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Old September 12th 03, 02:09 AM
methylenedioxy
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"Steven C (Doktersteve)" wrote in message
news:T388b.115651$kW.28901@edtnps84...
And please dont get me wrong, i really dont want to upset the people in

this
group after they spent so much time helping me with some issues i have had
in the past week with my hardware, and giving me some good info on radeon
cards.

i dont think that the current "scandal" with nvidia will kill that

company,
and i think that nvidia saw this coming a mile away... it seems that

nvidia
has done quite alot of diversification in the past, making chipsets for

the
xbox, making motherboard chipsets, etc... it seems as though somewhere

down
the line they said "enough with this high end gaming business, we can make
far more money by pandering to the middle range consumer". and that is

what
they did.

No-one is suggesting it will "kill" the company, it's just a scandal that
the customers are going to suffer. Those middle ranging customers are going
to get a shock when they try to use their brand new Nvidia cards on new
games it is supposed to handle well and doesn't, they will end up having to
upgrade even sooner than before, especially if devwelopers just say no to
optimising their coding to allow geforce cards to run due to time
constraints etc. Then Nvidia could well just say that the games are just
poorly made, great news for a new developer no? :s

Its like 3dfx and nvidia years ago.
3dfx decided to go after a certain market, while nvidia catered to a high
end market. in this case, you could compare call it nvidia going for that
middle range market and ati going for the high end.
The problem that 3dfx had was releasing way to many cards at the same time
in a desperate attempt to regain market share... a problem that nvidia
doesnt have.


It's nothing like 3dfx and nvidia years ago, 3dfx produced decent cards, in
fact superb cards, they just made a mistake with the voodoo 5 (and note,
there are rumours that this new fx range was based on the plans of the
voodoo 6, so not sure if this is true or not, but the curse lives on)


years ago ati wasnt a contender for high end, then the radeon 7500 and
8500's changed all that, and nvidia was faced with competetion for the

first
time ever.


No, the Radeon DDR changed it, before the 7500...


If this is the result (these bad benchmarks with HL2) of nvidia having
competetion, then it marks a turning point for the company, and hopefully
they can stop and change direction and gt back on track, just like 3dfx

was
NOT able to do.


I doubt they will get back to the same as before, you realise how much money
Nvidia have lost in last 8 months? First the 5800 embarassment and now this,
there is no turning back....And it isn't just Half Life 2 mate, it's any DX9
game with pixel shaders, nothing to do with half life 2, if it was, Nvidia
could easily squeeze out of this hole they are in by saying that it's all a
concoction by Ati and Valve seeing as they are both promoting each other,
but it isn't, Doom 3, 3d Mark 03 and the last Lara Croft all brought these
issues to light, no doubt we will see far more as more and more dx9 coded
games come out.


Still, this doesnt spell out the end for nvidia. If they have cards that
cost less, and which run games, that is what about 80% of the market will
tolerate.
Admit it... 8/10 gamers could care less about what we here care about, and
that mass market is what keeps hardware and software companies in

business.
It costs less to make Geforce4 cards than the new 5900 cards, and if

nvidia
sold enough geforce4 cards to still turn a huge profit, they would never
complain.


Of course gamers care about this, they have just shelled out £100+ for a new
card, you think everyone is made of money? Do you think people shell out
money for 3d cards if they won't use them? Don't be mad. The only reason it
costs more to produce the 5900 is because of the marketing costs.....I'm
sure they have made enough of them now to rectify any problems with
production, and they have the 5600 and 5200 cards, any bad cards are turned
into these anyway.



they got themselves in trouble with behcnmarks, they should have shut up
about 3dmark, and i am sort of grinning at my own decision to get a 9600

pro
card now, but i dont want nvidia to die.

No-one thinks they will die, as above they have just hit a bad spot and one
I doubt they will really get back to the "old" days over. Times have now
changed for Nvidia.

in fact, no one here should want nvidia to die.
Why did ati become so good in the 3d game? it was because they were trying
to compete with nvidia.
if one company has a monopoly for a market, its never a good thing.

There are other makers out there, don't forget about them, S3 for instance
have been on the OEM and onboard gfx for years, they are due a big boost and
it could be time, they have a couple of chipsets that are looking good.

still, i dont think nvidia is dying by any means, they are just at a point
where they have to decide if they want to go mass market only, or

seriously
work on making great cards, and ignoring little squabbles like whether or
not someone optomizes cards for benchmarking.


Nothing to do with their positioning in the market, they are a gfx chip
maker and always have been, they have just produced 4 bad chips on the trot
and 2 of those are high end cards.


thats my opinion. worth what you paid for it btw ;-)

thanks for reading.

No worries