Interview with Sebastian from Matrox

[Electric Amish]

http://www.ga-hardware.com/features.cfm?id=matroxQA

As usual, though, not much meat..

amish

[Brian R.]

...barbarians at the gates... That's great. Anyway, they sure are secretive. I wonder if they have left the door open, internally, for last minute changes in technologies and/or supported modes (FSAA?) to see how the gaming community river flows.

[Helevitia]

This is my favorite Q&A from the article:

Q6: I know it quite well that the G800 is as yet an unannounced product. However, the web is full of speculations about its specs. Can anything be said about what we can expect with the coming of the new chip? For instance, last year Dan Wood, VP of Technical Marketing at Matrox, spoke about Environmental Mapped Bump Mapping (EMBM) at Meltdown in June, and in August, Matrox released the G400, the most innovative feature of which was EMBM. This year Dan Wood gave a talk on Matrix Palette Shading. Does this mean that the new chip will feature 4-matrix vertex skinning?

A: G800, what's a G800? As far as talks at industry conferences are concerned, these are talks about technologies that Matrox has an interest in but isn't necessarily tied to any future products.

[Himself]

Yep, definitely a PR specialist, I suspect NVIDIA is targeting him for their own.

About the 6 month thing, raise your hand if you wouldn't have liked to be able to buy a G800 last December and would hate looking forward to a G1600? But that's not what NVIDIA does, they don't come out with radical new designs every 6 months, just speed tweaks on existing designs. Tbey put out 2 worthwhile cards, the TNT and the GeForce, the variations with numbers and gimmick names is just about tweaking those two designs, the GTS is just a GeForce with a bit of cut and paste to add more pipes. They sell their intermediate beta hardware, that's the only difference. The reason they can do this is because they don't make cards, just chips and they don't have to provide support for them beyond reference drivers, NVIDIA's real customers are Creative Labs, Asus, Elsa, Guilemot, and crowd, not you or I, whom they could care less about beyond saying whatever we want to hear.

[iamtheone]

Finally someone I agree with so strongly that I would go and register for this forum!

Quote "The reason they can do this is because they don't make cards, just chips and they don't have to provide support for them beyond reference drivers, NVIDIA's real customers are Creative Labs, Asus, Elsa, Guilemot, and crowd, not you or I, whom they could care less about beyond saying whatever we want to hear." Himself

That is the Bottom Line!

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Financial Freedom is only a click away!

http://www.skynary.com/winstonco1

[drzaius]

your right "Himself"
if Matrox did have a 6 month product cycle we would be looking forward to the G1600, but the G1600 would be exactly like the G800 (G800, what's a G800 ) we're looking forward to. and we (and Matrox) would have spent lots of money on developing the 6 month product (G800) when, if we waited (like we are) we could have got a G800 with the performance of a G1600.

if this didn't come out right.... i agree with what you say Himself.

[Jazza]

Hmm, he doesn't know what a G800 is. Maybe he should ask Amiga about it.

This is from the MU news page, from 31 July.

"We went upto Montreal and spent a whole day in their development labs. We saw the G800, and we saw the stuff that they are working on past that."

Jazza

[Maggi]

Originally posted by Jazza:
Hmm, he doesn't know what a G800 is. Maybe he should ask Amiga about it.

This is from the MU news page, from 31 July.

"We went upto Montreal and spent a whole day in their development labs. We saw the G800, and we saw the stuff that they are working on past that."

Jazza

LOL

Glad, you mentioned it ...

I still have my good ole A1230/882 in my attic and I'm wondering if I can revive it with a decent G4 board coupled with a G800 somtimes in the not too far away future.



Cheers,
Maggi

[Ashley]

Unlike NVidia, Matrox-the-chiphouse only has a single customer, and unlike Creative, ELSA et al., Matrox-the-board-manufacturer only has a single source of chips. If the two were spun off from one another, you'd probably see a whole different product cycle dynamic...

A GF2-based card from Matrox? A G400-based card from Visiontek?

[Kruzin]

GigaByte buys G400 chips for their BIOSless MGA400 cards.
And Matrox designs the chips, but they don't fab em themselves

[Himself]

drzaius,

I think Matrox would like to be able to turn out products every 6 months, tweaks or no, they just don't seem to be able to execute very fast, which is like saying a turtle approaches the speed of light a bit slow. Witness the G450, that is as delayed as the 3DFX V5 was, if not more, for less obvious reason. Even a G450 back in January would have been a nice option to buy, it would have had a lot more value back then. If Matrox were like NVIDIA, the G450 would have come out in October.

[AJ]

Exactly what "customers" are they talking about in the article? As a Matrox "customer" (I've bought a MillII, G200 and G400), I sure as heck would like them to pump out new revs at a faster pace! My G400 is getting long in the tooth performance wise. I'd like to stop seeing texture corruption in OpenGL (win2k, no TurboGL which fixed that under win98). At least, their visual quality is still great!

Anyway this customer could move on this fall if they don't have something better than the G400/450 out. I like Matrox enough that I might buy a card with only 2x the peformance of the g400Max if the OpenGL drivers were improved as well - that doesn't seem like a hard target to hit, does it?

My 2 cents.

-AJ



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Trying to figuring out what Matrox is up to is like tying to find a road that's not on the map, at night, while wearing welders googles!

[Liquid Snake]

Kruzin,

Who fabs Matrox's chips? I remember reading some time ago that NEC fabbed them.

[Kruzin]

NEC still does em.

[LAMFDTK]

"I'm actually glad that Matrox is avoiding (at least right now) a six-month product
cycle."
You don't HAVE to buy a new product every six months because it is produced right?
Matrox is privately owned and there is no gun to the head for anything to be produced. The two Brothers that own Matrox are well off and they support a nice size corp. Figure it out. They are not on a model structured by an Investment Banker nor are they able to "Compete" with Nvidia. They do not need to. They are a great Mid-sized company.

I just hope the next card is will let me play games at the same resolutions as a 108.00 MX 32 meg card is letting me do now. I just fired up NASCAR Heat and I want 1280 32 full boat. G400max wont cut it. The 108.00 MX does. I think Matrox is Due. I hope they are not waiting on DX8 that's 1-2nd quarter 2001.



[This message has been edited by LAMFDTK (edited 18 August 2000).]