Lets hope NVDIA doesn't become the next Creative Labs

[iamthebear]

what have they done since the introduction of the Live! a few years ago? Squat. They rehash the same chip over and over with a slight twist and a new name. So much for innovation.

 

[Dark4ng3l]

yea at least creative's emu10k chips are programable so if they choose to implement new features they dont need to build new chips.

 

[Impact55]

Sound cards are a lot harder to innovate.

 

[UsandThem]

They must have done something right. All their serious competition went out of business.

The Sound Blaster Live is a great card anyways.

 

[Sephiroth_IX]

It could be a lot better. Plus, Nvidia is coming into the sound market also. Im just hoping Matrox (yeah right...) steps up. I think ATI is going ot have one hell of a time keeping up...

 

[CalebTG]

antiAbit:

their competition went out of business because they pulled a Rambus and sued everybody

 

[Remedy]

caleb go post a link or something, :frown:

 

[JellyBaby]

Well lets also face reality: innovation in sound technology is simply not gonna match the pace of video technology. While I agree Creative could be doing more I must give them some slack simply due to the fact new audio features are few-and-far-between.

 

[Unsickle]

Creative could begin making software that doesn't suck

I can't think of a single piece of software made for creative products that doesn't get the lame award.

 

[Aboroth]

I don't know. I remember a program I think was called Dr. Spaitso and I think it came with my friend's old Soundblaster. That was a pretty cool program to play with. Does anyone else remember that? You could type in questions to the program and it would answer you and try to have a conversation. Pretty neat. Didn't quite pass the Turing test, but not bad.

 

[obeseotron]

Rumors about ATI's new chips are looking possitive. Personally I don't think ATI has a prayer of having the absolute fastest board on the market, but it is looking more and more like the fastest chip on the market is becoming less and less of an issue. In all honesty it is an extreme niche that can afford a geforce ultra, and what really matters to most people is that a GTS is faster than a radeon ddr, and an MX is faster than a Radeon SDR. The $125 and the $250 price marks are where 90% of people will look for their next card, and where 99% of oems will look.

nVidia went through a different pattern than creative. Creative was king, nearly got dethroned by Aureal completely beating them with the conversion to PCI. Then they created a product that could compete with the Vortex2, and gradually bled their competition dry until they became king again. Sound cards use extremely small amounts of CPU power, the new ones support Dolby Digital decoding in hardware, and work with everything. There isn't much you could ask for that they don't do. With graphics cards, I want the Final Fantasy movie on my computer screen, and that's aways away.

 

[ROcHE]

Heheh I Remember the doctor spaitso too. That was cool.

 

[rubberneck]

Creative's soundcards are capable of producing life like sounds. When Nvidia (or any other graphics chip manufacturer) can produce a graphics chip/card that can produce life like 3-D graphics, they'll earn the right to slow innovation as far as I'm concerned.

BTW, anyone wanna guess how long it'll take for a consumer graphics card to produce life
like 3-D in real-time?

 

[Loralon]

I'd guess that we're around ten years or so away from seeing consumer systems that can do photorealistic 3D in real time with what we'd consider acceptable performance. Hard to say really, but it's definitely not something we'll see anytime soon. To stay on topic, you guys are right on in that there's hardly anything left to do with regards to PC audio technology. Quite unlike the 3D graphics arena.

 

[Czar]

<< what have they done since the introduction of the Live! a few years ago? Squat. They rehash the same chip over and over with a slight twist and a new name. So much for innovation. >>


Sorry, must do this. So what has 3dfx done, they made the voodoo1 and they have been using the same bloody chip untill the Voodoo5 came out, and still its not much different. Here, my last 3dfx rant.

 

[WetWilly]

Creative needs to look over their shoulders, though. nVidia raided Aureal's engineers and also licensed Sensaura. nVidia doesn't even have the problems 3dfx did when they bought STB. If nVidia makes sound chips and Creative doesn't like it, what are they going to do? Boycott nVidia? And even if they try, who are they going to buy their video chips from? No other video card OEM besides Creative would care if nVidia made sound products.

At the rate nVidia's going, there's a possibility we could see an X-Box on a card for a PC.

 

[BoberFett]

But didn't Creative wait until A3D threatened their stranglehold on the sound market before creating EAX? Perhaps if Aureal hadn't existed, we still wouldn't have 3D audio. That's the problem with virtual monopolies such as Creative, Intel, Microsoft, and soon to be Nvidia. There's no telling what technology won't be created due to the immediate destruction of any competition.

 

[Pretender]

There really isn't much to do in the way of sound cards, all that can be done really has been. Considering that humans rely on sight a lot more than sound, graphics improvements are much easier to detect than sound improvements. Nvidia can't really be compared to Creative because they run two completely different realms. There is still a lot left to be innovated in the graphics field, and hopefully they'll (or anyone) will do it.

 

[fs5]

Hell I'm still using a SB16!