Why hasn't a third vendor come in?

[Illyan]

It would be fairly exciting having 3 or 4 high end cards to choose from, each with different architectures.

 

[Scali]

Similarly, I'm not clear _why_ Matrox decided not to compete in 3d performance or why all the rest of them (S3 etc) failed to become players there while ATI and nvidia did.

Matrox misfired with the Parhelia. The card was *supposed* to compete with nVidia and ATi on performance (it was a very ambitious design, large chip, first card to support VS2.0, and a 256-bit memory bus, which was considered very wide at the time), but it couldn't deliver on its promises.
As a result, Matrox left the gaming market, and concentrated on specialized hardware only.
PowerVR has a similar story... they tried to go for gaming consoles (Sega DreamCast) and competitive discrete cards for PC, but could not compete well enough, so they concentrated on the emerging mobile market instead, where they are now a big player (even Intel's Atom chipsets use a PowerVR-designed GPU, the GMA500).

Most companies were just blindsided by 3dfx from the get-go, and never managed to deliver a competitive 3d card at all (legendary names such as Tseng Labs, S3, Cirrus Logic, Trident disappeared overnight with the 3d acceleration revolution).
ATi and Matrox were the only ones who could adapt and compete in the 3d acceleration world... and nVidia has been the only successful videocard startup since 3d acceleration.

Technically ATi the company is dead ofcourse, since they were acquired by AMD... so nVidia is the only remaining video card company for mainstream discrete cards. It's been a real rollercoaster ride.
In fact, if we look beyond the PC market... some other important companies also dropped out of the 3d race. How about Silicon Graphics for example? They were one of the first to develop 3d acceleration hardware, and OpenGL is their API. These days they just use off-the-shelf hardware, rather than developing their own, and OpenGL is now maintained by the Khronos group.

 

[Leyawiin]

Kind of a parallel situation to CPU manufacturers. I don't think we'll ever see anything beyond the two main players again. Just too difficult to get started this late in the game.

 

[Idontcare]

Matrox misfired with the Parhelia. The card was *supposed* to compete with nVidia and ATi on performance (it was a very ambitious design, large chip, first card to support VS2.0, and a 256-bit memory bus, which was considered very wide at the time), but it couldn't deliver on its promises.

Yeah the story of Matrox and Parhelia is basically textbook "failure to execute".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matrox_Parhelia#Performance

 

[Anarchist420]

+1

+2.

I always thought the G400 (especially the MAX) was better than the TNT2 Ultra, as well as everything else it went up against in 1999, due to Matrox's kickass IQ.

I also thought the voodoo 5 was better than the Geforce 2 series because it had better IQ. Software T&L wasn't very fast, but ordered grid aa sucks worse than software T&L IMO.

Maybe if the economy gets better and taxes get reduced we'll see a third player.

 

[Scali]

Yeah the story of Matrox and Parhelia is basically textbook "failure to execute".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matrox_Parhelia#Performance

Yea, I remember being really disappointed... People making a big deal out of the GeForce FX, Radeon HD2900 or Fermi... what are you talking about, really? Those companies survived... But Matrox didn't (well, the company did, but not in the market segment we'd want them to be).

I really liked Matrox as a company, because of the innovative products they had, and the general high quality of their products.
They had groundbreaking Windows acceleration, were among the first to include features for video decoding (like hardware scaling and bilinear filtering and YUV->RGB conversion), they gave us environment-mapped bumpmapping, and I think they were the first to add TV-out and dualhead as a standard feature.
Before 3D acceleration, they also had great memory bandwidth for software rendering (and among the first to use things like vram).
The AA on the Parhelia was also amazing.

 

[happy medium]

Why? Because without a x86 licience,they would be doomed.

 

[SirPauly]

Yeah the story of Matrox and Parhelia is basically textbook "failure to execute".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matrox_Parhelia#Performance

What was impressive to me was the surround gaming feature, which did take some time for ATI and nVidia to eventually offer. Great to see this choice once again.

This reviewer, Typedef Enum, which his name is really Scott, wrote a wonderful review on the immersion factor of what Surround Gaming did for him:

http://www.nvnews.net/reviews/matrox_parhelia/page_18.shtml

 

[tweakboy]

Very nice post thread starter. Very imformative and totally I agree with you and all of you.

Well there is a 3rd vendor thats Matrox. But that is not for gaming its for graphics workstation.

S3 tried Diamond tried but this is over 10 years ago. We saw how 3dfx was bought out.

I think the only hope for a new vendor GPU is Intel. But that is not going to happen either, instead this is what will happen.

Intel I believe with their i9 core will have a onboard GPU, but pffffffffffffff its gonna be slow and you still need a graphics card. I dont think for now that Intel can do this. Maybe in 2020 they come up with a CPU/GPU on one die that performs as fast as latest nvidia or amd. Then would there be a need for a graphics card ? You bet there will be that GPU is not gonna be a monster killer, ull still need a dedicated graphics card... thanks

 

[Barfo]

Hey guys, I've got some free space in my garage. Whaddaya say we start a video card company and teach ATI and nvidia how it's done?

