Consumer-level P10 cancelled

[Ribbit]

I'm surprised no-one's commented on this yet. Over at Ace's there's a link to an interview with someone from Creative, and in it he says that plans for the consumer-grade P10 boards have been cancelled. (He also mentions a P9 chip, which was news to me.) Evidently with the 9700 here and the NV30 coming closer, they feel the P10 would be too far behind performance-wise.

I was actually very interested in this as a potential Parhelia alternative. Accurate rendering (compare with nVidia's cut-all-possible-corners approach), all that programmability, OpenGL 2.0 readyness, and virtual memory management. And 3DLabs have historically been quite friendly and forthcoming with the Linux/XFree86/OSS/Free/etc. software community (then again, so have Matrox...) About the only thing I'd have missed would be edge-antialiasing.

Oh well...

[Indiana]

Creative is just bought by NVidia. They scrapped the 9700Pro cards as well (at least in Europe).

[lecter]

Nvidia bought Creative?! U're kidding, right?

[Indiana]

You do know what I mean by "bought". They're surely getting "preferred" delivery of new chips, maybe better prices and the like for doing this.

[P5ycho]

Creative owns 3dlabs, i dont think that they get any discounts at all when buying from nvidia...

[lecter]

Plus, Creative doesn't even make graphics cards, it's MSI all the way for the Nvidia ones....

[Indiana]

Then look at the latest interview with a Creative official. It's full of pure NVidia marketing propaganda. They do not do this "for free" or just because of personal preferences, believe me. Thinking otherwise is just plain naive...

[lecter]

Let's face it, when you have a product which you want to sell, then you praise it all the way to the sky, I mean how many companies have you seen that don't do the same thing when it comes to their own products?

[Admiral]

From what I understand from that interview (only read about half of it though) the different divisions (Europe, Asia, US) are quite independent, having a free hand in choosing what sollutions to implement.
Asia chose ATI feeling it suits better and Europe considered other sollutions before settling for nVidia's NV30.
They consider it to be best for business but it causes great customer confusion.

Personally I never considered buying a Creative graphics card, they're overpriced here.

[lecter]

Creative made really good graphics card before, I had 3 of them and they performed flawlessly, right now however they're far from being a major player on the graphics market.