RussSchultz said:
Doomtrooper said:
Why does a company have to possess huge cash reserves to make a superior product ?? Anybody remember a Little company named AMD that released the fastest X86 processor right out from under the shadow of the Cash Cow Intel ??
Money has little to do with it, its the people that make the difference in any company. People are a companies most important asset.
And if the Athlon hadn't worked, AMD would have gone under.
Money has everything to do with making a superior product. It buys and keeps the good engineers, feeds them with quality tools, and reduces pressure to get it right the first time or die. Management is more willing to be risky, react in a situation when things are getting out of hand, staff it correctly, etc. It also allows people NOT to take short cuts that bit back in the long run. Mind you, its not the only reason, but...
I can almost guarantee that money is the reason BitBoys isn't going anywhere. Maybe they've got a terrific idea, but without the money to bring it to fruition they're just another failed startup.
I disagree to some degree, here.
As it concerns Matrox, there really isn't any question that they have good engineers. Where I think reality deviates from that simple view of the graphics 3D world, besides the ever-present possibility of an "ingenious" discovery/idea, is that while the chips have gotten more "complex", the goals of design have become somewhat simpler.
Namely, we've backed off of the specific feature hardware design road (add this feature, add this feature, add this feature, make up a feature and try to get people to support it) and moved more towards a more general purpose and easy to target road (make it support these instructions, any way you want). This is reflected by both what DX 9 is (or will be according to M$) compared to even DX 8.1, let alone DX 7, and the goals of OpenGL 2.0.
I think this shift was apparent ahead of time to many graphics card companies, and they have the time to spend in shifting to this more direct goal. I think we are seeing the result of that in the string of announcements that have been made for this year.
Given this, it seems easy for me to believe that Matrox, which hasn't been spending a lot of money on spreading out into other fields that nVidia and ATi have done, has had the time and resources (even with not selling a lot of cards outside of OEM/business, and their specific niche applications that may be fairly lucrative) to concentrate on creating a powerful design in the current 3D graphics environment.
Also, they haven't had to participate in the consumer segment price wars (which, for example, seem to severely affect the NV17 design project profitability, for one thing), nor do they have to contend with legacy costs and snags for this new architecture, since the previous architecture has been out so long it is "done".
I think these factors make Matrox's position more favorable than you seem to think.
This leaves concerns such as driver development that we won't be able to evaluate until the product ships, but they have had experience in overcoming driver challenges already...and the new APIs will make this easier, not harder.
As for BitBoys...well, I can't say I disagree with you at all. They have never really been a graphics card manufacturer, let alone made a profit (well, the BitBoys have probably made a ton of money, but I'm referring to actual product sales). The thing there is it really isn't possible to guess whether someone would be willing to foot their bill...either someone is or isn't, and someone who hasn't seen how viable their design may be (that would fit you and I) can't really evaluate the likelihood of that. The other thing is that the "concerns suchs as driver development", etc, are much more of a concern for BitBoys.
Of course, both nVidia and ATi have had the opportunity to dedicate resources in the same manner towards this goal, and they are being unveiled this year...it just remains to be seen how "smart" they were about their approach compared to Matrox.
MIO
EDIT: I never even answered type's question!
For me, it is displacement mapping, once someone actually uses that feature. Upon initial release, I
hope it will be high performance with no compromises anywhere in
any aspect of the image quality.
