let's count money in nVidia and ATI pockets :)

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Hi, some stuff to be counted! Correct the math follow if it's wrong. (A friend of mine tryed to estimate a market share of hardcore 3d gamers. He is not familiar with current data on video card manufacterers but have some data about how market can be counted.)
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Lets try to take into an account stats for MadOnion.com ORB system. At 20:00 (east coast time) there were 700 visitors online. Let is be a session lasts for 10 minutes so there are some more than 4000 visitors per day. At 19:00-20:00 700 visitors stands as 8-10% of the day auditory, so all the auditory can be estimated about 50000-70000 per day.

Monthly auditory (unque visitors) can be evaluated by multiplying by 2 (per week) and by 2 (per month). So, about 100k-150k unqie visitors per week and 0.2-0.3mln unique visitors per month.

MadOnion.com can be viewed as good example of so called 'pioneer resource' (those ones, who is in a frontier). Let's assume that the first wave of innovators ('pioneers') is 10% of all possible market users (we count 3d videocard users ONLY - gamers and so on).

To sum it all there are ~3 millions of diehardcore 3d users (that can be interested for nVidia/ATI) around the world. Multiply by $150 (an average that a fan is ready to spend per year) and you'll understand why nVidia and ATi is crazy about 6 months cycle and why 3dfx is died so horrible.
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Not much at all, by the way. I think that there are much large office computer installation base nVidia wants to put it's hands on.

(If Ant opens it stats on daily users behaviour same math can be applied to Matrox fanbase, just replace MadOnion.com with MURC and gotcha! )

I hope this stats can help you think about why game devolopers won't to turn their games into benchmark farms (as id's Quake do). They'll gain publicity ... and lose customers base.

[SteveC]

erm, OEM contracts? Matrox have sold many many many times more cards through Compaq and Dell than through online stores/the high street.

I bet the same is for ATi (and a lesser extend nVidia) too.

[Lemmin]

I think you are making too many assumptions when coming up with those figures. It is almost impossible to calculate anything on the basis of web page hits these days, for several reasons (spiders, differences in reporting, lack of knowledge about browsing habits etc).

It would be a much better idea to work the other way - ATI should be publishing their quarterly results today or tomorrow. Get a copy of them, see how much revenue they took, then estimate the proportion of that revenue which is contributed by the top-of-the-range gotta-havvit gamers (probably less than 10%).

I think the common wisdom is that ATI and Nvidia only operate their 6month product cycle as a kind of marketting excercise (with a secondary objective of paying for their R&D) - John User is looking for a graphics card, and says 'ooo look, NvidiATI has the fastest XYZti60000super+ card' but doesn't actually buy one, they buy the previous generation because its 1/3rd the price. The 5% or so who DO buy the latest product at a huge price premium effectively end up paying for the technology development that works its way into the mainstream in 6 to 12 months time.

ATI and Nvidia really make their money on the cut-down mainstream chips, and the massive sales they can make to OEMs and system builders on the basis of their top-end chip publicity. The hysteria surrounding their latest'n'greatest chips helps to maintain the effective status quo, whilst making it seem like great strides are being made, and huge technological and sales breakthroughs are happening. NvidiATI can't afford to change this, not least because their shareholders are as excited as the average gamer.

One of the reasons I like and support Matrox (apart from the excellent products they produce) is because they are just inherently more honest about their products. They apply less double standards that the other players, they are obviously not attempting to artificially generate excitement in a 6 month cycle, but are instead attempting to release groundbreaking and long-life products more in line with the rest of the industry. Part of this honesty and common sense is probably because they don't have to report to shareholders....

Just my tuppence worth: I dislike the hype that Nvidia and ATI pump into the industry, and I despise the people who can't see through it to the real (financial) motives of those companies.

LEM

[fav]

I think you are making too many assumptions when coming up with those figures.

Sure, I do. It's an attempt to find out not a precise amount of money but a gross market potential. It's an attempt to find a right scale for those product - do we have any good analytics site/company for gfx industry?

Of course, quarterly reports of public companies can help a lot to doublecheck all possible data from independent sources.

Sure, I want more data. I think, that gamers as a community have a skewed point of view by discarding valuable information.

(And I do really love Matrox. )

Thanks for your comments!