nvidia=evil

[Def]

I think Wingnut PEZ has a point.

Ignorant people automatically see the company on top as some how wronging them. It's the same mentallity that people get when they're less financially endowed than other people. They automatically assume the money and power(they're the same in most people's eyes) were just given to them, not earned. There can't be ANY way for that other person/company to actually be "better" than me(or insert underdog company here) is the usual thought that goes through people's head. Not that they are "better" in reality, but usually ignorant people equate money and power to self worth. Which talking about a business, their money and power is usually inversely proportional to their ethics and "niceness".

Sorry guys, but business is not "nice". Rival companies don't push each other in the swing on the playground. They want to be the ONLY one in the swing. While some actions of NVIDIA, Intel(now more recently since losing marketshare) and MS(long history of this in particular) are not the most "sporting" of a company that is topdog at the moment, they certainly aren't the bad guy just because they happen to make a better product. Which NVIDIA does now, Intel did without a doubt before, and MS just made it so they are the defacto standard by taking initiative way back.

It's only natural for them to want to stay on top, and they certainly won't wish to show favortism to companies/vendors that start using/stocking competitors products. I really doubt NVIDIA has stopped shipping all GF3 chips to Hercules, that makes them not make money to be made. You don't get on top thinking like that. But they sure won't go out of their way to make sure Hercules has an endless supply of chips, and they probably won't be one of the first set of makers out with a board when the GF3 Ultra is released. If NVIDIA has a surplus of GF3 chips, they will try to sell them to anyone they can.

Intel is the same way with OEM PC makers. When Gateway started pushing AMD chips more, Intel didn't put them at the top of shipment lists. They still got Intel chips to sell, but they were usually at a slightly higher cost and a bit later from rumors I've heard.

MS is a bit on the greedy side when they have money oozing from every orifice, and no one like them can write a buggy piece of software. Yet Billy Gates craftily maneuvered and positioned his company just before the dawn of PC's. I don't think MS really got to where they were because they produce by far the best software, but they were just at the right place with the right new idea and it took off. Now they're just a name, a standard, an idea. People just "buy MS" because it's the thing to to.

Well, it's late and I'm rambling.

My long and drawn out point is:

Sometimes ya just gotta wake up and realize that not everything is "nice" in the businessworld. That's why it's called BUSINESS, not Candyland.

 

[powervr2]

being deceptive lying (that pdf) is ok in the business world?

I can't get it !
why you love NVIDIA so much?

I don't hate nvidia I hate the way they make business... the underdogz usually don't do that sort of things...

A better 3d world is where there is 3-4 players giving us better products for less money...
a bad 3d world is a single player giving what they want at the prices they want... capiche?
and that is what I am against...

 

[Silverforce]

I was just posting a comparison. I dont agree that any company is evil.. there is no such thing as its all legal business marketting.

I think when companies get big they tend to have to "reaping the reward" syndrome.. where they feel they are obligated to charge as much as possible for their products.. sort of as a reward for all the hard work they've done to get to the top. Unless some competition arrives, they wont even consider lowering the price to a decent amount.. who then suffers? The consumers thats who.

About R&D. Let me remind you that the core for the Geforce remains the same since Geforce 256, branching to all their products up to Quadro 2 Pro. They are just higher clocked on the GF2 range thats all. The only major development is the GF3. And we cannot be sure how much R&D costs, but they only needed to implement 3 things, the programmable shaders, lightspeed architecture (borrowing previous experience from ATI and 3dfx), and faster DDR. The core still remains similar to GF2, with its 4 pipe 2 texture unit. So i can presume R&D is no where near the scale of the P4 with its entirely new architecture. However, production costs would be another thing, GF3 is huge, 57 million transistors.. its by far not a cheap thing to make.
They opt to sell it at $500, then had some competition catching up so lowered it.. either way, its still too damn expensive.

If you want to see how effective competition is.. look at the Xbox. Its the underdog trying to beat Sony's PS2, hence it must go out of its way to compete and establish itself. As you all know the Xbox comes with 733mhz CPU, Geforce 3 "Ultra", and 8 gig hdd. Just these components alone, not to mention R&D, costs a lot more than the $299 it will sell at.. but it has to sell at that price to compete. MS will lose profit for every Xbox they sell, but Gates is willing to lose at first and gain afterwards.. he knows how to play his cards right.

There are no such thing as Evil companies.. its how far they are willing to push the legal limits in order to attain profits.. but then again, evil or not is purely subjective.

btw, nVidia owns next to nothing in OEMs and Workstation shares. And seeing approaching competition from ATI and STM they realise it will get awfully crowded in graphics industry which will hurt their sales.. hence, shifting into integrated chipsets for motherboards, which up to now has not been fully exploited. A very smart move.

Check out their Quadro 2 Pro vs the REAL workstation product FireGL 2!

http://www4.tomshardware.com/graphic/00q4/001213/index.html

Tom also raised a very valid point suggesting nVidia with their current 6 month cycle is the reason they will never be strong in High End Workstation graphics. The original Fire GL is around 6 years old, and its been that long for the Fire GL 2 to be out.

 

[RobsTV]

<< I think what powervr2 meant by that MDK2 statement is that even without hardware T&amp;L the Kyro II still shines.. thanks to his Duron cpu. Heck, if your CPU is mighty enough, T&amp;L just aint necessary. To which STM claimed that their Kyro generation didnt needed T&amp;L because todays (over a year ago) in game T&amp;L can be handled by the CPU fine.. and its true. >>



Don't fall for the marketing hype that says T&amp;L is not needed if you have a fast CPU.
Both Anand and Tom's state that this is a needed feature on the Kyro, and it clearly falls flat compared to there cards, when T&amp;L is used.

Case in point. Nascar Racing 4.
Duron 750 @ 1GHz. GF2 GTS. 256Meg, WinME, DX8.
All cars, max detail, max everything, rear of field Daytona,
skip qualifying, waiting on start engines.
1024x768x16 D3D without T&amp;L = 20fps.
1024x768x16 D3D with T&amp;L = 32fps.
1024x768x32 D3D without T&amp;L = 18fps.
1024x768x32 D3D with T&amp;L = 27fps.

As this clearly shows, modern DX8 games get a huge benefit out of hardware T&amp;L, and high end CPU's are not enough to compensate for this. Without T&amp;L, at these high detail settings, the sim is not playable, but with T&amp;L it is playable.

 

[Silverforce]

RobsTV: As i said it wasnt needed at the time.. the Kyro is old technology. There is no doubt it is needed today, which is why Kyro 3 will include T&amp;L.

Btw, it is unfair to compare the GTS with and without T&amp;L to show its advantage when talking in terms of Kyros. Simply because Tile Rendering is much more efficient it wont lose so much without T&amp;L in previous games.

Anyhow, its one of the factors that dissapointed me about the Kyro cores was its lack of T&amp;L and only 1 pipeline.. but i guess it was already obsolete technology from its conception. It's just good that it can still compete. Give it a little credit.

Best Graphis Chip: Tile Renderer with more pipes, hardware T&amp;L, faster DDR. But then it doesnt matter which company makes graphic cards, as long as its good and affordable.

 

[Mingon]

<< btw, nVidia owns next to nothing in OEMs and Workstation shares. And seeing approaching competition from ATI and STM they realise it will get awfully crowded in graphics industry which will hurt their sales.. hence, shifting into integrated chipsets for motherboards, which up to now has not been fully exploited. A very smart move. >>



Are you sure ? I thought nvdia products could be found in all the main boxes dell, gateway etc.. not to mention the geforce2go in the laptops has started quite brightly.

 

[Silverforce]

Mingon: Yes im sure, go do up so market research papers.. you'll see ATI still has a huge share of the OEM pie, other dominant ones being S3, and Trident. Who the heck would have think they still exist? LOL.. but the world PC sales just dont revolve around a few US brands.

Btw, Quadro 2 Pro are costly not because they deserve to be, but because Workstation graphics dont care about the costs.. they care about the product efficiency and long term stability so they wont have to upgrade a few months down the track. Personally, i think that $1,200 for a Quadro 2 Pro which is nothing more than a GTS higher clocked absurd. It's nowhere near as complex as the same priced Fire GL 2. And sure, it handles textures better.. but most of the workstation work is done in wireframe, only at the last minute at textures applied to check if it is right. The Quadro is a gaming card, and hence, shows its weakness.

 

[powervr2]

I bet that with an athlon 1,2 those T&amp;L numbers will not look that great..

this is only guessing from your's numbers...

 

[Silverforce]

powerVR2: Do you or do you not admit the GTS is faster than a Kyro II in most of today's and any foreseeable future games?

Do you admit that Kyro II's driver is still unstable and is currently trying to prove itself stable?

When you look at these two features, and the fact Kyro II arent much more cheaper than GTS, it will appear as a not very likely strong competitor. nVidia's driver have matured over the years, they are proven. Their hardware is proven. Customers want reliability, as most wont know how to change their resolutions, not to mention drivers or bios tweaks. the minority (you, me etc..) tend to support underdogs because we understand that equilibrium must be maintained or else 1 major supplier will rip everyone off.. but even us must admit that the nVidia products are currently vastly superior. STM has POTENTIAL.. and until it is proven with its upcoming Kyro 3, all it is and will be is potential.

Btw, what does the Kyro II has that a Radeon LE shipping at $65 cant match? Who is the stronger competitor now? Although i favour the Radeon LE, and i would argue once its tweaked and overclock can match the GTS.. i could easily have said a GTS tweaked and overclock will still lead. But the deciding factor is BANG FOR MY BUCK.

 

[powervr2]

well we will see lower prices from inno3d and club3d and the rest of the bunch for kyro 2 (mx prices) soon and that for 64 mbs !
with a high end cpu kyro 2 beats allmoust allways geforce 2 GTS.(not forget that geforce 2 gts is descontinued)

I don't find any problems with kyro 2 drivers.

 

[Finality]

NVidia owns 34% of the OEM market and ATI owns 33%, this includes there chokehold on laptop chips and until recently Apple as well

The rest fall to ST and whoever is left

 

[AppleTalking]

Okay, I feel that I have to respond to some of Silverforce's comments:

Do you or do you not admit the GTS is faster than a Kyro II in most of today's and any foreseeable future games?

Nope, sorry. There's no way that the GTS is faster than the Kyro is most of today's games. Read Anandtech's review of the Kyro II. At worst it performs along the same lines as the GTS, at times it even performs on the level of the GF2 Pro.

There's also no way that the GTS will be able to outperform the Kyro II in future games. The Kyro II has tile-based rendering. That means that it doesn't render anything that you can't see. Future games, being more complex than today's games, are likely to have a lot of overdraw -- pixels that are rendered by conventional cards but aren't visible on the monitor. The Kyro II won't draw these pixels, while your GTS still will. In time the GTS will slow down because it's memory bus will be saturated while the Kyro II will still be going strong. nVidia tries to compensate for complex games by adding more and more bandwidth. At some point they're going to hit a brick wall where they just can't add any more bandwidth using conventional technologies. And then all of us with tile-based rendering cards will just sit back and laugh.

Do you admit that Kyro II's driver is still unstable and is currently trying to prove itself stable?

Oh, please. I have not had one crash on my computer that I could attribute to the Kyro II drivers. And I play a lot of 3D games. Unreal Tournament, Quake III, Diablo II, Myth II, the list goes on. Not once has any game crashed on me or been incompatible with my Kyro II card. The Kyro II's drivers are rock-solid with current games. There may be some glitches with games that are years old, but Hercules has been releasing drivers on a weekly basis to correct these bugs. The Kyro II's drivers are far from unstable.

Btw, what does the Kyro II has that a Radeon LE shipping at $65 cant match?

Uh, higher frame rates? The fact that I don't have to overclock my card and tweak my registry to get it to work? Win 2K drivers that give the same performance as the Win 95/98 ones? There have been several reports of Radeon LE cards that won't over clock. The Kyro II gives guaranteed performance.

When you look at these two features, and the fact Kyro II arent much more cheaper than GTS, it will appear as a not very likely strong competitor. nVidia's driver have matured over the years, they are proven. Their hardware is proven. Customers want reliability, as most wont know how to change their resolutions, not to mention drivers or bios tweaks. the minority (you, me etc..) tend to support underdogs because we understand that equilibrium must be maintained or else 1 major supplier will rip everyone off.. but even us must admit that the nVidia products are currently vastly superior. STM has POTENTIAL.. and until it is proven with its upcoming Kyro 3, all it is and will be is potential.

Okay, wait a second. What person that doesn't know how to change their resolution is actually going to buy a 3D accelerator card? I have not had to tweak my BIOS or my drivers in order to get my Kyro II to work. I will not admit that nVidia products are vastly superior. Granted, the GeForce 3 is a great card, but it's way out my price range, and I suspect out of many other people's as well. When you look at cards in the same price range, I think you'll find that the Kyro II has great bang for the buck (Radeon LE excluded, see my comments above). I think the Kyro II has more than just potential. It has real performance.

Nick

 

[DevilsAdvocate]

Just because a company is successful, does not mean that the company is evil. Microsoft and nVidia are evil because of the way that they perpetuate their success.

M$ started out as an innovative company. After M$'s PC products (superior at the time) allowed them to achieve a monopoly, M$ began using strongarm tactics to strangle out all competition. Their product became bloatware... less efficient, but still dominant in the marketplace. When M$ began dictating the browser configurations of machines, that is when M$ went too far. M$ trying to snuff out Netscape was the straw that broke the camel's back. This type of behavior led to a DOJ lawsuit that led to a court order to split the software giant, under the Sherman Antitrust Act.

So -

nVidia is doing the same thing with respect to ST, by strongarming their &quot;partners,&quot; preventing integration of rival products.

This is monopolistic, anti-competitive behavior. M$ did this with Netscape, and M$ was found guilty. The judgement against M$ is likely not going to enforced, because M$ products have become nearly essential to the continued growth of e-business, and by extention to the economy.

M$ software runs the world, so the world can't run without M$.

The world can run without nVidia. nVidia better watch its practices or it could wind up in some Federal District Court somewhere, watching the DOJ come up with a plan to carve up their enterprise into several smaller companies.

Intel as an example of how to behave???

Yes. Intel, for a company as large and successful as they are, have not behaved this poorly in recent memory. Intel continues providing chips to anyone who wants them, even motherboard makers that use Via chipsets. Intel provides P4's to those making Athlon systems.

Intel merely cutting down balloons at Computex is one thing - not very nice, but hardly what nV is doing here. nVidia trying to drive Hercules out of business by cutting them off.

This is unacceptable.

 

[Archknight]

First of all I never in my post wrote that Nvidia is &quot;Evil&quot;, and I never said ATI is good. I only comment on their sh*ts(exact words I used) marketing tactics and forcing everyone to &quot;hail to Nvidia&quot;. And I never said Nvidia didn't produce great products, the only comment is about the some of the 2D they have at the bottom of my post. Oh! maybe the MX200, which I think it go no where near BANG for the BUCK.

ATI LE is a BANG for the BUCK, yes I can say that to everyone and I have my reasons to back it up. Even without the registry hack and overclock, it is still a great card for it 2D, DVD quality, providing a reasonable speed and better image quality. I spend time on 2D apps and the internet much more than I play 3Dgames. The MX is great, just not as great as the LE all around. Those little higher score on a benchmark don't really bother me, as long as the game is not sluggish and look good enough to me, unfortunately I don't have trained eyes. This is my personal opinion.

 

[fawhfe]

powervr2-I used to listen to you and then i stopped because you refused to admit ANYTHING. Even the most basic knowledge that supports Nvidia. Whenever you say something, I already question it. Maybe you liek your kyro II and maybe you think its great. Thats fine and if thats all you did, I would say, &quot;OK thats one person who has had a good experience with kyro so maybe ill consider buying one&quot;. However, you keep forcing your opinion on others. It seems all you do with your time is look for stuff that shows nvidia is bad. Which brings me to my second point. This article is absurd. People want to make money. Since STM makes nvidia make less money, they want STM gone. Simple as that. Whats to say they should be benevolent and just let STM develop so they can take away more of nvidia's profits? There is no way that they can keep evyerone from buying a kyro ii so its just easier to reduce the supply. Hell, if I or just about anyone else here was Nvidia, we would want to make more money and get rid of competition. You also forget pride. How do you know Nvidia doesnt have enough pride in their products that they feel their products should be the only ones people use since their products are so great? Maybe you dont tihnk nvidia is great but i bet most of the people who work there do. What Nvidia is doing is no worse that what any other large company does to small companies. You just seem to hate Nvidia exclusively.

 

[RobsTV]

Nope, sorry. There's no way that the GTS is faster than the Kyro is most of today's games. Read Anandtech's review of the Kyro II. At worst it performs along the same lines as the GTS, at times it even performs on the level of the GF2 Pro.

Don't know what article you read, but the review that I just saw at Anand tells another story. Sure it's a great card for the money claimed, but in reality it is priced the same as a GF2 GTS card. Anands tests show the card stays close to a GF2 GTS in Q3, but it gets stompped in MDK2, even by a GF2 MX at low resolutions, and never touchs the GF2 GTS. In UT the card is 2% faster at low resolutions, but is slower at higher resolutions. MBTR is another that the card flounders badly at, and leaves it wishing it were a GF2 MX card. With a card running great or O.K in 2 out of 4 tests, yet performing badly in the other 2 out of 4 tests, it doesn't make sense to invest time or money in a iffy product, when for the same money you can get a card that runs all equally well. At it's best, it will keep up with a GF2 GTS, but 1/2 the time it has trouble keeping up with a GF2 MX.

 

[Leon]

<< Mingon: Yes im sure, go do up so market research papers.. you'll see ATI still has a huge share of the OEM pie, other dominant ones being S3, and Trident. Who the heck would have think they still exist? LOL.. but the world PC sales just dont revolve around a few US brands >>



You are sorely mistaken. Accroding to latest Mercury research, ATI has 16%, Intel has 33%, and Nvidia has 30% over overall market share. S3 has 4%.



<< btw, nVidia owns next to nothing in OEMs and Workstation shares >>



Wrong again. nVidia is the market leader in workstation market, with 34% share (confirmed by Gartner Dataquest).

It's unbelievable that some people still think that ATI has the biggest OEM share. This is not 1998 folks.

Do your own homework.

Leon

 

[Killrose]

I for one am just happy that ST has been able to pick themselves back off from the floor and release the Kyro series cards. That PVR chip Matrox used in the M3d card, and the Neon 250 were sure lacking.

As for &quot;pdf&quot; files, every company on earth has information that they would never want anyone to see. And they could be in &quot;pdf hell&quot; up to thier ears if it were releasd on the internet.
What I saw was just like many sales training aids, though maybe a bit much. It was probably thrown into the trash as such and thats how it got picked up.

I don't like to see Nvidia drop favor with a company such as Hercules for releasing a rival chipset based card. Hercules (even though under new management) has always been known as the gammers friend with all thier cards supporting features to make us happy. This is wrong friends.

 

[Silverforce]

I've worked as a sales tech, and i can assue you people come in demanding a good 3d card.. and when they take it home, constant phone calls and store visits asking the simplest of questions.. even changing the refresh rates. Also they have no clue what a good card is, i ask them what do you mean good.. how good do you want? &quot;i dont know..&quot; is the most often heard answers..

While i dont expect users who frequent forums have these difficulties.. i mean, they did get past the sign up screen afterall. You'd be suprised at how many computer illiterates are out there who actually use computers.

While tile rendering will improve as scene complexities rise.. not for the Kyro II in future games. Seriously, overdraw wont get excessive unless you're running VillageMark or the Card demo. Its 1 rendering pipeline with the max fill rate of 175 megapixel or 350 megatexel just wont cut the cheese as games with more textures appear. However, i do believe the true performance king will be the Kyro 3 if their white paper specs become real silicon.

But just for the Record, i think the Kyro II and Radeon are great because they offer the possibilities of choices. Ofcourse if these two weren't around, id would surely gotten myself a GF2 of sorts.. and if the Radeon werent here, itd be the Kyro II over a GTS eventhough its slower but its visuals are tidier. Right now though, nVidia is still the performance leader.. and it wont change for the next few months.

However.. seeing as people just refuse to actually consider what others say, im giving up. Dont really care anymore, if you're happy with your Kyro II, GF2, Radeon, V5 etc then thats all that matters. If you feel you got the bang for your buck thats even better! And if you're one of those rich folks who have plenty of money to throw away, then fine.. pay as much as you like for your stuff.

EDITED: Leon: Sorry about that, i made an error, refering to the pie chart for the Laptop graphic solutions.

