XBox Revenues Rise 20%

Posted on October 24, 2003 by Ron

Microsoft officials have posted slightly better than expected figures for the company’s first quarter results. Unusually sales were boosted from outside of the company’s core business, in particular servers and MSN. For the period ended September 30 sales rose 6% from the same period last year to $8.22 billion. Excluding employee stock-based compensation, which have only been reported this quarter, the company earned 30 cents a share – one cent higher than analysts had expected. Net income also increased to $2.61 billion, up from $2.04 billion last year.

Importantly the company saw a 20% revenue growth in its home and entertainment unit, which includes the Xbox, with $581 million in revenue generated. Nevertheless shares in the company still fell once the figures were announced, due to news that fewer large corporate contracts for software had been agreed than expected. This fall in contracts is largely due to a number of high-profile security scares involving Microsoft products.

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NVIDIA comes on board the OpenGL ARB

Posted on October 10, 2003 by Ron

NVIDIA is now one of nine permanent board members, the other being 3Dlabs, ATI, Evans & Sutherland, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Intel, and SGI. NVIDIA had been a term member. Apple, Dell Computer, Matrox, and Sun are term members. A term member still has a vote, but is on 1-year membership. This is a bit like the UN, as the permanent members vote (in closed sessions) on whom to admit as a permanent or term member. It comes as a bit of a surprise that NVIDIA wasn’t a permanent member before this. It also brings to mind “why now” questions. There was some contention between the ARB and NVIDIA over Cg and the GL Shading Language, with NVIDIA pushing an NVIDIA-centric Cg featureset and some others pushing anything but Cg.

Nonvoting participants include (as of June 2002) Alt. software, Crytek GmbH, Discreet, Empire Interactive, Ensemble Studios, Epic Games, GLSetup (which tells you this is an old list), id Software, Imagination Technologies (PowerVR), Intelligraphics, Micron, NEC, Obsession Development, Quantum3D, RAD Game Tools, Raven Software, S3/Diamond Multimedia, SiS, Spinor GmbH, Tungsten Graphics, University of Central Florida, Verant Interactive, and Xi Graphics. Microsoft quit the ARB to focus on DirectX issues.

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ATI releases RenderMonkey 1.0

Posted on October 1, 2003 by Ron

If you’re an artist leaning shader programming, a programmer interesting in having a shader testbed, or just interested in shader programming, ATI has released RenderMonkey 1.0. (To find out what RenderMonkey can do, look here.) According to ATI RenderMonkey has undergone a major rewrite since the V0.9 beta. These changes have greatly improved the stability and usability of RenderMonkey and also provided a much more developer friendly framework for the introduction of the RenderMonkey SDK. Find out more at the ATI site here. You’ll need the DirectX9.0b. The following features have changed or been added since the V0.9 beta:

  • Completely rewritten preview window including a more extensive Trackball user interface.
  • Completely rewritten HLSL and Assembly editors with improved user interface and syntax highlighting.
  • Support for REFRAST
  • Additions to existing set of RenderMonkey special variables giving user control and adding functionality such as random number generation.
  • Addition of Camera object types allowing for per-pass camera parametersto be stored in the workspace.
  • Display of HLSL disassembly.
  • Addition of many more HLSL examples
  • Improved error checking and reporting.
  • Automatic mipmap generation for renderable textures.

Improved stability.

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Valve’s “Steam” set to go live.

Posted on September 8, 2003 by Ron

Valve prepares to release its new gaming engine, “Steam”. Essentially a platform for games of all types – as well as an integrated solution for a number of tasks. Whether it’s delivering new content (new maps, mods, skins, full versions of game, etc), managing version control (no more patches) or handling anti-cheating measures (it can check your version whenever the developer wishes, preventing cheaters from hacking the code), Steam is going to be big news. Either for the technical standards it’s sure to set, or, as the Spong states, the new subscription model that Valve is taking (in an attempt to maximize earnings) by offering “premium” content.

“The Steam Beta has delivered several VALVe games and popular Half-Life MODs to over 300,000 gamers, and will come to a close Tuesday evening (Pacific Daylight Time). The first full version of Steam, VALVe’s broadband platform for the delivery and management of digital content, will launch at 11 am PDT on Wednesday. Set up installers for the full version, which will be free of charge to existing Half-Life and Counter-Strike players, will be available from www.steampowered.com and leading game sites. When Steam is official, a valid CD-Key will be required to play through Steam. It appears that Valve will soon be replacing the WonID system of user authentication that Half-Life has used since the very beginning with Steam. A valid CD-Key will be required to play through Steam.”

This means that you will have to own a copy of Half-Life, Counter-Strike, or any other product that includes a WON CD-Key after the beta resets in order to play on the new Steam-based network.

“Set up installers for the full version, which will be free of charge to existing Half-Life and Counter-Strike players, will be available from www.steampowered.com and leading game sites. Anyone interested in hosting the installer or becoming a Steam Service Provider, please email biz@steampowered.com.”

For those of you wondering what the big deal is, consider this; Since its 1998 launch, “Half-Life” and its various add-on packs (including mods such as “Counter-Strike” and and the fiendishly original “Natural Selection”) have sold more than 8 million copies worldwide according to Valve. “We’ve learned a lot from our experiences with the mod community and with Counter-Strike and Day of Defeat,” said Valve’s Gabe Newell. “Half-life 2 will be a much better platform for mod authors than Half-life 1.”

“Steam is a broadband business platform. With it, we can market and have direct communication with customers, sales and distribution, and have customer service and support. It uses a high-performance distributed file system for fast, scalable content delivery. You only download what you need and when you need it. It’s faster and cheaper than CDs and lastly, no more patches.”

