Brand Loyalty

Scott_Arm

Legend
I spend a lot of time reading on these forums, trying to learn as much as I can about 3D graphics technologies etc. I have an interest because I've studied electronics and programming. Many times, I find the good information is lost in a pile of arguments between different camps that religiously defend their favourite 3D companies.

My question is this: Do you feel brand loyalty has a postive or negative on the 3D scene? Obviously there is good and bad in everything, so I don't expect to get clear-cut answers. I'm just curious as to why people feel so much a part of their favourite companies.

I would say it's a negative. I do understand a certain amount of brand-loyalty. I am a turntable hobbyist, and I really enjoy Grado cartridges, so I try to support the company when I can. But I I do not doubt that there may be a better product available from another company, and I would never make any attempts to slander or downplay the success of another company offering a good product. I may or may not decide to buy this other product, depending on how important a buying decision it is. And sometimes I like to support the underdog, simply because I feel it's good to support alternative choices in the marketplace. But to me, if I'm going to make a huge investment of money in a product like a graphics card, I will most likely buy the product that best suits my needs. I have bought graphics cards from ATI, Matrox, Nvidia and PowerVR(Hercules), and all of them were wonderful products. Brand loyalty limits your own choices as a consumer, and I feel that few companies actually deserve loyalty because they have no real interest in you other than your wallet and the free advertising you provide them by promoting their products to your friends and peers. I will recommend a good product from any company. If there is a company I generally turn to for a product, and the current product is of poor quality, I'll usually recommend something else and say, "Maybe the next one will be worth looking into", or even recommend a previous product. But simply, I will never recommend a product that I feel is of poor quality. I feel that many people do not recommend a good product, they recommend the brand-name instead, which is an entirely different thing. You do no service to yourself or your friends by recommending brand names. And it's even worse when people resort to slandering a person for choosing a different product or brand. I am rambling now, so I will stop.
 
would have to agree with ya on that, unfortunatly it really does hurt, specially when a benchmark site is slanted. Forums well alot less to the effect as not many people frequent the forums as they do reviews.
 
I think a large part of the brand loyalty starts with the fact, that people who bought a videocard for quite some money want to know it was a good deal. Nobody likes to think they got ripped off.

But it gets a lot more complex from there on, I guess.
 
negative

I have been posting on these forums for little bit now but I have been reading them for a long time. Its negative, no doubt about that. Logic seems to fail from both sides.
 
though I have owned whole bunch of cards (and chips), I must say that I have been most happy and impressed with Matrox. This causes the a sort of loyality towards this company.

And of course, I am die-hard fan of Bitboys and proud of it. I have my reasons, even though there wouldn't be many guys understanding about it. :)

Here's list of card makers whose cards I have owned:
- Paradise / Olivetti
- Cirrus Logic
- Hercules
- FireGL
- ATI
- Diamond
- 3Dfx
- Club3D
- Orchid
- Matrox


and the list of chipmakers chips that I have owned:
- Commodore (VIC-II) ;)
- 3DLabs
- PowerVR
- ATI
- Paradise
- Western Digital
- Bitboys
- nVidia
- 3Dfx
- Matrox
- Cirrus Logic
- S3
 
Nappe1 said:
though I have owned whole bunch of cards (and chips), I must say that I have been most happy and impressed with Matrox. This causes the a sort of loyality towards this company.

And of course, I am die-hard fan of Bitboys and proud of it. I have my reasons, even though there wouldn't be many guys understanding about it. :)

Here's list of card makers whose cards I have owned:
- Paradise / Olivetti
- Cirrus Logic
- Hercules
- FireGL
- ATI
- Diamond
- 3Dfx
- Club3D
- Orchid
- Matrox


and the list of chipmakers chips that I have owned:
- Commodore (VIC-II) ;)
- 3DLabs
- PowerVR
- ATI
- Paradise
- Western Digital
- Bitboys
- nVidia
- 3Dfx
- Matrox
- Cirrus Logic
- S3

Haven't owned a Matrox product since the Matrox Mystique. I was pretty happy with it at the time, but I really don't remember much about it at all. I'm a big fan of PowerVR TBDR stuff. I had a Kyro2, which I was extremely pleased with. Good performance for the money. I would definitely consider buying products from them again, if they offered something that would suit my needs, but that wouldn't stop me from fairly evaluating the competition. Can't say I've ever been a die-hard fan of anything, other than Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark.
 
