'Fusion' cards

[Marshmallowman]

Matrox has to release, quite a reasonable card soon.
The Geforce 2 MX is starting to move in on matroxs big market, while the quality of the dual display aint the best on an MX the price and performance of the MX will erode matrox oem market(especial since integrated video chipsets are springing up everywhere).
The g450's major shortcommings are 3d and video playback(no iDCT or motion comp) which are becomming essential, as 3d rendering is creeping in everwhere.
g800 has to be at least Geforce 2 speed, if its going to be a long term product(another year for the next card after the g800) even for oem!!.

[Bohrn]

I haven't read word for word all _8_(!) bloody pages, but I did quickly scan em. So forgive me if someone beat me to it.

Fusion, from Joel's first page (yeah, way back there!)
"2. a) the union of different things by or as if by melting; blending; coalition..."
The key word here being coalition!
I hate to think that they are selling out the 3D part of the company, but the word coalition scares me.

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AsusP3B-F,P3 880 Slot1, 256mgsPC133,G40032megSH, Diamond MX300,13.5gigs of HD's,52X CDrom,WinME, PD 5.41 w/ 6.10ICD,Altec Lansing ATP3Subwoofer,
Envision 17",Terrayon Cable modem w/D-Link nic,1 grey cat,1 black cat & 1 calico

[tr4veler]

Borhm, you've been playing too much Rifts

$.02 - I'd like to see prices come down, and a 450MAX. Take the higher quality cores clock them up and put the high bandwith/speed ram in. It might be enough to get me to replace my 400MAX. As it is there ins't enough incentive to upgrade. I've seen more increase in game play ability from upgrading my connection that my buddies with faster hardware.

And purly wish list I'd like to see the 4x0's in more laptops. Can you belive how many still have ATI Rage and NeoMagic ??

[dZeus]

blue_helix: you're a Matrox (ex-?)employee?

[Homercles]

Something I mentioned before, and got to reply to. Did anyone else read the post on Matrox's site about the success of of G200-MMS solutions???

http://www.matrox.com/mga/archive_st..._financial.cfm

They mention that over 6 million G200-MMS "units" have been shipped. Now, with the 4 way version costing $699US and the 2 way version going for $499US, you can begin to see some serious income coming from these sales. I think any company shipping Nvidia products would be absolutely ecstatic about shipping even a million of the top of the line cards (aka GeForce2 Ultra or similar) that don't even come close to costing 700 bucks. I'm not sure how accurate my calculation are, but it would seem that at an average sale price of 600bucks, the g200-MMS dealies would bring in over 3.5 billion in sales.

Any comments??

Homercles

[drzaius]

<font face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" size="2">
Originally posted by Marshmallowman...
The Geforce 2 MX is starting to move in on matroxs big market, while the quality of the dual display aint the best on an MX the price and performance of the MX will erode matrox oem market(especial since integrated video chipsets are springing up everywhere).
</font>

actually the GF2MX is not doing anywhere near as much damage to the OEM market as Nvidia would have liked, simply because it's hard to push a product that is built for games (and has worse 2D features, and image quality) to a business owner, because he doesn't want his employees playing games, he wants them working, so the speed advantage the GF2MX has over the G450 is actually it's down fall

I'm not sure how true this is i just remember reading about it on some site, that was reviewing a G450.

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Slow people as easy to pass, it's people who drive fast that are hard.

[This message has been edited by drzaius (edited 28 January 2001).]

[Ant]

I find it very difficult to believe that they could have sold 6 million units of such a specialist, expensive product. Surely they mean that Matrox have shipped 6 million total graphics card units??

<font face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" size="2">Originally posted by Homercles:
They mention that over 6 million G200-MMS "units" have been shipped. Now, with the 4 way version costing $699US and the 2 way version going for $499US, you can begin to see some serious income coming from these sales. I think any company shipping Nvidia products would be absolutely ecstatic about shipping even a million of the top of the line cards (aka GeForce2 Ultra or similar) that don't even come close to costing 700 bucks. I'm not sure how accurate my calculation are, but it would seem that at an average sale price of 600bucks, the g200-MMS dealies would bring in over 3.5 billion in sales.

Any comments??

Homercles[/B]</font>

[dZeus]

You can interpret that text in another way:

it could also mean that 6 million G200 chips were sold in different cards in total... it mentions 'proven technology', and the G200MMS is based on exactly the same G200 core as other cards based on G200 chips like the Mystique G200 and Millennium G200

[This message has been edited by dZeus (edited 28 January 2001).]

[DGhost]

Personally i believe my G400MAX runs better on a high speed athlon (1.1ghz, 1.2ghz) than a GF2MX, and certainly looks better. The GF2MX is a cheap card that is *slow*. nvidia crippled it. people are turning to it because it is nvidia, has the GeForce2 name, and is cheap. But, after all is said and done, not alot of people are interested in a GF2MX. alot of people have never heard of nvidia, nor do alot care to know about them. that is how compusa and best buy can get away with selling TNT2's still.

Anywho, if nothing else, 'Fusion' could refer to something as mundane as 'fusing' a T&L engine with a 2d/3d core. so you get a card that has T&L.

[dZeus]

when EMBM and the rest of the core were 'fused' on the G400, that wasn't called a fusion, was it? Then why call it fusion now, when only a feature is being added to the 3D-core, which happens with just about every new generation of a core (except G400 and G450, but I don't really make a difference of a generation between these cores)

*hint*

[Wulfman]

can anybody confirm that this "fusion" is still included in the latest driver release?

mfg
wulfman

[Topha]

Maybe we all looked at the Fusion Problem from the wrong angle. Maybe Matrox isnt fusing two 3d chips, but a 3d chip with a chip that is able to hardware accelerate texels (as used in comanche 3 and outcast). The texel technology is able to provide much more realistic graphics, but the problem is that todays 3d accelerators dont support texels. Maybe matrox realized the potential of texels and are working on a piece of texel hardware. The reason why it takes so long is that they have to wait for some great texel games to be announced.
i know its just speculation, but it would be cool (the texel games visuals were always way ahead of their time).

[dZeus]

texels or voxels?

I don't know about voxel acceleration... I've read and heard many times that it would be VERY difficult to accelerate those in hardware

[Topha]

Voxels i mean, oops all these technical terms are way to complicated for me but if its hard to implement it, thats another reason for the delay

[dZeus]

Or think videowall... or even a beamer-wall

If you can use 4 of those quad-output cards at the same time, you can built a 4x4 video wall? That would look really cool, and probably cheaper than a single screen that has the size of 4x4 monitors/tvs... maybe a single beamer is cheaper, but there probably are certain conditions where you can't use a beamer.