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VisionTek Folds

Posted by timothy on from the crinkle-crinkle-smoosh dept.

geogeek6_7 writes: "In a major shocker with potentially far reaching consquences, it seems that VisionTek, the number one producer of NVIDIA based graphics cards, will be foreclosed, and cease to exist. HardOCP has the details."

11 of 290 comments (clear)

  1. Lifetime Warranty? by The+Big+Dude · · Score: 5, Interesting

    So what about my Xtasy GF3 Ti200 lifetime warranty? I already replaced the fan on it with a Blue Orb because the fan was spinning very slowly.

  2. GeForce2 GTS by T-Kir · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Damn pity, they're the only (as far as I know) company that manufacture the GeForce 2 Xtasy GTS-V cards, at a knock down price of $47 (on newegg.com).. a damn good budget card with performance to boot, at least games are now playable on my brothers crappy Sony Vaio celery desktop (urghh!).

    So I guess it is case of "buy while stocks last" (for those who are interested of course).

    --
    Are you local? There's nothing for you here!
  3. Tell that to 3Dfx. by Blaede · · Score: 3, Interesting

    That is, if you can find any of their remains. They used to just sell chipsets as well, then they decided to make the entire board. You know the rest of the story.

    1. Re:Tell that to 3Dfx. by Daleon · · Score: 2, Interesting

      It would be really interresting to get an inside story of the 3dfx downfall. It was the company the really made what we have today possible. I would hate to imagine what kind of games we would be playing if it had not been for them. To me, it just seemed like a series of bad management decisions that lead to their downfall. It the hardware market, bad management will put you out of business over night.

      Few things - The V2 kicked the day lights out of the TnT and in many cases the TnT2 for real gaming. Back in the day hardcore gamers could care less about 32 bit at 30 fps, we wanted 16 bit at 85+ fps. Not until the Geforce's did 32 bit become an everyday thing.

      - The V3 was one of the best selling cards of all time up to that point. It set more records than almost anything? Why, because it was the a single card solution that support Glide. 3dfx had enough games that looked much better at the time on Glide than D3D. The V3 was also not a complete slouch in the speed department.

      - The V5 was just out way to late, it really should have come when the V3 came. It still had some of the best AA to this day, but it could not stand up against a real GPU.

  4. gfx cards come and go by GreyWolf3000 · · Score: 1, Interesting

    In the past few years, graphics cards have been more that just an expample mirroring the ridiculous attempt to increase fervor for buying new pcs by tacking on new "features"...they have been even worse perpetrators. First it was the 8MB cards, then 16MB, then 32. Sometime in there AGP got thrown in (I know AGP is better for graphics/acceleration than PCI; the point is that for most AGP was a new buzzword that new gfx cards must have). Then the chips on these cards came in, and cards competed on the GCP (Graphics Processing Unit) and it's capabilites. Now I hear things like "All-in-one", "XTasy", and "Expandable RAM up to 512 MB."

    All of these features serve a purpose, mind you. But if there's one thing the mindless pumping of new products to people that have decent ones already does, its precicely this. Create a 70's gas-like war where companies outbit eachother to sell the cheapest yet greatest. This is bad for the consumer, because he can generally get duped into purchasing that's either junk or way more than they need (or both).

    This also has a negative impact on the companies. Take the pricewatch model (which I use myself :). Companies get thier business from being at "the top of the list," meaning their stuff is the cheapest. This becomes the only way the get business. They may even grow according to this model somewhat. At some point, they realize they are not really turning any kind of profit, and all their business would go away if they raised their prices. This self-destructive cycle is exemplified by pricewatch, but again, the same thing happened for this company.

    The world needs companies that sell high quality products with good support, that work right out of the box, and are well maintained. Oh wait, there already is such a company.

    --
    Slashdot: Where people pretend to be twice as smart as they really are by behaving like children.
  5. Just an observation... by t0qer · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I'm holding a 16bit mach64 card in my hands, just for effect...

    ATI has been around as long as i've been playing with PC's. Slow and steady wins the race.

    Sorry that was all I could think of at the moment. My heart goes out to all the people getting laid off from this. Someone got really rich off of your hard work, while you struggled for them, now they sit confortably driving some nice cars. Sorry VC's and exec's of the internet age, most of you are real assholes!

    Right now the way things are going, it reminds me of the victorian age when railways were first coming about. All this money was poured into the rail systems of europe (watch this on discovery yesterday) and it was managed by crooks that were chased out of the US. (This one paticular guy i'm thinkin of had a wife and 4 mistresses!)

