G800 or whatever

[Greebe]

Think of it from an employee's perspective. Company A treats you like dirt. Company B offers much more, why shouldn't you move?

I don't give a rats ass if the company did or didn't treat them well. They were the one that signed the employment contract, if they didn't like it, then they should have quit.
Even then if an employee thought they were getting paid top dollar or even way more than they ever had and someone stepped up and offered them more should they leave, offering up their previous employers secrets for personal gain? No not ever.

What's worse is to have faith in anyone or anything that does life this way. Would you want your kids to thieve around town just so they can have that car you can't afford to buy them? Or you see a fantastic business investment opportunity but have no cash... so behind your parents back you offer their home up for collateral. All is great for a month or two then BLAMO they find out... you tell them all is fine and good and they'll be so much wealthier shortly. Then stock value plumits and you can't meet the call, loosing everything. See how that works? Oh yeah, that's right, I'm talking to PaulS and his infinite wisdom, D'Oh

[PaulS]

I know there are a lot of companies that would agree with you Greebe. Personally I think that many employment contracts in the IT industry go too far in try to safeguard the rights of large organisations over individuals.

Other knowledge industries are not quite so backward. If were a musician in a orchestra, and better postion in a better orchestra became available, then there would be no problem taking it - even though I may not have been able to get the job without skills and knowledge obtained while working in my previous position.

It's only the IT industry that thinks it should have some over-arching right to people's knowledge. I know you think it sucks Greebe, but knowledge wants to be free!

Paul

[Greebe]

What a bloke! Instead of answering any of the points I have raised, all you have done is talk around them. We're not talking about Rambus here dilweed, we're talking about a hardware manufacture. If you developed a product as a manufacture, saw it through til it was finished and all the while sacrificed all the capital needed to insure it's success, feel they own it. If your in agreement, then by all means step up to the bat and let a competitor or employee take it away and see how you would feel. Oh that's right, business only exists to set information free! (dope!)

[qball]

What's worse is to have faith in anyone or anything that does life this way. Would you want your kids to thieve around town just so they can have that car you can't afford to buy them? Or you see a fantastic business investment opportunity but have no cash... so behind your parents back you offer their home up for collateral. All is great for a month or two then BLAMO they find out... you tell them all is fine and good and they'll be so much wealthier shortly. Then stock value plumits and you can't meet the call, loosing everything.

This is unrelated to the topic at hand.

Certainly stealing technology is wrong. I don't think you'll find anyone who disagrees with you on that point. However, I don't believe stealing talent is. This is a bit shady because often the 2 go hand in hand. For example, a certain engineer is really good at designing a particular bus for application x. Company A has produced advanced technology with this method because of the talent of it's engineer. Company B's engineers can't figure out how to come up with such an elegant well-featured design, so they hire Company A's star engineer out from under them and then he designs a similar bus for them. Now has the technology or the talent been stolen?

The other factor is one of simple anti-competitive practices. Lets say that engineer has been working on this project for 3 months and will finish the project in 3 weeks. Now he is pulled away and it will take the company another 5 weeks simply to figure out all of his unfinished work and create a patchwork solution to finish it. Maybe it will take another 3 months to finish. Now company B beat company A to market and stole a bunch of the market share that they would have had to compete for.

It's all shady, but I would have to say that regulation is not the answer. Hire loyal and ethical employees and treat them well and you won't have this problem. Any regulation that could help in a case like this would have to encroach on an engineers right to practice his craft. Nearly all broad anti-competitive employee agreements are unenforcible for this reason. I'd say that Matrox may be in for an uphill battle.

It's only the IT industry that thinks it should have some over-arching right to people's knowledge.

Termonology my dear friend. IT workers are people who keep office computers and networks running. They don't design chips and boards, engineers do. Matrox couldn't care less if nVidia stole their network administrator or helpdesk tech .

-Q

[Dogbert]

Maggi,

There is one (among many) difference between Deutchland and matrox, Deutchland said they are/were sorry. Matrox didn't.

Like I posted before, the G200 2D and overall picture quality was great, but it lacked huge in speed. Some balance is needed. G400 offered same+ quality, more features and greater speed but it's still not enough. The industry (games/cpu) is moving ever faster and matrox is quite lagging behind. This is why you see so many GeForce owners in the forums lately.

------------------
I like to con people, but I also like to insult them. What if I could combine the two, I would call it - Consult !

[Dogbert]

I think there is a slight problem here, in the conceptual level.
We play games for the fun of gaming. This means the gameplay is the most important factor, the sound/visuals etc. are secondary. a great game with not so good visuals is still a great game, a bad game with stunning visuals is still a bad game. If you buy your graphic card just for visuals, I can send you some very beautiful slide shows.
EMBM is a very nice feature which enhances the visual quality of a game, I'd rather play 1024x768x32@40fps than 640x480x32 with EMBM @ 20fps. Speed has to do directly with gameplay. I don't need anything above 60fps, but anything below 30 is very much affecting gameplay in many games.
By the way, EMBM was invented by Bitboys OY and licensed by matorx and ATi. nVIDIA is using 3dot bump mapping which is considered more realistic. It is/will be much more widely supported.
Not to mention that with recent things between 3dfx and nVIDIA, the latter might buy completely 3dfx. Reminds me of the Intel-DEC story.

------------------
I like to con people, but I also like to insult them. What if I could combine the two, I would call it - Consult !

[cerb]

PaulS, you don't appear to be thinking about what you are saying...

