32 TMUs clocked higher than on RV670 will help for sure, as well as double the GFlops on the shaders. ROPs mean nothing nowadays, specially on Ati cards where AA is done in the shaders. Such high memory bandwidth is not really needed, but it will help increase performance a bit. All in all, I would expect a card with these specs being more than twice as fast as current generation of Radeons.
I have quoted you since it's the last post regarding the vista crashes subject, but it's directed to everybody talking about them.
If we HAVE to talk about Vista crashes and Nvidia drivers in a thread about new HD4000 cards, at least let's do it with real numbers. Here you have actual market share figures:
http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/video/..._Back_Market_Share_from_Intel_Nvidia_JPR.html
Here's a resume: Intel's average for the year is around 40%, ~30% for Nvidia and ~19% for Ati.
Now I have to say that I agree a bit with newtekie. Even though he is using bloated numbers, what he said has sense. You have to take into account that most Intel IGP users are not doing anything stressful enough to get a crash related to graphics. The chances for Office, Mozilla or Emule to cause graphics related crashes are not very high, mefinks. Anyone with more "ambitious" needs will use a discrete card, even if it's only for watching movies on the PC, or they will use Ati/Nvidia integrated graphics instead of Intel IGP.
You can't use bold numbers in this situation since the use that people give to their machines is most relevant than the graphics adapter itself. Overclocking, driver changes, hardcore gaming, benchmarking/stressing the card, all of them are risk factors that could eventually lead to crashes. None of them are going to happen in an Intel IGP.
I would apply the same about Vista. Amongst people using Vista there's a bigger chance to find Ati/Nvidia discrete cards than on XP machines. The last time I heard a Vista and graphics card related news (aside the Vista crashes one), it was about Vista increasing the number of discrete graphic cards sold.
Those two facts take Intel out of the ecuation IMO. So that leaves us with Ati vs. Nvidia crash numbers. Here Nvidia has ~66% of market share, but there were reports that Nvidia was selling way more DX10 high-end cards (before RV670, but a year selling "only" Nvidia 8 series leads to lot of users), while Ati was selling more low-end and integrated graphics. If you look at the charts, you can see that Nvidia+Ati sold 52 millions of graphics adapters in Q4 2007 and in the next link we can see they sold 31 million discrete graphics on the same timeframe:
http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/video/...Rise_but_Prices_Down_Jon_Peddie_Research.html
Almost half of the cards are integrated, where Ati was selling more. Again there's a low risk factor between people using integrated graphics. We can easily conclude then that between the risk factor crowd the number of Nvidia cards is a lot bigger than what pure market share would suggest.
In the end what I mean is that Nvidia causing more crashes is purely stadistics at work and has nothing to do with driver quality. None of te companies offer better drivers than the other.