Why did Matrox lose the battle?

[xMax]

Matrox used to rule back in the days. But now they have been cornered into a niche market that seems to be shrinking with each passing day. It seems almost inevitable that they will be out of business within the next 5 to 10 years. Of course i could be wrong. I hope im wrong. I really liked Matrox, and they are based out of Montreal, the city i live in.

So what happened? Clearly its the 3D market that has crushed them. But they were making 3D cards, so why didn't they battle it out with ATI and Nvidia?

Im assuming there are three reasons why they lost the battle:
1- They didn't have the money and thus the resources.
2- They were too deep into the 2D market and couldn't battle it out in the 3D market.
3- 2D rendering was no longer a big deal for modern computers to handle.
4- DVI emerges and makes all 2D analog image quality, their specialty, somewhat obsolete.

Maybe i dont know what im talking about, but i am interested in knowing why they went down.

 

[Lifted]

It's a cut throat market. I think it comes down to management, then talent/resources. If management lacks vision and the skills to succesfully compete in a very fast industry, a multi-million dollar company can fall apart in a years time, or less. Same thing happened to 3dfx, Hercules, Trident, Cyrix, VIA (CPU's), Transmeta, etc.

 

[tjpark1111]

what about SiS Mirage? are they any good now?

 

[Acanthus]

XGI is coming to take us away!!

They will be market leaders in 2007, didnt you see the roadmap?

 

[xMax]

It's a sad world we live in. So brutal.

So what's going to happen with all these other companies as ATI and Nvidia just keep rolling out with so many up to date highly compatible and high performance products? Is it just innevitable doom or what? I mean, once ATI/Nvidia become larger and larger, then they will have enough resources to excel in what these leftover companies still excel in, like Matrox and thier 2D image quality. Although of all those companies, i still think Matrox will be able to hold its ground with Multi Display Solutions. But thats just a guess on my part.

And heres the thing. Has their ever been a 2-company monopoly? Because if one of these companies, either ATI or Nvidia, starts to take over the other, then we get a monopoly as the other companies just get the bread crumbs. And if that happens, then that company, wether ATI or Nvidia, which gets the monopoly, will eventually be dismantled.

In my view, i think ATI and Nvidia will probably make sure they both stay on top. I honestly believe thats the way of modern capitalism. Because if their is 2 companies, then they cant be taken apart.

Im almost certain that Intel made sure AMD caught up to it so that it didn't become a monopoly. Of course i could be wrong, and dont think anybody could prove this theory wrong or right. But it could make sense.

Poor Matrox. But hey, its all about survival of the fittest, and thats natures way, and nobody could argue with that.

 

[mwmorph]

Originally posted by: xMax
It's a sad world we live in. So brutal.

So what's going to happen with all these other companies as ATI and Nvidia just keep rolling out with so many up to date highly compatible and high performance products? Is it just innevitable doom or what? I mean, once ATI/Nvidia become larger and larger, then they will have enough resources to excel in what these leftover companies still excel in, like Matrox and thier 2D image quality. Although of all those companies, i still think Matrox will be able to hold its ground with Multi Display Solutions. But thats just a guess on my part.

And heres the thing. Has their ever been a 2-company monopoly? Because if one of these companies, either ATI or Nvidia, starts to take over the other, then we get a monopoly as the other companies just get the bread crumbs. And if that happens, then that company, wether ATI or Nvidia, which gets the monopoly, will eventually be dismantled.

In my view, i think ATI and Nvidia will probably make sure they both stay on top. I honestly believe thats the way of modern capitalism. Because if their is 2 companies, then they cant be taken apart.

Im almost certain that Intel made sure AMD caught up to it so that it didn't become a monopoly. Of course i could be wrong, and dont think anybody could prove this theory wrong or right. But it could make sense.

Poor Matrox. But hey, its all about survival of the fittest, and thats natures way, and nobody could argue with that.

matrox slipped up in the first and second generations of the 3d car wars and lost it's footing and never recovered.

as for monopoly, Creative's Sound Blaster line is a virtual monopoly

intel didd not make sure amd caught up, companies will inevitably make mistakes and slip fro mthe top. It's life, look at Great Britan now or look at 9 labs graphics.

 

[Genx87]

Matrox didnt seem to understand their own market and where it was heading. On top of that their product cycles were way to slow to compete with Nvidia at first and now ATI.

What was the name of the last GPU Matrox shipped out that flopped in the 3d market?
It has been like 3 years since and well, in 3 years we have gone from the R300\NV30 to the R580 and G70.

The market this card targets is probably being devoured by the Quadro and FireGL cards.
It is a cut throat market that Nvidia pushed in the late 1990s that drove some of these companies out. Now the big players are Nvidia, ATI, and Intel. With ATi and Nvidia fighting in the discrete game card arena.