 

[bryanW1995]

Add a zero onto that.

A modern GPU from nothing to a selling product? $1B easy.

didn't intel already throw $3 billion at the problem with zilch to show for it?

 

[zerocool84]

I loved 3DFX. Bought the 5500 when it came out. Huge beast of a card for back then.

 

[vshin]

As said before, Intel did try to put out a discrete solution but it didn't work out. And if Intel couldn't do it, then there's really no way some dude in a garage is going to do it either.

That being said, Sandy Bridge is probably going to knock off a huge chunk of the low-end and notebook market for 3rd party graphics. It seems more likely that nVidia's future will be limited to discrete desktop graphics for professionals and the dwindling PC gamer market. They might get lucky and snatch a contract for a next-gen console but AMD is probably in a better position to leverage their processor assets with an ATi GPU.

 

[midnilux]

I don't think so, low end notebooks are already dominated by Intel. It's the midrange where ati/nv (especially nv) are rising. If you just need a piece of crap laptop that can't play anything it will likely come with intel gfx, nv's integrated graphics on midrange notebooks are amazing for what they are.

 

[Dark Shroud]

Intel's new "HD" video chip can play back Blu-ray video just fine and I believe it supports Direct Compute as well. So for "normal" use it's good enough and that's the problem in a nutshell.

VIA also has their own onboard video chips for their systems/mobos. But they're pretty much like the Intel HD video/older GMA.

We're probably not going to see a discreate Graphics card third party for another 5 years easy. We need to get past x86, someone mangages to sign a licenseing deal, or someone develops something crazy that gives them a foothold.

Baically all that's need is an act of God with a fist full of money.

 

[Scali]

We need to get past x86, someone mangages to sign a licenseing deal, or someone develops something crazy that gives them a foothold.

What does x86 have to do with discrete videocards?

 

[Will Robinson]

Damn,beat me to it. The X86 instruction set has zip to do with video cards.
Intel tried to do one using X86(Larabee) but wasn't able to pull it off with acceptable/comparable performance(yet).
They did not try to create a video card using similar architecture to that used by NVDA or ATi.

 

[WhoBeDaPlaya]

As said before, Intel did try to put out a discrete solution but it didn't work out. And if Intel couldn't do it, then there's really no way some dude in a garage is going to do it either.

The old i740 was actually pretty decent for the $$$.
And the S3 Savage gave us S3TC.

 

[Leyawiin]

I loved 3DFX. Bought the 5500 when it came out. Huge beast of a card for back then.

Finally sold the one gathering dust in my closet. People still want them I guess.

 

[BassBomb]

Where is the third cpu vendor?

BTW you mean manufacturer, not vendor... its difficult to suddenly enter mass market

 

[superunknown98]

Nobody remembers XGI? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XGI_Technology A mash up of your old friends Trident and SIS. they still seem to be alive too.

 

[Wreckage]

http://www.s3graphics.com/

Microsoft® DirectX™ 10.1 Ready ChromotionHD™ 2.0 Video Engine for Blu-ray™ and BD-Live™ Playback
Shader Model 4.1 H.264, VC-1, and MPEG-2 HD Acceleration
OpenGL 2.1/3.0 AES 128 Encryption Engine
GPGPU Shader Architecture Integrated DisplayPort™ with HDCP™
Optimized 64-bit Memory Interface Dual-Link DVI™ and HDMI™ with HDCP™
AcceleRAM™ Graphics Memory Support PowerWise™ Advanced Power Savings

Also it would not take much to put Intel's crappy GPU on a card and compete at the low end.

 

[PingSpike]

http://www.s3graphics.com/



Also it would not take much to put Intel's crappy GPU on a card and compete at the low end.

It kind of would. People don't buy intel's crappy low end GPUs. They buy their CPUs and then end up with their shitty GPU. No one seeks them out.

 

[Modelworks]

Why ? Not enough money in it.
Companies are in business to make money and right now in the graphics chip market that is in embedded devices not pc. In the embedded market there are over 20 graphics chip providers .

 

[Cerb]

Where is the third cpu vendor?

BTW you mean manufacturer, not vendor... its difficult to suddenly enter mass market

I think vendor is more accurate. TSMC gets to make practically everything .

http://www.s3graphics.com/

Also it would not take much to put Intel's crappy GPU on a card and compete at the low end.

How is S3 going to get their GPU into an Intel chipset?

Intel has never had good IGP. The best they can say is that their non-Imagination GMA series can at least do Aero effects, and play older MMOs. Compared to IEG and IEG2 (IEG2 was IT, wasn't it?), that's rather impressive (IEG2 can't even play back Youtube videos smoothly, half the time!), but...

Ting is, you can get Intel IGP in an Intel chipset. It was hard, even when there was room to compete, and Intel's IGP was a total POS. Now that mobile matters most, and the GPUs are going into the CPUs, you'd be a fool to try to compete.

Low-end cards are dominated by nVidia and ATI, and most of them are not useful to most people (they just come in their box from the PC OEM), and are well-known for having even lower margins than mid-range and high-end cards.