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New Graphics Company, With Working Cards
gladbach writes "Toms Hardware has in their hands an actual working card, unlike other vaporware cardmakers *cough* bitboys *cough*... To quote Toms: 'A new player dares enters the graphics card market that ATi and Nvidia have dominated for so long. XGI (eXtreme Graphics Innovation), based in Taiwan of course, comes at the market leaders with a line of cards for a whole lot less money. We look at XGI's product range, and offer results of a beta model from XGIs top model Volari Duo V8 Ultra.'"
I personally find NVidia's TwinView to work a lot better, if you have a card with two outputs, which most of the GF4s and higher seem to have now.
We might as well ask about S3 if we're asking about Matrox. Remember that great card they had a while back?
The best we can hope for is a pricewar I think. Cheaper Nvidia or ATI cards is always better.
Morphing Software
Remember, going for quantity rather than quality was what killed 3dfx. How quickly some people forget :)
.com days, SIS, Trident made most of the low end, SVGA cards that powered almost every server I seen. Until Intel started putting gfx chips on boards. They have the background, and with the man power out in the market right now, they could easily take 10-15% of the market on Initial release.
Well, I disagree. The reason 3DFX was killed off, the partners decided that they wanted to be the only vendor for 3dfx boards, they killed off all 3rd party vendors. Then they bought STB so they could release boards, and that never panned out. So with the 3DFX limited release, nvidia expanded with new OEM partners, and easily took over the market. Vendors need to release boards, even if cheap OEM boards, they need a product to fill. 3DFX took that away from all the smaller companies. And believe it or not, lots of people buy OEM quality products. Even CompUSA and main stores carry an OEM selection selection with a sticker on the box to make it look retail.
3DFX could of lasted another 2 years with the multi-gpu design, and had another GPU in development. The Partners tanked the company, sold few a few million, and walked away. They had better visual quality at the time. OpenGL was a little flaky, but could of been fixed with drivers, they had a great developteam that moved on to other GFX companies.
I had a Voodoo5 and a GF3-ti500 both the hottest cards out at the time. The Voodoo5 with only 2 CPU's kept up almost every game. But after the drivers stopped from 3DFX, you had to move to different hardware.
This is where Sis+Trident=XGI can rock. Trident has been making OEM chipsets for years, Sis makes motherboard chipsets. With a good design, and to use Multi-GPU's to make boards faster, they can cut a good niche out of the low end market.
ATI and NVidia use the same CPU cores for most boards, they just cripple and use the GPU's that dont pass high end tests. This is why when the ATI 9500 came out, you could driver hack it to a 9700. Also they use less expensive ram, and limit the hardware. This doesnt exactly save that much money, a few bux, but the selling price can be 50-100 dollars more. Most people wont spend 400 bux on a high end GFX card, but the 99 dollar sweet spot is a big field, and if XGI can come up with a card to fill that niche, they could come out as the heavy hitter and take over some major piece of the market.
Also, back in the
Of course, after reading the article, 300 bux release, and not the top preformer, they better tweak the hell out of those drivers. Maybe multi-core could help, but it at the performance of the 9500/5700, it needs a little more performance. Maybe driver tweaks, since its still beta could bump it up. Nvidia and ATI are already tweaking the drivers like crazy if you watch the benchmarks out everymonth, so tweaking and optimizing drivers does help.
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Power by Nvidia, pfft. Spend more time fixing bugs, and less time suckling on the nvidia tit...
The thing is, to get these marks you either cheat, or are an idiot savant, or effectively a genius. Now you put all these people in the same room, what do you get? Superior products? No.
You get ego clashes, clueless idiots, hangers-on and cheaters who couldn't design a 10ms monostable with a 555 and a book from Radio Shack. NO real-world experience, NO real skills whatsoever.
The Matrox you see today is due to universities run wild and employers being blinded by them.
Just another example of the irrelevance of university to real-world problems.
XGI is a new player in this market and need something to distinguish themselves from the competition. This is an opportunity to persuade them that supporting Linux by releasing drivers would gain them positive reviews and have an impact on sales. Linux is gaining in popularity in the enterprise and server areas, so announcing Linux support for their products would sort of *legitimize* XGI's cards. It's worth a shot--the question is, how do we convince them?