 

[SpeedZealot369]

its true, you gotta keep up in a fast paced industry, and video cards is definitly fast paced. But with higher risks, come higher returns

 

[ElFenix]

matrox owned the tnt2 era with the G400. they then only made minor updates to it for several years. eventually, just a few weeks before the 9700 pro debuted, matrox debuted the parhelia. what with it's 256 bit memory bus and fragment AA it should have owned everything on the market at the time and been very competitive with the 9700 pro.

three things though:

though fragment AA looked really good when it worked, and with a minimal performance hit, it didn't work all the time.

it was set up as a multitexturing gpu, rather than as a shader processing gpu. it was set up with 4 texture units per pipeline, but only 4 pipelines (so 4x4). the 9700 pro was set up with an 8x1 scheme. though the trend had been toward more and more multitexturing over the previous couple of years, it was already starting to move away and toward shader processing. because prior GPUs had only used 2 texture units per pipeline, even games with heavy multitexturing loads were designed with that hardware in mind.

but the thing that really killed the parhelia, imho, was that there was absolutely no z-culling prior to render. this made a card with more memory bandwidth than anything else on the market have far less effective bandwidth than perhaps the Geforce 4 (which had 40% less theoretical bandwidth). this also killed the multitexturing fill rate advantage because the processor was filling pixels that would be discarded anyway. compared to nvidia and ati, which by then were culling the vast majority of unseen pixels (afaik), this was just a giant mistake. and one that matrox never recovered from or tried to fix with later revisions.

 

[xMax]

So what about the Multi Display Solutions that Matrox provides? Because they still seem to lead the way in that arena. Perhaps they might still be able to survive if they stayed on top of that niche market.

I just cant believe how fast ATI and Nvidia keep shipping out new products. Its insane. They practically have a new product coming out every month or two, while Matrox comes out with 2 products per year. At least for the desktop video cards.

Anyhow, thats life!

 

[Matthias99]

Originally posted by: xMax
So what about the Multi Display Solutions that Matrox provides? Because they still seem to lead the way in that arena. Perhaps they might still be able to survive if they stayed on top of that niche market.

Basically, the only reason they've been able to hang on there is that:

1) They produced products with very good quality VGA outputs (when sometimes ATI/NVIDIA partners were skimping on this). DVI essentially makes this irrelevant.

2) ATI/NVIDIA have not put out any boards with more than 2 video outputs. If this changes at some point, Matrox will be screwed.

I just cant believe how fast ATI and Nvidia keep shipping out new products. Its insane. They practically have a new product coming out every month or two, while Matrox comes out with 2 products per year. At least for the desktop video cards.

ATI and NVIDIA generally aren't launching new products 'every month' -- or if they are, they are mostly just scaled-down versions of other cards.

Matrox does have somewhat longer product cycles (the 18-month cycles we have seen recently from ATI/NVIDIA are VERY aggressive by most hardware development standards) . But they launch fewer products primarily because they aren't in as many market segments -- they don't have to launch low-end, mid-range, and high-end gaming cards, PLUS AGP variants, PLUS workstation cards, PLUS intregrated chipset solutions, etc. etc.

 

[xMax]

Thats an interesting response there Matthias99.

And by the way, Matthias, i actually listened to you the last time you had practically told me off when i was ready to buy a very expensive quadro fx just to have a proper DVI compliant card. I wound up thinking twice and doing a lot of research, which eventually lead to me back to the computer store where i got my rig from in order to have a coversation with their technically informed employee. The end result is that i was about to buy a quadro FX 4500 until he pulled the plug on that idea and told me to go home and read up on Matrox. Sure enough, after reading up on Matrox, this is what i found:

Matrox UltraSharp Display Output Technology:
- Highest-quality analog, digital and TV output
- Ultra-crisp display quality at high frequencies
- Highest-quality design, electronics and filters
- 5th-order output filters
- Highest-fidelity frequency and transient response for optimal signal quality
- High signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) with super-low PLL Jitter

As i have discovered, in theory, there is no such thing as quality when it comes to DVI, but in practice, there is an overwhelming amount of cards out there that are not DVI compliant and tend to produce screen speckles or noise on the display, something i have seen with my own eyes. But Matrox pays special attention to signal quality, and not just analog. For this reason, it turned out to be the right company for me, especially when im practically broke and cant afford a quadro FX 4500.

Of course, i would not have needed a quadro FX 4500, as a quadro FX 1400 would probably have done just fine. But with the Matrox cards being an almost guarantee to have the right image quality, along with the low cost of their cards, less than 300$, then i just cant see myself going after any other card.

But as usual, you will probably have something negative to say and put me down. So go ahead, give me your best shot. But I dont think i made a mistake this time. And i did listen to you.

P.S. I tried the 7800 GTX but had problems with it when it boots. I also tried the 6600 GT, but it has problems playing back video in Windows Media Player. And the ATI cards are incompatible with my Eizo LCD display. The proof of that is provided in the link below.

Eizo Technical Note

It just has to be Matrox!

 

[Budarow]

nVidia "stole" all their great engineers (at least that's sorta what the lawsuite said which Matrox filled against nVidia)

 

[xMax]

Wow. Now thats pretty interesting. But why would the Matrox engineers leave Matrox when they were the best at that time. Hmm...Perhaps they left just when Matrox started to go down.

