• Competitor rules

    Please remember that any mention of competitors, hinting at competitors or offering to provide details of competitors will result in an account suspension. The full rules can be found under the 'Terms and Rules' link in the bottom right corner of your screen. Just don't mention competitors in any way, shape or form and you'll be OK.

Do we need/want a 3rd or 4th 3D GPU Maker e.g Matrox again?

pugheaven

pugheaven

pugheaven

Soldato
Joined
22 Apr 2008
Posts
3,929
Location
Bryn Celyn Wales
Just thinking with the mixed reviews and views on the forth coming next gen cards, that do we now need more competition again?

Remember when we had 3Dfx, STB, Diamond, S3, nVidia, ATi, Matrox, Cirrus, Trident etc etc... PowerVR tech hahaha I remember that one.. ... you know in the old days there was a lot of competition...

Is this lack of competition nowadays making the whole GPU market stagnant? I think it is... and wouldn't it be nice if Matrox decided to re-enter the 3D Market, I remember their Millianium was the fastest 2d in the world, and the Mystique 2 and 4mb, they were ace 3D cards them as well...

What's people opinions on the current (well last few years) monopoly of just two companies pushing it? does it make them rest on their laurals knowing they only have to beat 1 other competitor?

IF for example, we'd have still had say 4-5 major players, would we have faster technology being released next week?

Cheers Pug ;)
 
I'd definitely be in favour of more competition, because it means lower prices and better technology. S3 are still making cards, but they are very low horsepower and they don't have any partners like Nvidia and ATi do (e.g. XFX, BFG, EVGA).
 
Matrox got hammered in the first round of DX9-capable graphics cards: the Parhelia - although quite a deal more advanced in terms of image quality than either ATI or Nvidia - just didn't have the horsepower to compete effectively. Becuase Matrox had dumped so many resources into it and it didn't sell, they had to dispose of much of their engineering expertise.

S3 have had new solutions brought tothe table over the past five years but these have never really made an impact, purely because they're best described as 'low end' solutions that couldn't (last time I looked) compete with a Radeon 9600Xt.

Do we need a third competitor? Given the vast amount of resources required, it's going to take somebody like IBM, Samsung, Intel or Sun to have a pop and I don't think any of them are particularly interest (apart from Intel, of course).
 
Intel are already heavily invested in the GPGPU market, with their 'larabee' card.

If it's able to compete with the nvidia/ATI offerings in the GPGPU arena (and I don't see why it wouldn't be, given the budgets and personnel available to them), we might well see a transition to the video market 6 months or so later.

I do feel that only Intel really has the budgets, manpower and access to fabs to really compete with ATI and nvidia, who have been specialising in this arena for 8 years or so now.
 
Could a third maker mean the games would be less optimized as they would need to spend more time making a game work on a third type of gpu ?
 
elmuzzy66. said:
Could a third maker mean the games would be less optimized as they would need to spend more time making a game work on a third type of gpu ?
Click to expand...

Fortunately not, these days.

We have just two standard APIs these days: DirectX (used by the vast majority of games), and OpenGL. So long as the hardware manufacturers make their hardware compatible with these two APIs (and they would be mad not to...) there will be no problems (driver issues aside of course). The performance in DX and OGL would be up to the hardware manufacturer to optimise.
 
Would be good to see Intel in the ring I think. They are a massive organisation and could probably start to compete rather quickly. They also have a history of very solid hardware, which doesnt hurt.
Wonder if their mastery of CPU design will help them create strong GPU's?
 
I not sure many company's apart from intel would be able or interested, i do think it would take quite a bit to get close to nvidia/ati at moment if you started from fresh.
 
Yeah, Matrox are selling low profile PCIe graphics cards with 64mb of DDR ram for over £120 like what the buck with steve buckley.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom