I never said that they didn't have lots. Just that they're spreading it too thin when it comes to R&D. Even the company that I work for right now is the same. They rake in tons of cash be selling products in a highly competetive technology market, but they wouldn't dare actually spend more on R&D. I think it's done that way to make the stock analysts happy. :\
having both chipsets and video chips means they should be able to have developers for BOTH, since they make money on both.
Well no doubt they have developers for both. The real question is do they have <i>enough</i> engineers to develop both properly? I'm guessing not.
I LOVE the position they are in right now, FIGHTING to catch up with ATI and TROMPING on VIA.
I have to say that it is nice that ATI is giving them serious competition in the graphics department. Companies (3DFX) that get too complacant with their position are rather ... annoying. I was starting to fear that nVidia was headed that route. Heh heh. Nothing to fear now! :O
And I love the tromping, stomping, and squishing into pulp of VIA. Gods I hate VIA. Oh sure, they've improved (supposedly) and I could give them another chance, but why bother? Heh heh. So many other <i>better</i> choices...
Now if SiS could just get into the ring for a TAG TEAM against VIA.
I don't know. I'm not very fond of SiS. (Or ALi for that matter.) I think I'd be happier with a completely different company (Micron?) coming out of nowhere with an unexpected but great product to do that than with SiS doing that. But beggars can't be choosers. If SiS does it, I won't really complain.
nVidia's hold on the graphics chip market is still to strong, they should stay barely behind another year, just so ATI can catch up on sales, and then release a trump card that has the two swaping the championship title every release.
I can't really agree. A clear market leader is better for standardization, and what the graphics market <i>really</i> needs are some f-ing standards. DirectX compatability just isn't cutting it (and OpenGL hasn't cut it in a long time), especially not with programmable vertex and pixel shaders and whatnot. There are just too many optimizations that have to be made company-specific if not card-specific. It's pathetic. It's almost as bad as the days when 3D graphics were just emerging. And it's only gotten this bad again because there is such a close gap between nVidia and ATI in performance. I want to see good competition, but I also want to see a clear dominant market leader just so we can get some darned standardization in the graphics market again.
Also, nVidia should spread their chipset department a wee bit thinner by offering a dedicated soundcard. Something 2 years ahead of their current sound solution. Something to slap the smile off of Creative's face.
That would <i>definately</i> be sweet. From an audio perspective I could only be happier if I could find a bloody portable MP3 player with an internal hard drive, a smartcard reader, <i>and</i> a CD player. It doesn't have to be super-tiny, just small enough to be able to drag between work and home <i>and</i> use in the car. Short of that, an nVidia PCI audio card that trounces Creative's best would rock.
There are TWO companies in this industry that are really easy for me to hate, Creative and VIA.
I don't mind Creative. Sure they're overbearing if not downright hostile in the market, but I've never had a problem with any of their products and neither have any of my family or friends. I absolutely adored my SB AWE32 for my old Pentium133. That card just rocked. And the Audigy2 is nice. My friend loves his and one day I might even buy one myself. I don't love Creative, but I don't hate them. VIA however I hate. Too many bad VIA experiences (and all from just one product) to like anything about the company.
What would be ideal is if nVidia could get around the licensing to release A3D 2.0 supporting hardware. And then take that to the next level. I don't think the license issue would be so hard to work around because A3D 2.0 IS hardware, but the software supporting it is already IN games, they should be able to "reverse engineer" the software and come up with completely new hardware to support it.
Well since the software API is pretty accessible (if it wasn't, no one could program for it) then it probably wouldn't be too hard to design hardware that is compatible. I mean it'd still be hard, but not <i>that</i> hard, you know? I think it's the licensing and legal issues that are the concern. Of course if they could just start a new standard or find an existing one to use or extend without pissing off Creative then they could do just as well for themselves. They would really have to do something amazing and innovative in the audio world though to give Creative a good smack. I'm not sure if 3D audio is enough though.
And man I'd really love to see a revival of MIDI. Why the heck don't we have 3D positional MIDI that sounds like the real thing yet? Throw into the file format the option for X number of matching vocal tracks in a compression format specifically optimized for human voice. That'd rock for instrumental game music tracks and probably beat the heck out of redbook audio or MP3. Or maybe I'm just nuts.
Hmm ... speaking of nuts, hardware voice synthesis with programable tone ranges to make your audio card litterally sing, and so well that you couldn't even distinguish it from a real human's voice. (Or at least so close that you wouldn't care.) That'd be cool. That'd make MIDI really funky if you could combine the two. Imagine a completely virtual music synthesis so good that it beat CD quality recordings of real songs.
Yep. I'm nuts.
<pre><A HREF="http://ars.userfriendly.org/cartoons/?id=20030905" target="_new"><font color=black>People don't understand how hard being a dark god can be. - Hastur</font color=black></A></pre><p>
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