    It's not a lot different now. Sure we have fancy computers and slashdot, but to get there we had to put some really crooked people in charge of our money. Some of them did right, a lot of them did wrong.

    I'm goin off base here, but I just wanted the people getting laid off, i'll say a prayer for you and your families. Cause I know what it's like to get laid off.

    Yours Truly
    --Toq

  6. Hmmm... by ZeLonewolf · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Would someone please explain how this news hit the press at 2AM Sunday night (Early Monday morning if you want to nitpick)? I realize that it's well into business hours in Europe and most of Asia, but according to the article, VisionTek is a US-based company in Northern Illinois.

    --
    "If at first you don't succeed, lower your standards."
  7. Re:Companies need to learn how to make money. by DNS-and-BIND · · Score: 4, Interesting
    They were U.S. based - labor costs were too high.

    I'm surprised anyone had the nerve to start manufacturing anything inside American borders. It's a miracle they lasted so long. A worker in China or Malaysia will work for a month on what an American makes in less than a shift. Add on high American taxes, restrictive labor laws, environmental costs, and the constant threat of ruin by litigation and it's no wonder nothing but a few specialized industries produce products with the label "Made in U.S.A."

    --
    Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
  8. As 3DFX learned the hard way by svzurich · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I agree that Nvidia has been wise to stay out of manufacturing their own cards. Remember when 3dFX bought STB? That proved to be one big costly mistake that led to their assets being acquired by Nvidia. Producing boards is very expensive as one must constantly upgrade the assembly line. When the die shrinks to a smaller size, the entire line has to be upgraded to take advantage. 3DFX learned this the hard way as having the factory slowed down their ability to respond to changing technology and market conditions. Once they bought STB, they became competitors with their former customers, and lost their support. Diamond, Creative, and Goulimont all dropped their 3DFX product lines overnight. By remaining unemcumbered by fabs, Nvidia is able to shop around in Taiwan to pick the best foundaries for the dollar. If TMSC can't do the job, Nvidia can always switch to UMC of even IBM. Over at www.theregister.co.uk and www.theinquirer.net are often articles covering the problems the Taiwan foundaries are having in production, and speculation on how Nvidia should react. Remaining fab free has definately been a boon to Nvidia, leaving them nimble enough to concentrate on R&D and changing conditions. It also keeps costs down.

  9. Re:Also, multi-monitor setups... by Corporate+Troll · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Glad to hear that I'm not the only one who think that PCI graphic cards still make sense. And you are right, you don't need a fancy graphics card to do "normal" applications. Heck the PPro I mentioned has an Matrox Mystique as primary graphics adaptor (Voodoo2 is an add-on board), and you know what: I prefer the display quality way over my others machine Geforce. How many times are you useing 3D anyway.
    And Halflife still rocks... It's all I need for my 3D fix *grin*.

  10. Re:Companies need to learn how to make money. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting
    I can give you a little bit of insight into this company, as I used to work in their (small) it dept. a few years back. At that time, they were just making memory simms, and just starting to explore additional product lines.


    They were started by four guys who were high-school basketball buddies. They started off by being a "memory broker" (buy low, sell high), this was in the late 80's when memory prices started to skyrocket. Therefore, they started making money hand-over-fist, and eventually got into the business of manufacturing memory simms. Meanwhile, they got used to making a huge amount of money, so the budgets for IT and engineering were almost unlimited. So the heads of these groups would adopt the position of "If it is more expensive, then it must be a better product, so we'll purchase the most expensive of any item out there." This was due to the corporate "blame" culture, that if something went wrong, then it had to be Someone's fault. So if you saved the company a half million dollars by going with a cheaper-but-equivilant solution, and it failed, your rear end would be on the line. Needless to say, with this blame culture, most of the crap rolled down hill, until it hit the actual workers (that is, non-management employees). So, job turnover was rather high (in the time that I worked there for a year, they went through at least 4 people for the pc desktop support position, and the engineering dept. was a revolving door).


    Also, since they got used to buying the most expensive, when the memory prices started to collapse, they didn't give up the old habits, and never learned to be frugal. Just more money being thrown at useless solutions. Also, the factory workers were treated like dirt. Someone would, for example, have a weekend planned with his family, and then would be told Friday a couple minutes till quitting time, that he would be required to work two 12-hour shifts over the weekend. If he refused, he wouldn't be working there too long.