Creative acquiring 3dLabs, will target new markets!?

[RanDum72]

Link here.

So, are we going to have a new player against Nvidia in the gaming market? First, the Matrox Parhelia, now this. I hope something comes out of this ( as in better competition).

 

[Mavrick007]

This sounds weird since Creative has come back and put out a GF4 card too. If they are going to make both cards, I bet nVidia wouldn't like that at all. If Creative does make their own brand of video card, I hope they don't go the route of 3dfx and shoot themselves in the foot so to speak. Competition is nice but we will soon see what happens.

 

[Random Variable]

The professional 3D graphic accelerator market is becoming a joke.

 

[Sunner]

Great, 3DLabs down the drain, who's next?

Now nVidia has an even bigger chance to run rampart in the professional arena with their Quatro cards.

 

[Random Variable]

<< Great, 3DLabs down the drain, who's next?

Now nVidia has an even bigger chance to run rampart in the professional arena with their Quatro cards. >>


There may be a rebirth of the Unix graphic workstation.

 

[Rand]

<<
Now nVidia has an even bigger chance to run rampart in the professional arena with their Quatro cards. >>



The Quadro has been losing ground rapidly in the last month or so since Elsa dropped out though, nVidia NEEDS an established player in the professional market if they hope for their Quadro to keep pace.
The Professional market is notoriously slow to accept newcomers to the market, and Elsa provides an established and recognized name to back them up. And Elsa's experience with driver work has certainly helped them with the Quadro, and was instrumental in their gaining ISV certification.

 

[Random Variable]

<< The Quadro has been losing ground rapidly in the last month or so since Elsa dropped out though, nVidia NEEDS an established player in the professional market if they hope for their Quadro to keep pace.
The Professional market is notoriously slow to accept newcomers to the market, and Elsa provides an established and recognized name to back them up. And Elsa's experience with driver work has certainly helped them with the Quadro, and was instrumental in their gaining ISV certification. >>


If they want to keep pace with whom?

 

[Floydian]

Remember when they acquired Aureal? Look at all the huge developments that came out of that.... <sarcastic>
But I'm hoping to see something come out, competition is always cool

 

[Rand]

<<

<< The Quadro has been losing ground rapidly in the last month or so since Elsa dropped out though, nVidia NEEDS an established player in the professional market if they hope for their Quadro to keep pace.
The Professional market is notoriously slow to accept newcomers to the market, and Elsa provides an established and recognized name to back them up. And Elsa's experience with driver work has certainly helped them with the Quadro, and was instrumental in their gaining ISV certification. >>


If they want to keep pace with whom? >>



3DLabs (Creative), FireGL (ATi), Matrox, Appian, not to mention E&S still has strong brand recognition and is rumored to be making a comeback into the high end market.

3DLabs and FireGL are the big guys though, while Appian is faltering and Matrox has a nice segment for themselves due to their 4+ multi-monitor options, despite the poor 3D capabilities.
I think it's realtively safe to say Creative will keep 3DLabs going strong in the professional market.... though I sincerely doubt their technology is at all suitable for the consumer level, and FireGL is staying solid under ATi. Appian and Matrox have small but extremely valuable segments their battling over.
Meanwhile nVidia's formerly extremely strong mainstream positioning for $500-1000 cards was doing very well indeed but has been quickly falling on hard times without Elsa to back them up, and they've been entirely unable to even approach ISV certification standards in their drivers without Elsa's expertise in that area.
nVidia has the technology to maintain their positioning, but technology alone is a small part of what it takes to be successful in the high-end areas the Quadro/Synergy lines targeted.

 

[Random Variable]

It's slowly but surely becoming a battle between ATi and nVidia on both the consumer and professional levels. BTW, has ATi been writing decent drivers for the Fire GL cards since the company bought the division from Diamond/SonicBlue?

 

[Rand]

<< It's slowly but surely becoming a battle between ATi and nVidia on both the consumer and professional levels. BTW, has ATi been writing decent drives for the Fire GL cards since the company bought the division from Diamond/SonicBlue? >>



Exceptional drivers IMHO, but then they did manage to retain part of the original FireGL driver team that recieved such long standing accolades for their work. At least in the case of the FireGL 2-4... the FireGL8700/8800 has yet to prove the drivers are up to par, though supposedly they've gotten better of late.

 

[Leon]

<< Meanwhile nVidia's formerly extremely strong mainstream positioning for $500-1000 cards was doing very well indeed but has been quickly falling on hard times without Elsa to back them up, and they've been entirely unable to even approach ISV certification standards in their drivers without Elsa's expertise in that area.
>>



You are very mistaken. Nvidia was formed from Sun/SGI spin-off, and they have one of the most talented engineers and driver writers. Elsa drivers are practically based on Nvidia reference drivers, with couple of "plugins" to increase performance in 3d studio max and other applications. Due to extremely good relationship between Elsa and Nvidia, I suspect most of their people will join Nvidia if Elsa will fold. In fact, I am sure many already did.

And can throw some opinion of Carmack on this issue.



