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Are Matrox's sales so dependant on how good they are in 3D?

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  • Are Matrox's sales so dependant on how good they are in 3D?

    Was reading an article @ the Inquirer and came across this blurb.

    "We also heard the startling claim that Nvidia’s Nforce 2 IGP, the integrated (cough!) graphics processor, is faster than 90 per cent of all processors shipped by Nvidia this year.

    Now, the IGP graphics part of the Nforce 2 chipset is aimed at the Geforce 4 MX 420 level, where Nvidia earns 90 per cent of its revenues -- on chips such is Geforce 2 MX and its variants, TNT 2 and TNT.

    You have to remember that cards such as the Geforce 4 TI 4600, the highest-end Nvidia offering, count for just two per cent of the company’s revenues, suggesting that money is not the main reason the company makes such cards. But, of course, the reputation for producing top-notch graphics cards certainly comes from these fast but expensive parts. "

    Now I have been following what has been going on @ the MURC. And to be truthfull the calling for heads by some because the P doesn't live up to their standards is crazy. We are consummers. Not graphics card companies employees. And the rampant speculation from so called reliable sources (there will be no 256mb model and the 64mb will be stripped down in features is to be released - to a complete turn around - there will be no 64mb version and a faster 256mb version will be released) Does absolutely none of us any good except to build a hate for a company we each obviously have become fond of in some way.

    I think the P is a great all around card (maybe the best ever) and is easily the best video card EVER for video editing. It also exceeds most all others in photoshop or desktop publishing or programing. In fact if you add up all these professionals who will easily pay $400 for a featured card like the P they just might out-number all those spoiled kids who spend $400 on a gaming card- you know the ones that add up to less than 2% of Nvidia's revenues.
    Oh my god MAGNUM!

  • #2
    Well part of the problem that Matrox has right now is that its low end offerings are way out date for the most part. The Parhelia is their first T&L or Vertex Shader card (whatever they are calling it this month) and even if someone had the slightest inliking of playing a somewhat modern game on it they would run into a brick wall (ask some of the G400 owners in here).

    Add in the mix of somewhat misinformed negative reviews that the Parhelia has gotten and that the card hasn't quite held up to its sales expectations, resulting in people getting let go doesn't bode well for Matrox. Yes I own a Parhelia, and I'm somewhat happy with it (vs being totally happy with the G400MAX I got ages ago from them) and it makes me wonder what the hell they are doing. Matrox needs to progress with using the Parhelia as a starting point if they want to get back into the game. Maybe looking at what ATI did with the Radeon Series would help. They came out with the Radeon, then Radeon 8500 and 7500. The 7500 was the older Radeon with some improvements to it to make it DX8.1 like the 8500. Wait another 6-8 months and the 8500 gets cut down a bit, but adds DX 9 support and is called the 9000 and replaces the 7500 as a low end card. The Radeon 9700 is the highend and the 9500 fills in the price gap that the old 8500 had. Only problem is that Matrox is both lacking time and money to do this...and doing a castrated 64MB Parhelia is pretty damn stupid if they sell it for more then $150 bucks a pop. I'm not sure what an impact the 256MB verison will do for the CAD card market they want to do get into to compete with 3DLabs Lowend Wildcats, but I'll let someone else chime in with more experance then I in that market to fill in the blanks.

    What M could use right now is a Card that performs better then the current Parhelia to generate some postive press from them thats been lacking for the past 4-5 years (well since the G400 MAX came out ) This would help alot since having a good repulation as a high end/performance card would help alot with sales of your lower end components. Just look at Nvidia...there Higher end stuff is decent, but their Geforce MX and TNT series cards are pure shit and the main reason they sell well is that people don't realize that they are buying castrated verisons of the cards that get the good press. For the most part People are morons and dont do the proper followup/research when buying something...they just go by names. Its sorta like people going out and getting a Honda...they think its the greatest thing in automoblies since it has a postive spin on it, but you could do more homework and find another car thats just as nice and costs less then it. It all boils down to Image for the most part....and Matrox doesnt have much of a good one for your Avg Joe out there.....
    Why is it called tourist season, if we can't shoot at them?

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    • #3
      And spending 400 bucks on a P wouldn't make YOU a spoiled kid?

      It doesn't matter whether Nvidia sells it's GF4 Ti4600 to 0.0000001% of the market. Like you said, what it really does is help sell the 99% of the OTHER chips they make.

      Unfortunately Matrox doesn't have a huge lineup like Nvidia or ATi, which puts them in the uncomfotable position to actually HAVE to sell the P in sufficient numbers.

