Originally Posted by the wizard
[q]$20+ million in revenue is $20+ million in revenue.[/q]
Yes, but profit = revenue - costs.
If they put $40 million into development (I\'m not saying they did) and you have $20 million in revenue to show for it, you have negative profit (you are LOSING money) and your shareholders aren\'t going to like you anymore.
I don\'t know how much they put into development, but if they were making money on the deal, Nvidia would not have litigation pending.

I don\'t have the details, but knowing Micr0$haft\'s history, how excessively aggressive they are and how badly they want to own everything (including the gaming crown); its clear that they aren\'t doing anybody any favors in the process of making a console that has an upfront loss attached to it, hoping to make money on game titles.

M$ isn\'t making money on the consoles - they knew that going in.
They cost more to make than they are selling them for. But now they have a presence in the gaming market.

This is no doubt a very big launch for the company. It is their first product using 3dfx technology. I'm sure the GeForce FX Ultra cards will command top dollar but the NV31 and NV34 products should really bring some ATI converts back into the fold.

Nvidia's making a bold move here by handling the manufacturing of boards but this is a bold product. It is surely a a chipset that will usher in a new age of near-cinematic gaming on the PC. ATI's Radeon 9700 Pro successor may be faster but it will also have to be feature-rich as speed is no longer enough for graphics cards. We'll se what follows in the coming months.

$20+ million in revenue is $20+ million in revenue. if that makes you sad, so be it.

I'd like to know how the hell that happens that someone posts something and suddenly the page is wider.

nVidia grosses something like 500 million a year. Xbox is nothing they can rely on when they invest massive amounts of money researching and producing video cards. If they lose the video card market, they have to downsize or capsize. ;]

http://srd.yahoo.com/S=2766679:WS1/R=2/K=nvidia+loss/H=0/T=10428472...F=c9375df03b35153dbe640b1ad9eebd17/*http://www.t...[com]

Originally Posted by the wizard
Sativa,

[q]they are just run of the mill gf3\'/q]

I don\'t believe that is the case. I don\'t remember where I read it (probably that british tech site theinquirer.net), but Nvidia is actually losing money on the xbox video deal and was suing Micr0$haft over the debacle. That would indicate that more money went into development than they are receiving in revenue from xbox sales. Either tat or the revenue they are receiving is such a small part of their bottom line as to be negligible and thus hardly worth the development effort put into it.
While the xbox video performance may be comparable to the GeForce3 line, I doubt they actually took the GeForce3 and modified it for the xbox. If that were the case, they wouldn\'t be bickering about losing money on the deal and risking losing a cash cow to ATI.
No one makes any real money on xbox hardware (except the xbox Linux crowd - dirt cheap PC\'s!!!!!).
I don\'t have any links to support that, but from the articles I\'ve read, Micr0$haft is sticking it to everyone involved with the xbox to try to get the price down.
I\'m not a huge gamer, but I have half a mind (I\'m not finished yet . . .) to buy a PS3 just to oppose the hegemony from Redmond.

On a different (happier) note:
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=7248

http://www.bestbuy.com/detail.asp?e=11205639&m=488&cat=540&scat=157...

The price of the GeForce FX is $399.99.
So much for the gossip engines . . .

especially considering they are just run of the mill gf3's. would you turn down $20 million for a product you've already made? lol

3.9 million xboxs (by the end of june... which was half a year ago) * 5$ = 19.5 million dollars

$20 million profit by the end of June... yeah you're right thats nothing.

nVidia makes like $5 profit each time an xbox sells. Not exactly something they can rely on, when they're spending massively to make video cards.

I should have said "by the end of June"

dauntless, according to http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/2149519.stm Microsoft sold 3.9 million xboxes at the end of June. its february now, you do the math.

You call this not selling well?

Originally Posted by dauntless
My question is why does Nvidia have to do the manufacturing of the cards? Is it because they are afraid that 3rd party companies may screw things up? Somehow that doesn\'t feel right. Is it because the board is very hard to manufacture? Well, with a 12layer PCB that\'s pretty much a given. So what\'s the real reason Nvidia is doing this? Afterall, they pioneered the concept of just being chip/chipset designers, not board manufacturers. It was one of the aces up their sleeves against ATI who couldn\'t release video cards with differing selling points or prices.

So why would Nvidia do this? The main plausible answer I can think of is that the board truly is incredibly diffucult to make and needs to be supervised by one controlling party. This would greatly explain the incredible cost and the constant delays.

No matter what the reason, Nvidia is in big doo-doo if ATI\'s R350 can perform in the same league in the same price range (or better). Sure, Nvidia can rely to some degree on chipsets, but Xbox isn\'t selling that hot, and Nforce2\'s are just getting out the door.

I really wonder what happened to Nvidia. They were doing so well, then they missed a product cycle, and what\'s worse, the product they have coming out seems grossly expensive, and may not outpace ATI\'s latest and greatest...so in essence, they might be missing two product cycles. It really is a 3dfx deja vu. However, I think Nvidia would have to flub up at least, maybe two more cycles to go bankrupt, so they still have a good chance. Plus, while we only have some good ideas about the performance of the GeForceFX, any speculations on the R350 and RV350 are still up in the air (including when they will come out). So I\'m not going to write off Nvidia just yet.

I just wish that A) they\'d open source their linux drivers, and B) stop pushing Cg for a pixel shader solution. In that regard, ATI\'s RenderMonkey seems more API neutral as opposed to Nvidia\'s solution which is trying to force a more proprietary scheme (the Cg language itself which of course will be more optimized for Nvidia driver\'s naturally). So I hope that RenderMonkey succeeds, or at least OpenGl 2.0\'s HLSL gets adopted. I\'d actually think that with ATI having the lead for a DX9 product, that hopefully RenderMonkey has gained some ground on Cg.