<< We bought three generations of intergraph/intense3D products, but the last generation (initial wildcat) was a mistake. We use nvidia boards for both professional work and gaming now >>





<< Nvidia's OpenGL drivers are my "gold standard", and it has been quite a while
since I have had to report a problem to them, and even their brand new
extensions work as documented the first time I try them. When I have a
problem on an Nvidia, I assume that it is my fault. With anyone else's
drivers, I assume it is their fault. This has turned out correct almost all
the time. I have heard more anecdotal reports of instability on some systems
with Nivida drivers recently, but I track stability separately from
correctness, because it can be influenced by so many outside factors. >>



ISV certification is not an issue. Quadro brand is very strong, and will only get stronger with Quadro 4 release. They have cards for every segment of the market - dual and quad monitors, low, mid, and high end.

Leon

 

[Rand]

<<
You are very mistaken. Nvidia was created from Sun/SGI spin-off, and they have one of the most talented engineers and driver writers. Elsa drivers are practically based on Nvidia reference drivers, with couple of "plugins" to increase performance in 3d studio max and other applications. Due to extremely good relationship between Elsa and Nvidia, I suspect most of their people will join Nvidia if Elsa will fold. In fact, I am sure many already did.
>>



Your forgetting the fact that Elsa heavily collorborated with nVidia in the design of nVidia's drivers for the Quadro, and they had quite a lot of influence in it. Prior to Elsa stepping in the Quadro series had been starting to get a reputation as having notoriously underperforming errors with some severe bugs in various texturing methods often used in 3D Modelling.
Excellent drivers for consumer level graphics means nothing compared to what is needed in the market the Quadro/Synergy brands are aimed at.

The end fact is that nVidia's market share in the prosumer market has started to erode disturbingly rapidly with Elsa's demise. They need another partner that is established in the field, with a reputation of quality that nVidia can build upon... this is a market wherein companies are extremely slow to trust new-comers to the market, and nVidia is still a relative newcomer there with little reputation.



<<
ISV certification is not an issue. Quadro brand is very strong, and will only get stronger with Quadro 4 release.
>>


ISV certification is an absolute necessity in the prosumer market. The vast majority of companies wouldnt touch any product that hadnt recieved ISV certification. This isnt like WHQL certification that means little, ISV certification is pretty much a requirement to have any hope of attaining any any semblance of wide scale acceptance.
ATi is learning that fact with the FireGL 8700/8800... where despite the sterling reputation of the FireGL line, the 8700/8800 havent been touched, nor have any companies even hinted at a desire to use said products necause of a lack of ISV certification. While the FireGL 2-4 is still thriving in the market.
nVidia could have the greatest hardware in the world, with the greatest drivers in the world... but without a partner with a solid reputation in the field, and ISV certification their going to have an extremely difficult time gaining acceptance.

 

[Leon]

<< Your forgetting the fact that Elsa heavily collorborated with nVidia in the design of nVidia's drivers for the Quadro, and they had quite a lot of influence in it. Prior to Elsa stepping in the Quadro series had been starting to get a reputation as having notoriously underperforming errors with some severe bugs in various texturing methods often used in 3D Modelling.
>>



Simply because drivers are optimized for other things. Nvidia is perfectly capable of writing their own pro driver, but until now, Elsa did that for them.



<< They need another partner that is established in the field, with a reputation of quality that nVidia can build upon... >>



No, they don't. As I said, they can write their own driver. Visiontek or any other board manufacturer can manufacture the cards, which will be sold under Quadro name.



<< ATi is learning that fact with the FireGL 8700/8800... where despite the sterling reputation of the FireGL line, the 8700/8800 havent been touched, nor have any companies even hinted at a desire to use said products necause of a lack of ISV certification. >>



Wrong

Here is another one

On the Quadro side, Quadro4 550 XGL, Quadro4 750 XGL and Quadro4 900 XGL, Quadro4 200 NVS and Quadro4 400 NVS are featured in Evo workstation line, and Quadro4 900 XGL is available in HP 2100 workstation series as an upgrade.

Pretty good rate of adoption, I would say - considering the parts was announced couple of weeks ago 🙂

Now back to 3D Labs discussion. It appears from CC that they want to very high end GPU (possible multi chip configurations), then scale it down to mainstream. Not a very good idea IMO - takes too much resources, and it won't easy to compete with Nvidia 6 month cycle. The good thing is that they pushing OpenGL 2.0 standard, which will hopefully end vendor specific extension hell.

Leon

 

[nortexoid]

ooh....some juicy stuffs right here....

i've no idea what creative's intentions are for the high-end graphics market, but i doubt they'll do much to target new markets based on the oxygen or wildcat series of cards...i also wonder if they'll have much input on the development of currently existing and future 3dlabs products (that is, over the input of the 3dlabs team)

anyway, this seems like rather bad news....but then again, i can't pretend to know in-and-outs of the high-end 3d/2d grahpics workstation market, so....

 

[Dasterdly]

I dont know much but I do know from first hand experience that nvidias open gl drivers sucked till elsa took a hand in thier driver development.

 

[jm0ris0n]

Just because something is listed as "For Sale" does not mean anyone will buy it.

Also, does nvidia hold any spots on the openGL standards board?

 

[Leon]

<< Just because something is listed as "For Sale" does not mean anyone will buy it. >>



36% of total workstation market share according to Mercury Research. Up from 1% two years ago.



<< Also, does nvidia hold any spots on the openGL standards board? >>



Actually, they do. They are a full voting member. But then, so was 3dfx. There were issues with Nvidia pushing proprietary extensions a while back (which caused Nvidia to be voted out of perm status), but this whole mess will be solved with OpenGL 2.0. Intersting to note, however, that Microsoft, who contributed nothing to ARB, is allowed to have perm status. So they can steal more 🙂

Leon