That was my point. That Havok is not going to be making money through hardware sales (unless they get some payments for "Havok Certified GPUs").
yea
I'm stating though that both will be making money through software .
But why wouldn't they be expensive from the start? Don't you see the circular problem here? They are not Havok. They don't have a long list of customers (that I know of) that are paying for the software. They are entering the market from both sides: software and hardware. This hardware has to come from somewhere and it is going to cost money. If Intel, a company with a long history of producing chips and owning their own fabs, charges $25 for chipsets (more now) that are mass produced and this is a business they are regulating with their CPU sales, don't you think an up-and-comer will have reasearch costs, development cost, manufacturing costs, and distribution costs to cover? And with what? Income from their historically loyal developer fan base?
They might but why would devs support the hardware ? Consumers aren't going to go plop down 300-500$ on something that will work with one game .
However if they go in low and make small margins at the 200$ or under price range and get consumers used to buying these devices they can do what gpu makers have done , slowly ramp up the price .
However that happens once there is a reason to buy them. As I said it will be easier to get people to buy the cards if they are cheaper when fewer games are out . After awhile there will be enough that more and more devs will support it and thus consumers will be more willing to spend more moeny on it .
This has very little to do with pricing of AEGIA hardware, I think. The Havok/GPGPU threat will only determine how far down in the pricing they will have to go or if they utterly fail. This doesn't change the fact that they will have a lot of costs to cover.
Sure it does . Once you go north of 200$ you start getting into high end video cards and at the 300 and 400$ range many users will be better off getting a dual whatever set up that will work in more games for graphics and then be able to use the second card in gpuppu titles .
So aegia can't price that high as many users esp at the start will just go with a second video card as that will make the most sense .
Sure they have alot of money to make back but i'm sure they aren't planing on making it all back in day and i'm sure they want to be here for the long haul.
Think about Voodoo 1 when it was launched. It is a relative piece of junk compared to what AEGIA is proposing. Remember the price? Why not add some to that to compensate for inflation and we should begin to see that $200 sounds a bit far fetched.
When u compare it to what else that 200+ can buy you in pc hardware 200$ even sounds like a lot .
200$ is the diffrence between single core or dual core cpus , its the diffrence between a fast 256 meg card or a super fast 512 meg card .
When voodo came out it only competed against cpus and at the time putting a voodoo card in would improve tons of games and boost performance past what any cpu on the market could give .
If you put together how I see this, my viewpoint becomes clear:
Against the odds, I am optimistic that this could work. It's going to be expensive and not every game will support AEGIA (actually, very few I would think). So, it better be damned fast. And here we see the circular behavior again...it keeps on having to be faster and faster or it has nothing to offer...so it is going to be expensive.
To win they need to sell alot of cards and to do that u need cheap cards
