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ATI at the Top Graphics Chip Maker for 2004
dirutz writes "ATI is at the top according to market share, but nVidia is catching up. Hopefully this competition means lower prices and more goodies."
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On the shelves at CompUSA, there seem to be a plethora of ATI cards with 9200s in them. Is the total volume shipped as relevant if ATI's bottom-feeding?
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... with regards to the availbility of their high-end cards. When was the last time you saw a store (online or otherwise) that had a x800 (of any stripe) or high end 6800 in stock? Probably not in the last 3 or 4 months. I was considering upgrading from my 9800pro, but until better cards become more widely available the costs are going to remain prohibitive.
How about Matrox? Are they still in business?
Haven't heard anything from them for ages....
I don't need a signature.
Is Intel's 40% market share. Honestly, when I read that the biggest market is for the lower-end cards and the big guns are most for marketing and prestige I didn't imagine it was such a difference.
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I would love to see the market share numbers broken down into separate markets.
Who gets the market share in the high-end workstation market?
Macintosh market?
Linux market?
They were in the mix in the late 90's but the lack of proper opengl support killed them as a "gamer's manufacturer". I still have a G200 running in one of my servers. Maybe they finally got out their opengl ICD, but by that time I was on the nvidia bandwagon and waffle between them and Ati depending on my mood.
"Look Lois, the two symbols of the Republican Party: an elephant, and a fat white guy who is threatened by change."
I used before an nvidia MX440 with personal cinema. kind of old but the 3d worked fine in linux. Personal Cinema sucked because there was no linux support for the tv part. Windows was fine.
:( but that will require another 200US$ :(
I upgrade to a radeon 9600 pro and it has been only headaches since then:
- Installing 3d acceleration in linux is really hard.
- I got an additional ati tv card that I installed, after a couple of days any 3d application had really bad texture corruption. I wrote to ATI and they replace my 9800pro card (with no proof of purchase because I lost the recipt.)
- The tv card was uninstalled for a long time, but I installed again and boooom... really bad 3d screen corruption. I turn off my machine and the 9800 was fine after a restart but I removed the tv card. Now ATI asked me to sent the tv card back. (again without recipt).
- Even in simple 2D screens I got screen corruptions.
- I did not do any overclocking to the card.
- Everytime i search for problem on 9800 it seems that they have the tendency of running too hot and people install additional coolers. But why do I have to expend more money in coolers if I already pay for the 9800 pro???
It seems to me that ATI is aware that some of their cards are a POS because they keep sending me RMA forms (return forms) at any complain I send.
I want to go back to nvidia
Altough I think the 9800 ATI card sucks, the support has been OK.
I bought the ATI Radeon 9800 and I was terribly disappointed. The fan fried not once, twice, but 3 times. I had paid almost $100 in RMA returns and shipping.
I no longer can leave my PC running around the clock because I know the card would fry if I leave it up. I already have gigantic fans running with open case. No overclocking at all.
Sorry ATI, but I am going back to Nvidia in my next purchase. ATI drivers are also terribly lousy. If you need a new Catalyst driver every month, you got problems. Half the games were always filled with overheated white dots. I treat my hardware with RTFM care. And I deal with another ATI product again.
It seems to me like it would be fairly impossible for there to be any benefit to the customer if there are only two main options available. It's been that way for a number of years, and I don't feel like I'm paying much less for quality than I did a few years ago.
Consider it to be like the operating system wars. On the top of the consumer charts there is Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X as the two most commonly known choices to the public. Now, nobody could actually argue that having the Mac challenger has made Microsoft decide that Windows should be cheaper: if anything, it's made them rise their prices. While this argument has flaws, including the different hardware architecture, it's still a case of the two horse race.
If both ATI and nVidia can make money off of the current price level of their cards, why should they change? For that matter, ATI seems to be really adept at making decent cash off of older hardware (like the 9200s), and from what I have read here nVidia isn't the most well-run company, and so until they get their act together they won't pose much of a challenge to anyone.
When you inundate the market with another choice beyond ATI and nVidia, you might see a bigger difference.
For some time now, people who have successfully gotten their ATI cards working have had to put up with very poor performance compared to Windows.