      Right now it's a nice board with a lot of potential that's being marketed to the wrong people.

      There's hope for the P256 as a niche player (notably in medical imaging where 10bit color is important, as well as excellent 2D) or as a cheap alternative to MMS cards.

      There's also hope that newer models will solve the actual problems, unfortunately the overconfident marketing ppl got the procurement ppl to order too many chips -so we'll have to wait until they reduce their inventory. Maybe the new chips will be fast enough if they don't arrive too late yet again.

      Then there's the OEM problem. Most use a feature list to make buying decisions. The P does compare pretty well there, except where you see it costs 3 to 4 times the price of competing products -which relegates it to niche markets where its intrinsic features are absolutely necessary and not available elsewhere.

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      • #4
        thought of something interesting: so I second what fanboy says. not only people buy cards according to their brand, they also tend to judge cards by their amount of memory lol. i know a bunch of idiots saying they want to get a Radeon 7000 for ~$100CND because they have 64MB of VRAM most buyers are "stupid"... they don't even consider what chip a gfx card has lol. i.e. My TNT2 must be as faster as the GeForce 2 Ultra because they both have 32MB of RAM.

        P.S. @funky-d-munky just to straight things up a bit. P256 retail should be slower than P128 retail because they are clocked 20MHz lower (same speed as P128 buck). For some reason I am uncomforable with the slower P. Many chip manufacteurs price them down because they may not meet the requirements for the higest clock speeds.

        P.S. @Fanboy lol: R7500 is a DX7 part w/o Pixel/vertex shaders; R9000 is total marketing BS because it's not a DX9 part: w/out pixel/vertex shader 2.0 or 128 bit color percision. It's exactly like the R8500 but slower because 9000 only has 1 texture unit that can do 6 textures per pass while the has 2 texture units that can do 3 textures per pass... so R9000 do badly in multi-texturing games.

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        • #5
          GT98- The Radeon 9000 is not a directx9 compatable part, as well I don't believe the 7500 is directx8 compatable. But I could be wrong on the 7500.
          "...and doing a castrated 64MB Parhelia is pretty damn stupid if they sell it for more then $150 bucks a pop."
          Stop making a fuss about a card that hasn't even been announced. Who says Matrox has to have a low end gaming card. There are 2-3 other companies that are 10 times as big as Matrox who fill this niche to the point of saturation. The P does quite well at gaming but why is this the only determining factor when compared to other cards. Why is it not compared to other cards in the relm of NLE. I don't go on a Nvidia site and see everyone scream for the top heads of Nvidia because every card they've ever made sucks at NLE.
          Oh my god MAGNUM!

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          • #6
            Three reasons Matrox needs to perfect and improve their 3D offerings:

            1. Speed sells. Let's be honest, speed is not always the #1 factor in a sale, but it is a major boot to the company profile. ATI has received an ungodly amount of good press for the Radeon 9700, and all because, after years of playing catchup, they finally took the undisputed preformance crown. It's just as Nvidia indisputably ursurped 3dfx with the release of the GeForce ( 3 years ago ), and gained wide acceptance.

            2. DVI-D will make crisp 2D output a feature of the past. DFPs do not require Matrox's well-timed RAMDACs and balanced filters. CRTs in the future will conceivably have DVI-D connections and move these components inside the monitor, so now you get a package-deal image quality level. You take the video card out of the analog loop.

            3. One word:

            Longhorn.
            what you say !!

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            • #7
              The R7500 is not, I repeat, is not a DX8 product (I should know as I have one) as it is the exact same Radeon that came out more than 2 years ago. It is just highly speedbumped as it is made on a .15u process instead of a .18u. It made the core possible to clock at 290MHz, up from 183MHz.

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              • #8
                defaultuser - i have already addressed the DVI idea in your other thread. it won't happen, not for a while. you are not gonna see a sudden change over to a new spec that the current parts don't even support. DVI is far too limited to make a good setup for CRT's, and in order to address them correctly it would take a completely new specification which none of the current hardware would or could support.

                about longhorn, the Parhelia is a fully GDI+2.0 part. it will do fine. and judging from the history other companies have of releasing drivers that work well in Microsofts latest operating system, NVidia will have beta drivers available for quite a while before Longhorn is released, and Matrox's drivers will be quite good out of box on longhorn, and they will ship more current drivers for it officially at the same time that it goes on sale, and in the form of beta drivers probably about a month before it is out, even if it isn't listed as supporting it....

