3DLabs Launching New GPU

h0tblack writes "...or VPU as they've seen fit to call it. The Register is reporting that 3DLabs will be releasing the P10 later this year. It's targeted at workstation and gaming markets with OpenGl2.0 and DX9 drivers having been seeded to developers already. Could be interesting as 3DLabs have been one of the key players in the development of OpenGL2.0. The P10 has over 200 SIMD processors throughout its geometry, texture and pixel processing pipeline stages to deliver over 170Gflops and one TeraOp of programmable graphics performance together with a full 256-bit DDR memory interface for up to 20GBytes/sec of memory bandwidth. More info can be found in the press release." There are also examinations of the new chip on Anandtech, Tom's Hardware, and no doubt many other hardware sites too.

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Opining on the Why: Creative's issues w/ hardware.

[RalphTWaP]

From the article at Tom's

blockquoth the poster (evermore with emphasis added):

It won't be until Creative Labs has fully acquired 3Dlabs, and is ready to announce its P10 boards for Christmas 2002 that we will know how the P10 is going to impact the mainstream desktop and the gamer, although 3Dlabs is convinced that the Creative P10 boards will be competitive with Nvidia and ATi products on the market at that time. Knowing Creative's sales muscle and reach, a Creative graphics board needs only to be competitive, and not necessarily better, in order to be a viable alternative to the two horse race we have right now.

However, there are some concerns. Creative has tried repeatedly to establish a strong foothold in the graphics business and has been pulled in and out of the market , particularly in North America. 3Dlabs has been aiming to find a way into the mainstream with its technology for a number of years and has repeatedly fallen short of delivering a competitive product. Can this marriage work?

Now then, the emphasized bits beg the question: Why has Creative gained and lost its footholds in these areas?

For this Creative customer, the reason is and has always been (across all product lines) one, very important issue: Software.

When and where the Creative development machine manages to mate decent, uncluttered, non-glitzy, tweakable, and trouble-free software (very very seldom IMO/) to the excellent-to-amazing hardware that they are deservably famous for, the results have been very good indeed.

However, in the normal course of events, Creative's hardware ships with installation, driver, ancillary programs, updaters, bundled "features", and enough just outright useless crap to annoy any self-respecting consumer. And while I admit that this occurs largely on the Windows platforms, you should admit to yourself that that's Creative's largest area of concern. Fortunately, they haven't yet figured that they could push for inclusion of enough Creative ad-ware to sicken a telemarketer drone into the driver packages for other platforms.

So, in this reader's experience, the issue is simple. Too much software that users don't want or need, too many features that won't work without all the glitzy junk (anyone like using the LiveDrive product, it's great, but the software to make it worthwhile--remote control--is a cast-iron bitch, crashy, seldom-updated, and too tied to useless trash in the installation). Now these issues seem somewhat prevalent along Creative's product lines, and they're killers.

Fortunately, the answer is simple. Creative needs to give the people who buy their hardware good, stable, and full-featured drivers without the need for a dozen attendant Creative-logo-displaying bits of crapware. If that parts' impossible, then it'd at least be nice to be able to grab reference drivers from the chipset manufacturer (how many people don't use NVidia's Detonator drivers in favor of the card-vendor's?)

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Failing those... license the hardware designs to vendors who'll give us good, honest, and stable software. Of course, they can always continue to lose business to the competition, afterall, it's . . . "good for the market".