I'd love to have another option for 3D on Linux :)
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden
I think you're absolutely wrong. If anything, the emphasis on GPU performace will increase. Look at the CPUs lately. Little to zero single-thread performance increase in the last 1.5 years. The "moore's law wall" people where talking about has already been hit. CPU performance will keep increasing but much more slowly. The easiest way is to slap more cores/cpus on but that doesn't help single threaded apps. Most games are hard to multithread efficiently, but graphics are easy to parallellize.
So while you wont get much game performance from adding more pipelines/cores/cpus, you will get it by adding more rendering pipelines to your GPU.
Using dieshrinking to improve graphics performance is easy, while it's not easy to use it to increase clockspeeds which CPUs need.
ATI reserves a whole special mode for suckiness of their drivers with windows too. I have an AIW Radeon PCI which I aquired primarily for using with a secondary screen + TV-in. The problem is that the card will not use the TV-in functions if it is not the only card on the system. ATI's webpage does indicate that it won't work if it's not the primary card, but while setting PCI to primary does allow for the drivers to be found, it still does not capture. An email to ATI results in a bunch of canned responses and eventually a "tough luck" answer.
ATI's drivers suck in windows, but not as much as their support for any OS.
Probably not ATI's fault. Did you actually buy card where not just the chipset, but the board was made by ATI? I bought a cheap ass nVidia 5200 and had the same problem. On a graphics board likely the only thing made by ATI or nVidia is the actual chipset, all other parts are provided by a separate manufacturer.
Oh, and my Powercolor 9700pro has run like a dream for the last 5 months.
Photos.
Pay attention to context in these stories, ATI's the lead in standalone, swapping places with Nvidia (just slightly). Overall Intel is still on top.
My company is the source of this data and doesn't release it, but on a regular basis portions get leaked, often to present a particular picture that isn't entirely complete. (Usually the leaks come from someone with a financial interest in driving perceptions on way or the other, and not the graphics companies themselves.)
They do release drivers, but they really suck. Performance is supposed to be below Windows performance (I don't know first hand since I don't have windows on a machine with an ATI card). Cards supported seems to be improving, but for a while they totally refused to support any of the mobility chipsets. We had to wait months in order to get a set of drivers for Xorg 6.8 that wouldn't crash when trying to use opengl. I have heard that there are lots of features that are currently not supported, but I haven't actually checked these claims (they aren't features that currently interest me). If my ATI card was in anuthing other than a laptop, I would have ripped it out and replaced it a long time ago (and I am kicking myself for not paying enough attention while ordering my laptop).
I've got a mind like a steel trap - it's got an animal's foot stuck in it.
How can this = to more competition? All that happend is the two graphics card companies switched positions
While it doesn't equal MORE competition, it does mean that competition is alive and well between the two companies. The alternative is that one company or the other has faded into obscurity and/or been bought up by the other. As long as there are even just two roughly equal players who constantly vie for the top spot, that's enough competition to keep things lively. Notice there *are* plenty of other graphics chip companies but you don't hear much from them because they churn out low performance low cost commodity products. So a third (or hundredth) player in an industry does NOT automatically mean there is hot competition on the cutting edge.
ATI and Driverheaven was planning an unofficial support for Linux Radeon drivers. They're now opening a new section in their forum for that.
Unfortunately, the manufacturers obviously don't see enough value in open source drivers to offset the risk of patent suits and/or cloning of their special hardware features. It's a matter of perspective - we see no legitimate reason why they should not release their internal documentation to interested/qualified open source developers, but they probably see themselves sunk if they did. After all, look what happened to the trailblazers in open source graphics docs: 3Dfx, Matrox, 3DLabs, etc.
The only solution for people who value open source drivers is to stop buying their products and develop our own to compete with them. Relentless lobbying will only waste their time and make them less likely to deal with folks in the open source community.
For people who don't care about open source drivers as long as a binary driver works good enough for you, just go ahead and buy a card from the leading manufacturers. But don't blame Linux when the driver blows up or acts strangely. As long as these vendors refuse to cooperate with the open source development model, the onus is on them to go the extra mile and produce a stable product that interoperates with the open source world.
So far, they haven't done well at that challenge, suggesting that either open source developers are deliberately foiling them (some people believe the absence of a driver abstraction layer falls along these lines), they employ incompetent programmers, or they are simply not providing their best effort as a company towards Linux support. I suspect the latter, and only market share will change that. (Hence the driving force behind platform advocacy, as opposed to the 'zealot' label that platform advocates receive from neophytes who misunderstand or reject the fundamental correlation between platform market share and quality of vendor support)
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