I don't really believe that people actually 'like' one IHV over another. It's just that some debates are more engaging when you take 'sides' so to speak. I'm not sure there is anyone on this forum that walks the line perfectly. ATI and Nvidia will be left in the dust if some third party shows up with a better product - then you will see where loyalties lie.
 
trinibwoy said:
I don't really believe that people actually 'like' one IHV over another. It's just that some debates are more engaging when you take 'sides' so to speak. I'm not sure there is anyone on this forum that walks the line perfectly. ATI and Nvidia will be left in the dust if some third party shows up with a better product - then you will see where loyalties lie.

Well, I like ATI better than NVIDIA, and always did. My previous two cards were NVIDIA ones, though. Liking doesn't mean brand loyalty.
 
I do have a preference for certain brands. I tend to prefer high-quality products.
I used to be a big fan of Matrox, because they gave me great performance when I was doing software rendering, and their image quality was (and still is, I think) pretty much the reference. They played around for a little while when 3d acceleration got into swing... I've had a Mystique myself, and my brother had a G200 and G450... After that we had to abandon ship, because Matrox was in no way competitive anymore.

I bought a GeForce2, but I wasn't too happy about it... The performance was great, but the image quality was horrible compared to the Matrox I 'upgraded' from. Especially when coding, it's nasty when your sourcecode is pretty much a blur on the screen. Your eyes get tired quickly. I actually went as far as doing the output filter mod on the card.

Anyway, when my brother wanted to upgrade aswell, I recommended the Kyro2. I'm a big fan of TBDR, because it's just so damn... elegant.
Sadly the drivers weren't too great, and a lot of software didn't work properly (sometimes also because the software itself was 'bugged'... as in not obeying all the Direct3D rules for lifetime of zbuffers etc, which in practice only affects alternative rasterizers, like the Kyro2).
The image quality was nice though, and performance was usually comparable to my gf2. But after a while we decided to get rid of it anyway, and get a card that works.

That card was the ATi Radeon 8500. And I've been an ATi fan since. Fantastic image quality, and ps1.4 was just lovely. Performance was decent aswell. I recently got a Radeon for myself aswell, 9600Pro... And yes, immediately I noticed how much sharper my old monitor looked with the new Radeon instead of the gf2.

The NVIDIA 6800 is making it tough for me again though... As far as I know, NVIDIA fixed their image quality problems a few generations ago (apart from gamma-corrected AA, and some other minor quality differences compared to ATi), and the 6800 packs both features and performance. I would probably go for NVIDIA again if I were to buy a card soon. Ofcourse that depends on what kind of SM3.0 card ATi will put against it.

Moral of this story: it gets increasingly difficult to remain true to a single brand, at least for me, because the world of 3d acceleration changes so quickly.
I'm still hoping for either a comeback of Matrox, or an SM3.0-capable TBDR by the way. Especially the Matrox comeback seems highly unlikely today, after the Parhelia.

On the other hand, I've always stayed true to my desire for quality gear. Intel CPUs and chipsets are still my favourites for example (although I am currently using an AMD. I am not too happy with it though, and will most probably buy Intel again next time).
 
Scali said:
On the other hand, I've always stayed true to my desire for quality gear. Intel CPUs and chipsets are still my favourites for example (although I am currently using an AMD. I am not too happy with it though, and will most probably buy Intel again next time).

Off topic but what quality issues have you encountered with AMD cpus / chipsets?
 
Scott_Arm said:
My question is this: Do you feel brand loyalty has a postive or negative on the 3D scene?
I just think it's an unavoidable aspect of human nature.

That said, discussion boards such as this one thrive on disagreements. Without them this would just be a news site with no need for forums at all.

Disagreements keep people interested in coming back. They get people angry so that they're willing to do the research to back up their claims. Sometimes this causes arguments to degenerate into mindless dribble, but I think that's one of the reasons I stay here. The mindless dribble is much less frequent (though I tend to get a bit upset when I do notice it cropping up....). I don't think personal bias, opinions, or "loyalty" are what should be combatted. It's lack of intelligent support of arguments.
 
Brand loyalty=sucker's bet

Base your purchase on the hardware, only base the history of the company and their track record of support/drivers/etc on the name and beware that it might change.

Seriously. :)
 
Well, Dig, I say base your purchase on the hardware and the software support at the time of purchase. Speculation on future driver support really should play a minor role in purchase decisions.

But the question was more about how brand loyalty affects the message boards, not people buying video cards :)
 
Chalnoth said:
[They get people angry so that they're willing to do the research to back up their claims.

Heh, I wish that was true on some forums :p

Oh and I do have to say I love these forums! Haven't seen many forums that have shared my love for the elegance of TBDR ;)
 
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