Time to say goodbye.

[Indiana]

Matrox as a whole not.
But what about the gfx-cards section? If this division is not really profitable anymore there are usually two logic things to do: shut the deficitary division down or search someone that buys it.

But as was already stated above, nobody here knows if Matrox gfx-card division is profitable or not.
I'd guess it still is (though most likely not by much), otherwise the Matrox owners wouldn't keep running it when they have other apparently more lucrative market-segments.

[Kurt]

Originally posted by Greebe
Diamond went bust in the graphics arena because they had the absolute worst support, the nastiest drivers (far below even what Rendition had released) rarely updated them (if ever) and crappy BIOS's not just for their Rendition based cards but every manufactures chip they used.

BTW Diamond wasn't the only company that used the Verite series chips, there were many others. Not to mention they themselves failed every Gchip maker on the planet...

Diamond originally tried to be a PC vendor (OEM), but that failed, changed the company name, then moved on to try again and fell flat on their face yet again. In the end they had to give up barely skirting around many lawsuits and not to forget bankruptsy twice.

Use a better example next time

The fact that Diamond sucks as a company is beyond the point. I agree with him on the fact that Matrox is screwing up their own market since the G450.

G450, G550 and P are nice boards but they can't compete with tthe rest in 3D. They have excellent 2D features but that limits their market a lot.

The focus is now on 3D. If Matrox wants to play in the graphic chips arena they have to develop a convincing solution. So far nobody's convinced (at least not at that price-point).

The DVI-D resolution problem is moot as well. By the time everyone moves to it the limitations will probably be resolved -not to mention that most users don't need more than 800*600 or 1024*768...

[DGhost]

see... the problem is that to resolve the problem it will take a new protocol... and you will be screwed either way because you won't be using DVI-D to send signals and will have to buy a new graphics card to do it.. so again, DVI is moot because its too limited to be a replacement...

i can kind of see where the G450 was a good idea in the market that was forming... sticking to a more conservative product that lies within your backyard is always a wise choice...

the problem is that the G550 didn't offer anything new, and the Parhelia... well... i love the Parhelia but there is a lot of other things going on with it that are starting to come to light...

i do tend to agree that the people in charge of MGA are idiots if they think that they can continue to dictate where the market will go.

the biggest problem with their logic is it is very old school. 3 years ago you would never have had a problem selling G550's or Parhelias to businesses... problem is that now you wind up with business people who say "hey, you can buy this video card for $150 and my neighbors 7year old son says it will work fine for what i am doing, why should i buy xyz video card for 4/5/6 times the cost?". and the stupid thing is they believe it. but, the abundance of cheap consumer hardware has really hurt the workstation market... people no longer feel the need to pay $12k for an SGI workstation, they just buy one from their local vendor for $2-$3k... 3 years ago their logic could work now...

adapt or die...

[defaultuser]

Originally posted by Greebe
I guess you can't see the forest from the trees either... nor do you realise that M doesn't have a fab of their own. Nor do you have any personal insight into the company. What you're stating is pure speculation on your part but you also want us to believe that what your saying is fact when it most certinly is not.

I was under the impression they made their own chips. Believe me, nobody thinks this company is fabless. But then again, Matrox is purposefully indirect about every aspect of the company.

So you're close to the company. Let's hear the truth. And no more of this indirection with Diamond Multimedia. I believe what I see, and frankly, when I look at Matrox, I see a whitewashed blank wall.

I understand they signed a deal with UMC for the Parhelia, but to be perfectly honest I've never seen any other chip deals announced in their press releases in the last few years. That seems kind of stupid for a company entirely dependent on external suppliers.

[Kruzin]

Matrox design/engineer their own chips.
They assemble their own boards.
It's never been a secret that Matrox does not have their own fab facility.
It's been common knowledge for years that NEC fabbed M's chips until recently.

[Greebe]

and he wants us to violate our NDA's just to prove his speculation wrong


Please tell us another joke

[Ali]

This was a good thread, taken way off-topic about Diamond. It was an EXAMPLE! not the point of the thread.

It seems like MAtrox Graphics is in a bit of trouble, specially if they have lost all their old engineers. We were all worried when some of the engineers were head-hunted by Nvidia, but now it seems like they had no choice.

If Matrox isnt paying you enough, you dont get overtime, you are getting screwed around by management changing your targets/goals all the time, then it is no wonder people jumped ship. Good on them I say (as long as they didnt leak tech to their new employers).

The last Matrox card that made sense was the G450, and that should have been a lowend MX style card to go along with a G800 type card.

The eDualhead software was a joke. How many people bought that? I also notice that you can now get up to 65% off the price of the eDualhead CD in the latest 'In the Loop'. Who is going to pay for that?

Head casting was a huge mistake. I always assumed Matrox bought the tech in from somewhere, not that they developed it in house. IF they wasted all that development time for Head Casting, then that has to go down as one of the worst decisions in history.

The Parhelia seems like a decent card still. The FAA flaws are acceptible to me, as it is first gen implementation, but the banding issues are totaly unaccceptable from a company that is based around 2D quality.

If Matrox had kept a few more engineers around, then we might also have seen some Win9x drivers for the PArhelia. That would have almost doubled the market for the card. Another strange decission.

Anyway, I have to get some work done.

