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Will it always be nVidia versus ATi?

SideWinder

SideWinder

SideWinder

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Just got me thinking really, will it always be this way? Has the market developed so much that another company just wouldn't be able to compete - more specifically they won't have the knowledge, experience or general technical know-how?

Only a quick thread. :o
 
It takes a hell of a lot of work to become a competitor in the graphics card market - both nVidia and ATi have years of repuation and card designing/building experience behind them.

No other company could reasonably survive long enough to become a major competitor.
 
I can't see anyone competing in the immediate future at the high end, the technology, research & development and costs involved in setting up a fabrication plant are huge. As Ulfhedjinn says other companies are still involved at the lower end (Intel being the largest graphics chipset manufacturer overall). There is also the problem of brand awareness and resistance to change, Nvidia and AMD/ATI are pretty firmly entrenched into peoples conciousness (those who know anything much about PCs) as the two biggest and best so for a new company to come along they would also need to spend heavily on promotion and advertisement to even begin to dent the market.

I could be entirely wrong as this is all off the top of my head but I really don't see anyone coming along that soon. :)
 
Mmm, confirmed a few of my own thoughts anyways. Especially with the branding and customers recognising the company.

Just wondering if a company had tried to make it in the market. Never even heard of S3. :o
 
Ulfhedjinn said:
S3 have made attempts to build graphics cards and aren't finished, Intel also have one in the works. :)
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didn't S3 release there 'chrome' graphics card a while back and it was terrible?
 
SideWinder said:
Just got me thinking really, will it always be this way?
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I'm not sure that it will. go back to the turn of the millenium and most people were asking whether it would always be 3dfx vs Nvidia battling at the top end of the market. ATI were doing OK in the desktop (i.e. non-gaming) sector but it wasn't until the Radeon 8500 that they started to get competitive (things like the Rage Fury MAXXX were kinda OK but crippled by crappy drivers).

Matrox probably have the clout to re-enter the market should they so wish (at one stage their M3D and later G400MAX parts were fairly popular with enthusiasts) however after they got burned by Parhelia I'm not sure if they will want to take on the behemoths of NV/ATI.

One of the problems these days is that you need a huge R&D budget to get competitive, and even then because the industry moves so quickly (new generations coming out every 9 months or so) it's hard to stay on top of the game - not to mention the fact that being late to market can have disastrous consequences.

There's always been rumours of PowerVR (in some guise or other) lurking around in the background working on stuff too.

The other possibility of course could be Intel deciding to take the gaming market seriously - they may see the ATI/AMD merger as a threat and I can see them possibily looking to take over some kind of graphics development company to try and gain a foothold in the market. To date they have only bothered making basic integrated chipsets but if anyone has the finance and reputation to force their way into the market, it's Intel.
 
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SideWinder said:
http://www.ampednews.com/features/195/

Hmm.
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thats the last i heard of S3, the chrome and uni-chrome cards, and judging by that they weren't all bad for there market, i mean the chrome on there beats the 6600 which is what its most comparable to, would like to see them release something to compete with ATI/NVIDIA now to make things a bit interesting rather than the usual load of rubbish of NVIDIA release card, no driver support, ATI release competitor obserdly late, and the cycle continues. not thing it would be great for S3 to sneak something in between the two to cause a bit of an uproar :D
 
SideWinder said:
Never even heard of S3. :o
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I don't know how long you have been interested in PCs but they have been knocking about for quite a while although they did rather fade into the background, the used to produce the S3 Virge Trio which I had (probably about 96/97 at a guess). :)
 
Gashman said:
didn't S3 release there 'chrome' graphics card a while back and it was terrible?
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The Chrome series was good for a first attempt at the modern market, and it did well in terms of performance against the Geforce 6600GT and 6800GT cards at the time if I recall correctly. S3 still do onboard video too, I bought a motherboard for my HTPC with S3 onboard (though I will be using a 7300GS or something.)
 
Intel are supposed to be entering the on board video market in order to provide on board solutions that will work better with Vista Aero, the idea here is offer some competition to AMD.
 
I think Matrox provide more specialist Gfx card types these days e.g. quad monitor support for financial houses, cards made for Pro video editing.

So I guess they're doing well in there small portion of the market.
 
3Dlabs have been around for a long time.. making 3D workstation cards..

Some of them are as good as the Geforce quadro series.. ie 3dlabs Wildcat Realizm 500

.... But not reallyaimed at games. We have a some of these types of cards in our workstation at work.. not cheap tho at the £2k mark each (thats just the card)
 
Who'd have thought that a company could come along and smash Nintendo, and kill off Sega consoles...

If Sony could come into the console world like they did, whats to stop a company like MS from doing it in the GPU world?
 
Microsoft hasn't expressed any desire whatsoever to build non-peripheral hardware as far as I know.

Intel on the other hand will no doubt want a piece of the discrete GPU pie and I want to see their stuff! :D
 
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