RussSchultz said:
gkar1 said:
Its extremely funny to me that they had the opportunity to drive the industry forward by leaps and bounds, but instead chose the path of greed and deceit. I guess i put too much faith in the goodness of the human spirit.
Perhaps I'm reading into it what isn't actually there, and what Gkar1 is REALLY suggesting is that by avoiding their creative marketing, they would have driven the industry forward by leaps and bounds. That doesn't make a whole lot of sense, either.
Or, perhaps he was saying that they would have driven the industry forward by leaps and bounds by (perhaps) going out of business by not (overly) aggresively creatively marketting their products.
Or....?
I think what Gkar1 is alluding to is that Nvidia was in a great position a 2-3 years back. They had just taken over the market. 3DFX was on it's last legs, ATI was uncompetative and had a poor rep. Nvidia was king of the hill with a ton of money in the bank and no competitors. DX9 was coming up and looking to be the best, and most significant update to the de-facto gameplaying API. So what do Nvidia do?
They decide to do the minimum. They crank out an incremental design that relies on the old Nvidia favourites of die-shrink for increased clockspeed and faster RAM. I'm sure the increased numbers of chips per wafer and associated profit increases hadn't escaped them either. Sure, they make some marketing noise about "Cinematic Computing" but that's just marketing hype for a couple of generations away. In reality, they do as little as possible to keep their profit margins as high as they can.
In fact, they go as far as designing their DX9 flagship around a DX7/8 game. Why design for Doom 3? It gives great marketing opportunities because ID games/engines sell massively, and are used for benchmarking for years to come.
I'm interpreting GKar1's words as pointing out what Nvidia *could* have done instead. They could have embraced DX9 and HLSL. They could have not tried an end-run around the standard APIs with CG in order to control the market (for marketing purposes). They could have made a clever design that really pushed the market forward into the new "dawn of cinematic rendering". They could have leapt forwards instead of meandering into the next cycle of marketing campaigns. Instead, ATI came up and did the leap, totally taking the wind out of Nvidia's sails.
I guess it just goes to show that without competition, the incumbent sees no reason or need to innovate. Why work hard and produce something new and clever, when you can eek out the old stuff and keep raking in the cash for minimal outlay?
It's that complacent, marketing-led, profit-above-all attitude from Nvidia that has got it into the position it is is now. It's why the fat and lazy Nvidia has just been demolished by the lean and hungry ATI. ATI had a lot to prove, a lot to do to turn around their second-string position. ATI had to do more than just eek out an incremental improvement in order come back from average-land. They had to think clever and out of the box, not just the brute force marketing and incremental clock-speed tweaks that Nvidia has always relied on.
Sure, we can talk about how people don't understand ASIC engineering, and why Nvidia can't magically fix NV3x, but that isn't the point. Nvidia is in the postition it is in *today* because of the choices it took as a company a couple of years back. Nvidia decided to be fat and lazy, and rely on marketing it's way to the top with nothing but "speed is king" in it's box of tricks.
Nvidia still acts like lying, cheating, and PR spin will see it through as it has done in the past. This time it won't. Nvidia has gone too far over the line, it's gone too long without a competative product - long enough for the mainstream to start to see ATI as the top dog and Nvidia as the second string manufacturer.
In that year of lying, Nvidia has blown away it's good name to protect a substandard product that has only just reached the shelves, and probably won't have much of a life six months from now. Was it worth it? Was it a good thing to do, even given that it was *all Nvidia could do* because of the poor choices it made two years ago?
Shouldn't Nvidia change their business and design models in the light of what has happened? Shouldn't they try to innovate in order to match or even attempt to overtake their competitors? Shouldn't they try to preserve their good name when they need it to sell their next products, instead of destroying it on the back of NV3x? Of course they should, but they decided to carry on as they are, and take the "lying and cheating" path instead.
IMO, Nvidia could have done so much more, both 3 years ago when they started designing their DX9 cards, and this year, when they had to deal with not having a competative product. Instead they gave us the minimum, the least - exactly what has made them look so much worse than their competitors and put them in the postition of showing themselves to be liars and cheats.
Why I'm trying to say here, is that nvidia needs to take responsibilty for the position it now finds itself in, and stop blaming others. It's not Valve's fault, or Futuremark's fault, or FRAP's fault, or DX9's fault. Nvidia needs to move forward, stop lying to it's customers, and honestly look towards changing itself so that it makes better products.
When people absolve Nvidia of the responsibility of it's actions today by saying "it's all they can do", it doesn't wash. Nvidia is the only one responsibe for it's current predicament, Nvidia is the only one that chose to lie and cheat instead of being honest about it's products and what they are trying to achieve. Other IHV's hold themselves up to higher standards of behaviour, and we expect them to. We should expect Nvidia to also match those standards of behaviour.