It looks as if nVidia and ATI could be getting some competition in the high-end graphics card arena. S3 plans on introducing a new GPU with 8 pixel pipelines. The GPU, currently referred to as "DeltaChrome," should theoretically be able to process 2.4 gigapixels per second. It should also be DirectX 9-compliant, and apparently exceeds the DX9 shading techniques. Deltachrome will come with a built-in HDTV encoder, and will be fabricated by TSMC on a .13 micron process. Moreover, the chip will be able to go into "idle" mode, during which time it will only consume half a watt. The first Deltachrome chips will be mobile versions, but a desktop version will be introduced later in the year. This is the third company to claim to have a GPU that could effectively threaten the nVidia/ATI hegemony. Matrox's Parhelia and ST Micro's upcoming Kyro 4 both appear to be semi-competitive GPUs. Although the Deltachrome looks impressive on paper, it is unlikely that this part will be able to seriously challenge the 9700 or the GeForce FX. By the time this GPU arrives for the desktop, the ATI R400 and nVidia NV35 will probably both be out. nVidia and ATI have multiple design teams and hundreds of engineers. Competitors like Matrox and S3 generally only have one design team, which makes it difficult to introduce new products at the same rate as nVidia and ATI. At this point there are increasingly formidable barriers to entry for any new company that wants to compete in the high-end consumer graphics card business.
http://www.geek.com/news/geeknews/2003Jan/wbg20030109018090.htm

ATI owns #60. They own his family. Heck, they own his whole gene pool!!!!!! OWNED!!!

[q]Seriously though, why is everyone so impatient about this card?[/q]
Because ATi sucks.

nVidia had better hurry up and release something soon... without the GFFX, I can't take advantage of all my DirectX 9 games!!

Seriously though, why is everyone so impatient about this card?

Droopy:
A volkswagon? Not a beetle I hope. Next thing you will be switching to the Mac. :)

I wonder when we will get processor limited with graphics cards.

Do you guys think its possible for them to advance that much faster than your main processor?

I know Geribil #52, don't think I can handle that plain color PCB stuff. If there isn't a red colored PCB Geforce FX, Nvidia can kiss muh ass!

What do you mean what's wrong with me, 4200 overclocked is hella fast :P.

upgrade a 8500 to a 4200? what's wrong with you?

I hope it's Silver, then it will match my new Volkswagen.

"The GeForce FX may, in fact, only be available in one PCB color."

OMG !

I think this would be a boon to all those companies that used to buy just chips and had to make their own boards... to get a board out to the consumer there is less work they have to do on the card

of course there is the opposite side of the spectrum... it of course means there will be less differentiation between different makes

i think in some way, Nvidia blames the companies that buy their GPUs to make their cards, for the companies loss of market dominance, thus this is maybe a tactic for quality control

problem is, the cost is too high, and the competition got to the market first, and the GeForce FX doesn't offer enough of a substantial increase in performance over top of the line ATI cards to warrant the price difference

Nvidia I think is starting to lose out on all sectors of video cards, high end, low end, workstation, etc... and they may be pointing fingers and desparatly trying to fix their spiral, while shifting the blame elsewhere

the blame is simply this...

Nvidia lost the lead in the technology race, they are now a few steps behind

Nvidia is definitely losing the lead in the price point race

Nvidia maybe doesn't seem to realize it'll only get worse once Matrox, PowerVR, and Xabre release their products

Nvidia needs to go with the current, not fight against the tide... glub glub

Originally Posted by davidwright
\"NVIDIA to handle NV30 production\"

I think that it is a case that nVidia has had to push the performance envelope in the design of this new product, in order to compete with the 9700.

The new GeForce FX could make or break them, so they probably decided to effectively overclock the final product, so that it would enter the market as high a performer as possible.

No room for manufacturing mistakes.

NVidia's last several top-of-the-line cards for the home user were all in the $450 to $499 range at their debut. $499 to $699 for the new monster, particularly considering the type of memory used, may be in line with NVidia's plans.

ATI's Radeon 9700 Pro appeared with a retail price of $399 in August 2002, but it was down to under $350 from on-line vendors almost immediately.

47, hmm lets see, the GF3 was pretty f$#$ing expensive, remember it was up to over $600 when first introduced.

AG46 - When was the last time you saw a $499 video card besides workstation video cards? Ultra highend would be a workstation video card bases on my standard, dont know about other people....and I believe some of Nvidias Elsa workstation video cards are cheaper then the GFFX.

Its not just the price but the timing, but the time GFFX is ready, so will the R350, and by the time summer roles around R400 is out there waiting. So, $399 for a GFFX by summer time, but then you might be able to pick up a R400 for probably the same price if ATi, still likes to keep prices low.

That $700 price is incorrect guys, sheesh. The high end ultra will probably be introduced at $499 and will go down in time. By summer I expect it to go down to around $399 if it follows the same path as the Geforce2 Ultra. Personally, I'll either keep my current 8500 or upgrade to a 4200 if I see one that drops below the $100 price mark.

oh my. Nvidia to make them to control 'quality' of an unready product that shouldn't be foisted upon the masses in its current form.

Waiting for NV31, 34. And then waiting some more. 'Cause I'm never buying a card that's more than $150 US dollah. I don't care if it slices and dices. I'd rather buy a console. Or a new computer at these prices...