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Old September 27th 03, 10:07 PM
Tony Hill
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On Sat, 27 Sep 2003 07:36:59 GMT, "graphics processing unit"
wrote:
While not directly related to Nvidia or ATI, the fact that XGI is entering
the consumer graphics industry with its range of Volari GPUs may effect both
of the current leaders. hopefully in a positive way, for the end user. God
knows we could use some more competition here.


"I'll believe it when I see it". There have been a LOT of graphics
cards that were supposed to be the next big thing to come along. S3
has done it a handful of times (and again just recently with Delta
Chrome), Matrox has done it, BitBoys did it several times without ever
having a product, and now we've got XGI. So far none of these cards
have managed to compete very effectively with the low-end chips from
ATI or nVidia, let alone their high-end stuff.

The real key is in getting decent drivers. This is why nVidia took
over the graphics world, not by their hardware. nVidia managed to get
fast and *stable* drives out for all of their products while 3dfx and
ATI were floundering with buggy drivers that were missing features and
having either very poor performance or, at best, uneven performance.
ATI has since learned from their mistakes and really improved the
quality of their drivers, but they are about the only one.

Right now there are three players in the graphics market, ATI, nVidia
and Intel (with Intel actually been the largest supplier). Most of
the world's computer users do VERY well with integrated graphics, and
have absolutely ZERO reason to buy an add-in card. That just leaves
an extremely small market at the very high-end and a decent sized but
very low-margin market in the mid range. If XGI wants to succeed,
they need to get a graphics card out for $100 that has stable drivers
and that can match or beat whatever nVidia and ATI are selling for
~$125 at the time (right now that would be the GeForceFX 5600 and the
Radeon 9600).

I ain't holding my breath. I'll be surprised if they ever get stable
drivers, let alone within the next 6 months of it's release. And
that's just talking about Windows drivers, the situation is likely to
be even worse for their Linux drivers if they even bother to make
those at all.

Personally, I am most excited about the Volari V8 Duo - first *consumer*
graphics card configuration to sport twin Grahpics Processing Units.


I'm not. I doubt that it manage to match a GeforceFX 5600 or ATI
Radeon 9600, yet it will likely cost a LOT more. It all comes back to
drivers, especially for a more complicated design with two graphics
processors.

Besides that, their claim as being the first consumer card with dual
GPUs is REALLY stretching things. They're taking a very narrow view
on just what it means to be a consumer card and what it takes to be
considered a GPU. Marketing at it's best/worst here.

-------------
Tony Hill
hilla underscore 20 at yahoo dot ca