are matrox short of engineers?

[rylan]

NVidia has/is becoming a graphics chip production line where they just pump out new stuff every 6 months and basically forget about their previous chip support, thereby forcing people to 'upgrade' to the newest and most expensive thing for compatiblity. Even so their 'current' drivers are more like beta-ware, with a 'new' version every couple weeks that fixes 1 thing and breaks another.

I'm really getting worried with everything going on in the graphics world recently. Matrox is obviously being hurt by its lack of design engineers (sucked away by the evil empire Nvidia.. hope M wins their lawsuits), and Nvidia is set to become the gaming monopoly if anything happens to ATI, leading to even more absurd prices for vid cards. :<

[Barbarella]

hope M wins their lawsuits.....


M has won can't say more

[Maggi]

Originally posted by Barbarella:
...
M has won can't say more
...

hmmm, maybe you got a link instead, Barbarella ???

[Borg]

hmmmmmm!..S3 is gone,3DFX is no more , 3Dlabs nothing..who is gona to stay??????

I hope the MATROX will stay !...because if MATROX goes, then the whole market will be rulled by Nvidia & ..men, this will not be good at all...

[Himself]

Hmm, 3dfx's buy out was inspired by their liklihood of winning a lawsuit against NVIDIA... (They had won favourable decisions but an actual verdict wasn't rendered)

I can see NVIDIA buying up Matrox eventually if things don't turn around for them.

[AJ]

Originally posted by Barbarella:


hope M wins their lawsuits.....


M has won can't say more

Now that's some good news (I owned a bit of 3dfx, so I could use some good news!).

I hope that Matrox can rebuild their R&D staff (if they haven't already) and get back in the game on the high end.

-AJ

[Salmonius]

If Matrox have a nice $200 million in pure cash burning in their pockets, they should make a hostile take-over bid of 3dfx.

If the shareholders agree, and they would unless nvidia raised their bid, they would get some cool patents + they could tell 3dfx to move on with their lawsuit against nvidia. If for some reason Matrox can take charge of the lawsuit, maybe they would get all of this for free!

If nvidia raises their bid and the shareholders agree with nvidia, then at least it will have cost them around $100 million more and it would be a nice revenge.

[Novdid]

do you really think matrox have 200000000$ lying around somewhere??????

But you can always wish.

[Salmonius]

It's possible that they have that amount. The g400 core is probably the most profitable core of all times (except maybe for rage II). They make profit on the whole cards (which are relatively expensive), not just chips like nvidia. Their advertising is definately not that big of an expense, especially compared to 3dfx.

But we will never know because it is a privately held company.

[mdhome]

are matrox short of engineers?

Due to the sad lament of 3dfx, I wonder if we will be seeing Matrox hardware designed by ex-3dfx engineers. I'm sure that Matrox will need all the help they can in producing a product to compete with the likes of the NV25 rollercoaster. Speed aside, I expect the g800 to have the visual quality that nvidia products lack.


regards Michael

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[DuRaNgO]

I can see NVIDIA buying up Matrox eventually if things don't turn around for them.

Matrox is privately owned

[Barbarella]

hummm ...

They are 2 kind of lawsuits

- Matrox against Nvidia

- Matrox against Matrox's eng working now for Nvidia. In this case M has won.

What's next ...

But yes as u i feel that some 3DFX eng will go to Matrox. well i hope so

But the real questions is. Will Matrox go again into the arena of High graphic game card for 2001 ? That is not obvious.

[WayneHu]

In my opinion, the reason why Matrox delayed the launch of G800 might be that he has got a lot of G450 orders from OEM vendors. And they have fulfilled the production line. If I were Matrox, I would not separate parts of my production line to produce less profitable G800 right now.

Only when G450 is less interesting to those vendors, it is the time to begin the G800 business.

But this is just my guess. Maybe the actual reason is indeed that Matrox cannot finish the G800 project in time...


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PIII-550E@733/1.65v, P3B-F, G400DH/32MB@140/186

[Rob M.]

Don't forget, before nvidia filed a lawsuit against 3dfx, 3dfx filed a lawsuit against nvidia, and 3dfx was looking like it was doing well in that lawsuit. It wasn't the lawyers that did 3dfx in, it was their chips.

[Ali]

We know that the TNT2 is Nvidias best selling, and most profitable chip to date, and the G400, and more importantly the G450 performs roughly the same as the TNT2.

Quote from http://www.nextgame.it/html/articolo.php?id=1322

"Alain Tiquet: Working on process and technology is part of yield and cost improvement. TNT architecture is 2 years old and is our best unit selling product and will be until mid next year. almost 3 years already... Unlike one says, you need to have hardware to write the software, there is a delay, but when the developer understand they invest in the right direction then everyone is moving."


This means it is likely that Matrox is having huge success with the G450, and pulling in those OEM sales as fast as they can fill them.

Remember that Matrox will have talked to their OEM contacts and asked them what they want. They arnt going to do well with a card that they can only sell to a small minority.

On the other hand, they have to keep up to date in the leading edge stuff, like the Geforce2 etc. If people start linking Matrox with slow cards, then its going to be hard selling them to the OEMs, even if the same OEMs are buying TNT2s that are reletively slow.

The average joe bloggs who buys a Gateway computer will look at the specs, see a Nvidia video card is included, and think "ohh, thats fast, all the internet sites say Nvidia cards are fast". They wont know the difference between a Riva 128 and a Geforce2 GTS Ultra, just see they are made by the same company.

Matrox is still OK in this respect, because joe bloggs will probably know Matrox are high quality (if he has heard of them at all), but once the speed difference of the flagship cards is such that nobody takes Matrox seriously, then they are in big trouble.

I have faith that Matrox has the G800 ready, or very close to ready, because the technology demo for it is finished (I read that in these forums somewhere, but Im too lazy to go looking for it). Its probably just so fast that Matrox thinks it will compete well with the NV20 and Radeon2, so is sticking to the G450 untill those cards are released.

Ali