Link

hehe. truly, my error. it is no wonder that with nVidia eating at the market that caused ATI to respond with the Radeon.

 

[Aihyah]

ahem, just look at the history of the video card market, companys die left and right in this market, dominance doesn't seem to last. nvidia better be using every tactic avaliable to them hah

 

[Octoberblue]

I don't care for the strong arm tactics either, but Kyro's just going to have to fight back. The fact that Nvidia is in a positon to help AMD take a bigger chunk of the desktop market puts me on their side, even if I don't like some of their other activities. If Kyro fights back with a few threatened antitrust suits and does some old-fashioned &quot;posturing&quot; (growl and puff yourself up like the animals do to scare each other) they'll probably be fine.

RealPlayer proved that with Microsoft, and AMD's proven it with Intel: most of the time if you hang in there, make a few clever moves to stay out of bankruptcy, and keep fighting to make the best product you can, you'll eventually be successful. Well, you may also have to &quot;negotiate&quot; with the enemy, compliment them and license some of their technology one day, then growl, bark, threaten to sue and, even better, threaten to bury them some day when you get a foothold in the market the next day, well, it seems like that's worked pretty well for quite a few of the current players. The real animals like Microsoft seem to respect that kind of behavior in a wierd way.

Hopefully NVIDIA will halt their abusive practices, but Kyro shouldn't depend on that to survive. If they play their cards right they can make it.

 

[Soccerman]

I don't know about the rest of you, but I haven't heard of AMD doing any strongearm tactics, and they're a pretty large company...

much bigger then nVidia is anyway.

So, what do I mean by this? well AMD surely isn't a saintly company, but it's alot better then most of the BIG companies out there. They had a superior product, and released it, and let intelligent OEMS decide (except perhaps Dell, though the KT133A fiasco at least partly gives Dell a good reason for not including AMD processors in their lines).

I think it's going to be tough for Kyro 3 and the ATi Radeon 2 to compete with the next nVidia card, though we'll just have to see.

 

[TravisBickle]

why would Kyro II need constant fixes for new games exactly?
Kyro II promised good performance on games with inexpensive FSAA. but compatibility feedback around here is not very positive.
I would like someone to give a comparison of Kyro II in 16 bit games with GF2 in them. lots of games only use 16 bit art.

 

[Def]

A GF2 GTS will pretty much manhandle a KryoII in 16bit stuff, with maybe one or two exceptions.

In 32bit color, the GF2 is just a bit ahead of the KryoII overall. Winning some, and losing some. Mostly winning though.

Sorry, but the KryoII is a *neat* product, not much more than that. I'm glad people have the opportunity to purchase a card made by someone other than NVIDIA or ATi, but you can't admit that there are products in the same price range or cheaper that outperform it and are more stable(drivers).

The KryoIII has a chance to really offer some competition to the mid-high end 3d market, but they better hope they hit their target date. NVIDIA has a *good thing* with their GF3 core, and you can be sure they will not hesitate to slap it with some higher clocked memory and up the core speed to crush a competitor's product. When the Radeon offered slightly better performance than the GF2, it did not take them long to crank out the Pro and Ultra.

The KryoIII sounds like it could become the next 3DFX VSA-100 deal. Great technology on paper, but when it comes to actually releasing the product, whoops!

I do hope they can offer some competition to NVIDIA though, it's good for the little guy(the customer).

 

[powervr2]

are you saying that only nvidia can release great products ?
duh...

look at kyro 2 speecs !!!
it is not better than a tnt 2 ultra...
2 pipelines 175 mhz core and memory
and it beats geforce 2 gts on higher resolutions or FSAA ...


funny ham ??? looks to me that kyro enginners are the most capable ones...
if they increase clock speed to 250 and add 2 more pipelines (4 pipelines and 250 mhz core (125 mhz ddr),T&amp;L, and some directxx8 features they will get a bomb !!!
do you think that this task is beyond what the enginners can do ?
don't make me laugh ...

about 16 bit performance... kyro 2 16 bit is not equal to geforce 2 16 bit (not in quality) so when we compare 16 bit performance of the two that is not fair...
I can even say that 16 bit quality of kyro 2 looks better than 32 bits geforce for me...