A graphics manufacturer that gets it !!! Waddya know
We know that the videocard industry is a harsh one. It's hard to stay competitive, you need to have the right product at the right place at the right time for the right price. I've known you for quite a while now and from what I can tell Creative labs Europe always managed to make dynamic decisions in terms of choosing a graphics chipset manufacturer. Switches from 3dfx, to NVIDIA, to ATi, ect... you do not doubt the market and know what the end-user is willing to buy. Can you explain what it is exactly that is so difficult in this industry ?
One of the fundamental difficulties in this business is selecting the right products to offer the customer. On the surface it should be easy to map out the price performance of each available product and figure out which is the best value for money unfortunately many other factors come into play. It is easiest to explain if I give you an example.
When NVIDIA launched the GeForceFX 5200 I was faced with an unbelievable number of potential implementations. The frame buffer could be 64MB, 128MB or 256MB, the memory interface could be 64-bit or 128-bit, it could have VIVO or DVI connectors. The challenge is to figure out what is important to the customer (and what features they are willing to pay for). So using the above example you get questions like “Should we do a 256MB version?†On the one hand everyone wants more memory and the additional cost is not huge so the answer should be yes. On the other hand because of the limited power of the 5200 chipset it is unlikely you would ever run apps at 1600x1200 with AA enabled and so you will never actually use the extra memory so the max should be 128MB. Why have customers pay for an extra 128MB they will never use?
And so it goes on all of the available chipsets. Rather than NVIDIA and ATI defining the product offerings they simply sell the chipsets and let the partners choose the actual implementation. This can be good in one way but also bad. The recent issues with the Radeon 9800 Pro 128-bit vs 256-bit that you highlighted on Guru3d is a good example. People are being led to believe they are getting a bargain when in fact they are getting a severely impaired product.