                about the rest of things, and sales, its all about brand name recognition and marketing... honestly, most people who are in the market for 3d accelerators have never heard anything about Nvidia or their product line, they buy it because its a feature or its a requirement and they read it on the box of the piece of software they want to play... another percentage heard that a certain company (lets say Company A) sells the fastest/best quality video cards. To the few (and yes, it is a small amount considering that America has several billion people living in it) that have experience with these things, they do not nessicarily go hand in hand. but, to the average consumer, they know that their friend has a video card by xyz and it does what they need it to and its better than what they have. so they go buy a video card by xyz, or whatever people recommend. advertising their fastest video card reinforces the belief in the customer that their products are better then their competetors...
                "And yet, after spending 20+ years trying to evolve the user interface into something better, what's the most powerful improvement Apple was able to make? They finally put a god damned shell back in." -jwz

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                • #9
                  about longhorn, the Parhelia is a fully GDI+2.0 part. it will do fine.
                  DGhost, you're usually pretty smart, but I think you missed the point here. I think what he's trying to say is that IF Longhorn engages the 3D engine even on the desktop, THEN we will have shitty looking displays all the time because of the horrible banding that shows up on Parhelias when the 3D engine is on.
                  Gigabyte P35-DS3L with a Q6600, 2GB Kingston HyperX (after *3* bad pairs of Crucial Ballistix 1066), Galaxy 8800GT 512MB, SB X-Fi, some drives, and a Dell 2005fpw. Running WinXP.

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                  • #10
                    ahh, see, the banding issue was not brought up in this hence the confusing... it appeared that he was addressing the general weakness of the parhelia on the market, and why purchasing a Matrox is no longer required... simply my way of reading it...

                    but yes, Longhorn, while the 3d acceleration that it provides would be good, will probably kill my eyes on the Parhelia i have... i have a hard enough time multitasking if anything 3d is running... and it really bugs me that it affects the second monitor too....

                    on a slightly different tangent... when working at a retail shop in Colorado Springs, we picked up 3 GeForce3's when they were brand new... we sold them with a sub-$10 profit margin, and placed it right at where the Best Buy and CompUSA were selling them at - $300, MSRP for the GeForce3's. it took 6 months to sell all 3 of them. Seriously. The average person does not want or care about high performance graphics cards. On the other hand, the TBird 1.4's that we had the day before AMD officially released them.. we sold the tray within the week...

                    about the calling for heads comment... i am quite happy with my Parhelia, except for the banding problems... it has a lot of nice perks that other graphics cards do not have, and it is a pleasure to have a Matrox card in my main system again... it is what i expected and more... and honestly it has given me enough reason to run multimonitor on my machine all the time...

                    why we are calling for heads to roll inside Matrox is because the product was knowingly shipped with serious design flaws... and because Matrox has seemingly forgotten that its not statistics that use their products, but real people...
                    "And yet, after spending 20+ years trying to evolve the user interface into something better, what's the most powerful improvement Apple was able to make? They finally put a god damned shell back in." -jwz

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                    • #11
                      Chrono_Wanderer .......What are you telling me?

                      "P.S. @funky-d-munky just to straight things up a bit. P256 retail should be slower than P128 retail because they are clocked 20MHz lower (same speed as P128 buck). For some reason I am uncomforable with the slower P. Many chip manufacteurs price them down because they may not meet the requirements for the higest clock speeds."

                      What does that have to do with anything I had to say?
                      Oh my god MAGNUM!

                      Comment


                      • #12
                        Originally posted by DGhost
                        America has several billion people living in it
                        a tad optimistic there are we?

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                        • #13
                          Originally posted by Kurt


                          a tad optimistic there are we?
                          just a wee bit

                          America has just under 290 million people in it, according to the census offices projections... go figure...

                          keep forgetting that we are pretty much nothing compared to the other 5.9 billion people in the world...
                          "And yet, after spending 20+ years trying to evolve the user interface into something better, what's the most powerful improvement Apple was able to make? They finally put a god damned shell back in." -jwz

                          Comment


                          • #14
                            Originally posted by DGhost


                            just a wee bit

                            America has just under 290 million people in it, according to the census offices projections... go figure...

                            keep forgetting that we are pretty much nothing compared to the other 5.9 billion people in the world...
                            Still, it's the biggest market for all things electronic

                            Comment


                            • #15
                              Cut the price for the retail P to 300$ and bulk to 250$, write win98 drivers and you might actually get your sales up.
                              A brand name Ti4600 or Radeon 8500 is priced 200-300$ and that's what the P performance is close to, FAA and triple head will be the features that make you choose the P instead of those.
                              Also make a 64mb P without the third head and price it 150-200$ to fill the lower end gap.

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