Introduction
Nvidia could call itself the Intel of graphics, but maybe that doesn’t tell the whole story. In the meantime, the company is on the leading edge of the graphics technology curve, and is gung-ho on the workstation market.
Nvidia is the hottest company in graphics. Just check out the company’s recent third quarter results. They’re making money, and growing revenues at a very impressive rate. As for Vegas, the buzz surrounding Nvidia at Comdex was on the company’s workstation version of GeForce, the Quadro. Elsa of Germany has the Quadro in its Gloria II product, and is gunning to get back into the professional space after being left out for much of the last two years as a result of its main supplier, 3Dlabs, going vertical. Before I go any further, I’d like to define the market at the high end, as I see it.
First of all, I don’t really like the term workstation. It’s anachronistic, and doesn’t really reflect the state of the PC market. I don’t mind calling the proprietary systems of a Sun, or SGI, workstations, but in the PC space I don’t think you can be so cavalier in making a distinction. The way most PC OEMs seem to make the distinction is whether a system ships with one or two CPU sockets. Any dual CPU ready system is a workstation. Of course, the number of actual desktops that have more than one CPU (I’m not talking about servers at all) is very small. Fine. However, there are also a number of high-end PC systems, a lot of which do not have dual CPU motherboards, but are being used for professional graphics applications, such as 3D Studio MAX, or AutoCAD. That’s why I prefer to think of the high-end of the graphics market as being a professional graphics market.
Once we get to this level it is safe to say that the vast majority of users, over ninety percent, are happy to use a mainstream graphics board. A small fraction, perhaps no more than three hundred thousand users, would be willing to fork a couple of thousand dollars for a product from Intense3D, 3Dlabs, Diamond, or HP. In the past, Matrox has succeeded in capturing the larger audience of professional graphics users, while 3Dlabs dominated the high-end, although Intergraph (now using the Intense3D brand for its graphics products) had the performance leadership with a high-end rendering and geometry acceleration combo. Presently, Matrox seems to be building its products to order, and dissatisfaction in the channel and among OEMs has created a sterling opportunity for Nvidia and Elsa.
That’s not to say that others having been taking advantage of that opportunity. 3Dlabs, and Diamond with their Fire GL line, have been hovering in the $600-700 price range with very capable OpenGL accelerators blurring the lines at the mid-range and high-end of the professional graphics market. Quadro may blur the lines even further by coming in below 3Dlabs and Diamond, and dragging GeForce behind it to cover the lower end of the professional graphics market.
Merciless OpenGL
The most interesting thing about all this is that the professional graphics market is very aware of quality, and OpenGL is merciless in its requirements of hardware. If Nvidia, working with Elsa, can define a role for itself in this segment of the market, it filters through the whole product line, and groundwork for its future technologies. Here’s how it could work. Nvidia hasn’t always been the best at visual quality. Sometimes the company has been lax in the visual quality department, but it has made up for it in speed. Secondly, the professional graphics market can take advantage of both the geometry components of Nvidia’s architecture, but it can also guide in the area of visual quality. It’s easy to see a nice progression in Nvidia’s technology from this point on.
Nvidia can start at much higher point in the graphics technology curve with future products, based on its experiences in the professional market, and trickle down its technology into the mainstream. In doing this, the company can afford to invest in more expensive, and more expansive chipsets, as the NV20 is rumored to be, and bring them into the mainstream much quicker than any of its competitors. Sort of like Intel has gotten used to doing with each iteration of the x86 architecture, and something which AMD has finally managed to cotton onto with the Athlon. In some ways, Nvidia could be taking its first steps into another generation of graphics controllers by spearheading Quadro. Frankly, the gaming market is not going to give any of the graphics chip companies the kind of cutting edge arena, and revenues, they need to make the leap to future generations. That’s because of the costs of designing and building ever more complex architectures. So, we are seeing the cyclical nature of the graphics industry in action. Consumer markets have driven the development of 3D graphics up to this point, and Nvidia may be picking up on a change in cycles by moving into the professional graphics arena. Just bear in mind that high resolution graphics was primarily driven by the PC CAD market in the late eighties. Actually, it was just one application, AutoCAD. The impact of consumers had been felt in the cycle’s preceding AutoCAD, and after it. Before, there was the need to get color and graphics on the PC, something that the early game consoles were doing very well in comparison. That’s where Hercules came in with the MDA (monochrome display adapter). Then in the early nineties came Windows to drive the mainstream graphics market, and subsequently, the multimedia CD-ROM business of the mid-nineties, culminating in the evolution of DirectX on Windows 95. Now, we are shifting back to applications like AutoCAD, Pro Engineer, Softimage, and 3D Studio MAX, as well as PhotoShop, and a host of other graphics design tools.
Previous: COMDEX/Fall ’99 – ATI could grow to $5 billion
Next: COMDEX/Fall ’99 – 3dfx – back to its roots