Comparing the engineers, etc, that work for Matrox to musicians in an orchestra?!?!

Can the orchestra apply for a patent and copyright the particular sound that your instrument makes as part of that orchestra? No.

If an IT company had the rights to particular technologies and employees left to a direct competitor and implemented those technologies, then that would not be legal.

I imagine that all the cards on the market nowadays that use S3TC would have to pay some form of royalties to S3 in order to use that technology. The fact that they all still call it "S3TC" and not for instance "NVTC" makes me assume that they have S3's permission to use the technology. "TwinView" on the other hand...

Every time I read one of your posts, PaulS, I can not help but feel that you're on nVidia's side about this whole thing. Either that or perhaps you're one of those people completely driven by money and a lawfully binding contract will not prevent you from going where the money is.

Cerb

[rubank]

Some straightputting is needed here:

until nVidia´s alleged unlawful acquisition of Matrox personnel and their spilling their confidential guts has been legally established, Greebe & co has no point.

Until such time, PaulS has all the points.

Greebe says, if employees are unhappy with the terms they themselves signed they should quit. Well, isn´t that what they did?
And who knows if Matrox did good on it´s promises in the contract? Maybe it didn´t. That´s not exactly unheard of in the world of business, or haven´t you noticed?

rubank

[xortam]

The originating company maintains the rights to the intellectual property. An engineer can leave the employ of said company and join a competitor to develop a similar technology, but is legally restricted from utilizing the same design and algorithms. Its normally a simple enough matter to alter the design enough to avoid prosecution.

[Greebe]

Look, three crackheads now! LOL

[xortam]

Was that comment meant to include me Greebe? Do you have some specific disagreement with my post?

[PaulS]

My dad is an electrical engineer, he has worked for 3 different companies in the last 30 years, mainly in R&D, so I think he is pretty loyal employee. He always works in fairly similiar fields (microwave communications) because that is what he knows. Obviously he never walked out with plans or the like, but in R&D you are always working on something, and you have to leave whatever that is to the next bloke. And the reason for getting your new job is due, in large part, to skills being used in your previous job. Industry just accepts that - it works for and against you, and in the end the consumer benefits because knowledge is not locked into one company.

I'll admit that nVidia sure could use some competition at the moment, so to that end it might have been better for us if these guys had stayed, but if they just walked away with what is their head, then I am pretty inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt.

As for being on nvidia's side, I have to admit a grudging respect for a company that's come out of nowhere to lead an industry in such a short period of time. I imagine those ex-Matrox guys are pretty excited about the new opportunites that may be open to them.

Paul

[JK]

Here's an angle:

The Matrox engineers (or Nvidia engineers nowadays) made a choice to walk out. I don’t believe that they did anything wrong.

They had all the options and they probably made the right choice. They had to make this choice considering what’s best for them. If Matrox don’t look out for their employees and Nvidia will, then the choice must have been simple. I don’t believe it was all a matter of money. It never is, or is it?
Nvidia offered something better and the Matrox engineers would have been stupid to pass..

Now for something completely different:

I hope G800 hits the market soon, cause I feel like spending some more money on a good 3D-card. If it doesn’t, then my $$ probably goes to ATI or Nvidia (whoever offers me the best 3DSpeed/2Dquality solution).

//JK

[Maggi]

Originally posted by Dogbert:
Maggi,

There is one (among many) difference between Deutchland and matrox, Deutchland said they are/were sorry. Matrox didn't.

Ok ... your point.

I'm glad you didn't misunderstand my comparison.

For the rest of this discussion, I better stay out of it.

[WMTJ]

I saw it (Carmack's quote) around last week Tues or Wed at Anands'. It seems as if bandwidth will be the next issue that will be primarily focused on. Why you say? Well the majority of the leaked info on most of the cards not to mention the loud complaints from consumers would suggest that either wishfull thinking is the prevailing state of mind or all these delusions of grandeur have "willed"at least 10-12 gig/sec bandwidth!

Take a look at this ixt labs NV rumor:

Leaked NV20 Details! [9:02 am] Rat
Thanks to Mr. Gabdab who called on our Discussion Board today morning, we got new information about the upcoming graphics solution from NVIDIA - NV20 aka GeForce III. According to this post in our Hardware Discussions Forum, here is what we may expect from NVIDIA in November:

Core: 300MHz;
Memory: 200MHz DDR SDRAM;
256bit memory bus;
12.8GB/sec memory bus bandwidth;
Fillrate 1.8Gpixel/sec (5.4Gtexel/sec);
6 rendering pipelines with 3 texturing units each;
0.15 micron manufacturing technology.
Besides, NV20 should have a greatly improved T&L engine and should be fully compliant with DirectX 8.0. As far as the performance goes, it is expected to be just outstanding: at the resolution set to 1600x1200x32 the system built with an Intel Pentium III CPU shows around 100fps in Quake3.
The new wonder from NVIDIA is supposed to be presented at COMDEX Fall 2000 and should cost around ~$800.
P.S.: As you can see, this info is absolutely different from what has been said before about NV20. Therefore we cannot vouch for the truth of these specs. You are most welcome to discuss this information here.


My point...........I forgot . Oh yea! We need lots more memory bandwidth or memory bandwidth saving features!
What do you think would be the best way to achieve 10-12 gig/sec? Embedded ram (128 cache) or a like tile rendering tech?

(I wonder if we can keep this thread alive till G whatever)