 

[DefRef]

I had an pre-order in for a G200 in 1998 and it kept slipping and slipping its date. Then one day, I saw this thing called a "TNT" and that was the end of Matrox's story.

How many people have two monitors on their desks. How many need three? That's why Matrox failed.

 

[Zebo]

Matrox used to rule back in the days.

Never heard of them.

 

[Indyboy2]

I used to like Hercules video cards had a 9800xt prophet was a great card always liked there color schemes i still have an 8500 le prophet running in an old pc

 

[Fox5]

Originally posted by: xMax
Matrox used to rule back in the days. But now they have been cornered into a niche market that seems to be shrinking with each passing day. It seems almost inevitable that they will be out of business within the next 5 to 10 years. Of course i could be wrong. I hope im wrong. I really liked Matrox, and they are based out of Montreal, the city i live in.

So what happened? Clearly its the 3D market that has crushed them. But they were making 3D cards, so why didn't they battle it out with ATI and Nvidia?

Im assuming there are three reasons why they lost the battle:
1- They didn't have the money and thus the resources.
2- They were too deep into the 2D market and couldn't battle it out in the 3D market.
3- 2D rendering was no longer a big deal for modern computers to handle.
4- DVI emerges and makes all 2D analog image quality, their specialty, somewhat obsolete.

Maybe i dont know what im talking about, but i am interested in knowing why they went down.

Matrox just couldn't compete in the 3d market, ATI and nvidia sucked up the pool of most of the top engineers.
That, and Matrox never really competed. Back in the day, their products were too late to the market and too expensive to ever really sell well (G400 was a nice card otherwise though), they skipped the Geforce1 through Geforce 3 gens, and then came out with the Parhelia too late, as it was on paper a geforce 4 competitor, but only a geforce 3 competitor in actuality since it lacked most of the advancements gpus had seen over the past several years. Once again, too late and too expensive. Matrox never got much of a foothold in the 3d market.
I wouldn't say Matrox's withdrawal from the market was a big loss, as they were never really in it. 3dfx was the only major loss, though it would have been nice to see PowerVR take a bigger foothold than they did. (afterall, they're one of the few companies that was actually doing something completely different, rather than just focusing on some areas over others)

Most of Matrox's current cards are based off of their G400 core. That's really a shame, even more shameful is that ATI and nvidia cards aren't consistently better yet. However, if all you're doing is 2d work, there's no real problem with going for a Matrox card, if you're doing any kind of 3d design though I'd recommend a Creative Labs card or a Quadro, or a Geforce with modified drivers to make it a Quadro.

 

[Megatomic]

Originally posted by: Zebo

Matrox used to rule back in the days.

Never heard of them.

shens? Matrox was big back in the day.

 

[Wreckage]

It seems the computer markets end up being a battle of just two companies or sometimes it ends up with just one company on top.

NVIDIA\ATI - Intel\AMD - Seagate\Western Digital - etc

Soundblaster - Windows - etc.

 

[pkme2]

For those who need multiple monitors for video work, Matrox is it. For gaming, get either ATI or Nividia.

 

[Childs]

Matrox can always get back in the game by doing what ATI did...buy someone else's tech.

 

[Zstream]

Originally posted by: Childs
Matrox can always get back in the game by doing what ATI did...buy someone else's tech.

Huh? You need to read up on some facts first, 3dfx was bought by Nvidia. Half of the 3dfx engineers went to ATI while the other half worked for Nvidia. Matrox on the other hand flopped they used 4x4 instead of 8x1 which waste lots of bandwith but none the less have far superior 2d image.

 

[Childs]

Originally posted by: Zstream

Originally posted by: Childs
Matrox can always get back in the game by doing what ATI did...buy someone else's tech.

Huh? You need to read up on some facts first, 3dfx was bought by Nvidia. Half of the 3dfx engineers went to ATI while the other half worked for Nvidia. Matrox on the other hand flopped they used 4x4 instead of 8x1 which waste lots of bandwith but none the less have far superior 2d image.

We've known that 'R300' would be the next high end chip from the Canadian firm and we've also heard that the ARTx team that ATI purchased some time ago--and who were responsible for the graphics element in Nintendo's Gamecube--would be the mainstay of the design team.

source

Artx

What facts am I missing? And that wasn't meant as a slam, just a fact.

 

[ElFenix]

Originally posted by: Zstream

Originally posted by: Childs
Matrox can always get back in the game by doing what ATI did...buy someone else's tech.

Huh? You need to read up on some facts first, 3dfx was bought by Nvidia. Half of the 3dfx engineers went to ATI while the other half worked for Nvidia. Matrox on the other hand flopped they used 4x4 instead of 8x1 which waste lots of bandwith but none the less have far superior 2d image.

while 8500 was competitive, it didn't really capture the hearts and minds of gamers. that was reserved for the 9700, which, by all accounts, was from ArtX.