Ali

[DGhost]

personally, especially considering that Headcasting relied on another companies technology, i believe that it was a fairly vain attempt at 2 things... 1) giving the G550 a feature, or a killer app... some reason why people would acctually want it... and 2) salvaging something from the design of what the G550 was supposed to be (in this case, salvaging parts of the T&L unit) and attempting to recouperate from the design costs...

the e-Dualhead idea was a pretty good idea, but the problem i saw with it is that it was essentially a cheaply developed, piss poor peice of software that ran on top of IE and did something that wasn't nessicary...

FAA is a good, practical technology... the current implentation may be buggy (honestly i do not know what it was supposed to be, so i don't know how it compares) but its a good, solid technology that has a lot of potential... i honestly didn't notice anything buggy about it...

if Matrox acctually looked at the market and looked at what people were interested, they probably would have come to the conclusion that investing in things like FAA would have made much more of a difference 2 years ago... its nice now, but everything does FSAA and the latest cards do it faster... personally i do absolutely love FAA... hehe...

as cool as surround gaming is i don't think that the Parhelia was really ready for it... unfortunately people have a problem with running games at 800x600 on a high end graphics card, even if it is across 3 monitors and with FAA... it definately has a cool factor but its not a feature that really sells cards in comparison to others... there are a lot of people who do not care about having that capabilities...

[VigilAnt]

Originally posted by Ali
This was a good thread, taken way off-topic about Diamond. It was an EXAMPLE! not the point of the thread.

It seems like MAtrox Graphics is in a bit of trouble, specially if they have lost all their old engineers. We were all worried when some of the engineers were head-hunted by Nvidia, but now it seems like they had no choice.

If Matrox isnt paying you enough, you dont get overtime, you are getting screwed around by management changing your targets/goals all the time, then it is no wonder people jumped ship. Good on them I say (as long as they didnt leak tech to their new employers).

The last Matrox card that made sense was the G450, and that should have been a lowend MX style card to go along with a G800 type card.

The eDualhead software was a joke. How many people bought that? I also notice that you can now get up to 65% off the price of the eDualhead CD in the latest 'In the Loop'. Who is going to pay for that?

Head casting was a huge mistake. I always assumed Matrox bought the tech in from somewhere, not that they developed it in house. IF they wasted all that development time for Head Casting, then that has to go down as one of the worst decisions in history.

The Parhelia seems like a decent card still. The FAA flaws are acceptible to me, as it is first gen implementation, but the banding issues are totaly unaccceptable from a company that is based around 2D quality.

If Matrox had kept a few more engineers around, then we might also have seen some Win9x drivers for the PArhelia. That would have almost doubled the market for the card. Another strange decission.

Anyway, I have to get some work done.

Ali

The "banding" problems are soley a 3D issue. Not 2D.

VigilAnt

[Wombat]

Yeah, pretty much, unless you're just running a 3D app in a window. If I do that, my entire desktop looks like @#$!.

[jackzod]

or if youre running 3d in one of your 2 monitor, the second one get the nice banding effect...

[Kurt]

Originally posted by Wombat
Yeah, pretty much, unless you're just running a 3D app in a window. If I do that, my entire desktop looks like @#$!.

methinks of the Longhorn GUI that Microsoft is developing. All 3D

[defaultuser]

Originally posted by Greebe
and he wants us to violate our NDA's just to prove his speculation wrong


Please tell us another joke

----> this guy thinks he's talkin to some new kid on the block

Honestly, you think you'd get it by now, considering your vast amounts of self-proclaimed wisdom. This is just the kind of response we expect from a private company in trouble.

The one good thing about publicly traded companies like Nvidia is that the stockholders expect results, and they get a surgeon's-eye view of the company operations. The only way to avoid the call of shareholder value is to cook the books, and that eventually lands you in a heap of trouble, as we've been seeing lately. So the company's strength in general is laregely public and known.

Private companies, especially if they're not industry leaders, are known to do two things without exception.

- They never fail to toodle their own horn during the good times. Think back folks, to the level of fanfare accompanying the G400's release, the thought of a quality-concious graphics company being able to compete with the big boys, the potential.

- They never fail to keep dead quiet about the company during the bad times. Launches of products expected to only be marginally successful are usually announded unexpecedly and backed by very little hype. Note that we hadn't seen anywhere near as hyped a launch as the G400 until the Parhelia was announced, and even the Parhelia's hype paled in comparison to the G400. For a chip that's supposed to be the company's salvation, the Parhelia launch was awfully tame, and strangely was allowed to cool down almost before it began.

Do you honestly think folks havn't noticed how little Matrox has toodled their horn in the last 3 years? Do you honestly think that any cute little indirections like the one above will ensure the sancitity and security of your sinking ship? Only a fool would hold the world in such unrealistic stature.

But I can wait. I have a feeling your NDA is non-binding should the company fail, so perhaps in a few months you can tell all.

[GT98]

Originally posted by defaultuser

But I can wait. I have a feeling your NDA is non-binding should the company fail, so perhaps in a few months you can tell all.

Thats Bullshit...other people on this group have been beta testers and left the program and cannot talk about what they might or might not have heard....

I'm assured that NDA's they signed are binding.....

[Wombat]

Doubtful. Even if Matrox Graphics is hurting, there's many other facets of the company.

And compared to Greebe, and others around here, you likely <I>are</I> a new kid.

After all, one need only look at your "impression" of Matrox's fab to see how much your instincts are worth. Plenty of people knew that Matrox was fabless, as well as where assembly was done. Hell, even when I was working on the PA processors, nobody knew who HP was working with, even with the "visibility" of a publically traded company. As for your shining example of nVidia, nobody would have known about a lot of their underhanded moves if Matrox hadn't taken them to court.