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NVIDIA completes acquisition of MediaQ

Posted on September 2, 2003 by Ron
NVIDIA corp. acquired privately held wireless/mobile device graphics accelerator chip manufacturer MediaQ for about $US70 million. MediaQ, was launched in 1997 with backing from National Semiconductor, Weston Presidio Capital, Summit Accelerator Fund, Infineon Technologies, El Dorado Ventures and ViVentures. MediaQ sells its semiconductors and complementary software, API’s and drivers for major mobile operating systems (Microsoft PocketPC and SmartPhone, Palm, Symbian) to the main suppliers of mobile phones and PDAs including Mitsubishi, Siemens, DBTel, Dell, HP, Palm, Philips, Sharp, and Sony.

Not only has NVIDIA been using its muscle to move into the workstation market as of late, they now have the means to move into the hot mobile graphics market, apparently having something better to do than pine over letting the XBoxNext slip away. In all a very shrewd marketing move, particularly if they can sell 10’s or even 100’s millions of inexpensive graphics chips. Imagine if your phone or PDA had the power of a TNT2 driving its graphics – now that would be awesome! “As clever as Nvidia is, they probably couldn’t develop the same type of technology that MediaQ has in a reasonable time frame,” said Jon Peddie of Jon Peddie Research, Tiburon, Calif. “A company like Nvidia that makes big, powerful processors with millions of transistors does have a hard time scaling it down into something that’s small and doesn’t consume a lot of power.”

During a conference call with analysts NVIDIA’s president and chief executive Jen-Hsun Huang stated “The transition from 2G to 2.5G and 3G phones will drive the growth of high-resolution color displays and high-resolution cameras, creating demand for full-featured, low-power multimedia chips.” Huang estimated that of the 400 million to 500 million handsets expected to ship this year, the number with color displays could exceed 190 million, up from 54 million last year. Huang expects the acquisition to make NVIDIA a one-stop supplier of graphics and multimedia chips for the PC, consumer, and wireless-mobile markets.
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Intel, NVIDIA, ATI account for 80% of the GPU market for Q2 – 45% of that DX9 capable

Posted on August 15, 2003 by Ron

XBitlabs reports some Mercury Research results for Q2 graphics market share from Q1. The big winner is Intel (even before they release the fricken Grantsdale chipset) increasing share from 27% to 32% – due to the integrated P4 chipsets. ATI increased from 20% to 21%, and NVIDIA fell from 31% to 27%. The report also said that NVIDIA had 60% of the DirectX 9 market share. Not bad for a company that botched its first DirectX 9 product release, although it seem that most of these were entry level (GeForceFX 5200) components. Still, it goes a long way to verify NVIDIA’s strategy of shipping only DirectX 9 capable products in its latest lineup. That leaves ATI with 40% of the DirectX market, though those are where most of the high end cards went. This roughly means 45% of the Q2 graphics market share was DirectX 9 capable cards.

The remaining 20% of the graphics market went mostly to SiS/XGI. Matrox Graphics, Trident Microsystems (now sold to XGI), S3 Graphics/VIA, Silicon Motion and 3Dlabs now occupy very small market shares.

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Xbox Next to have ATI GPU’s

Posted on August 15, 2003 by Ron

Well, that explains the $US18 million listed as a “deferred revenue associated with an unannounced contract” that showed up on ATI’s books last quarter. This apparently was a prepayment for R&D associated with developing the graphics chips for the next-gen Xbox. The deal was announced Thursday (Aug. 14th) and wraps up a year of negotiation. It seems that ATI has learned from NVIDIA’s bitter experience dealing with an 800 pound gorilla (read about that here). ATI’s agreement is royalty based, where ATI gets a slice of every Xbox2 sold, as opposed to NVIDIA’s deal as a subcontractor to Microsoft. Microsoft will also subsidize ATI’s research costs. This seemed NVIDIA’s deal to lose, and even with the happy happy sound bites from Microsoft’s Robbie Bach – “We selected ATI after reviewing the top graphics technologies in development and determining that ATI’s technical vision fits perfectly with the future direction of Xbox”, NVIDIA apparently wasn’t willing to be too flexible to make a deal with Microsoft – even though it accounted for up to 20% of NVIDIA’s sales over the last two years. Guess they really didn’t like having to do that arbitration thing. ATI should still be wary, NVIDIA also got an advance – $US200 million – and put 200+ engineers on the Xbox team (and then missed the initial deadline).

“After the way the first Xbox went, I would view NVIDIA’s involvement with the next Xbox as a negative,” said Joe Osha, a senior analyst at Merrill Lynch. Osha also stated that ATI could get $US35 million in Xbox revenues in 2005. Osha expects ATI will reap $25 million to $35 million in royalty revenues (about 5 to 8 cents additional earnings per share) in 2005, assuming a Christmas 2005 roll out for the Xbox2.

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XGI maps out strategy

Posted on August 15, 2003 by Ron

No one ever said that the consumer video graphics market was banal. Extreme Graphics Inovation (XGI) is, according to president Chris Lin, moving quickly to establish itself in the graphics chip market. The company aims to break even in the shortest possible time and become a very competitive, highly profitable graphics chip designer within three years. Saying that its strengths are in R&D and cost structure, XGI hopes to use a “high-profit, strong-competitive-strength strategy” and not engage in a price war. XGI was spun off from SiS in June, and acquired the notebook graphics unit of established player Trident – allowing XGI to enjoy a $US3 million revenue in July. The Trident acquisition also gave XGI a boost in attracting talent for its research and sales and marketing teams. XGI plans to maintain Trident’s product lines and customer base and will release a series of low-end, medium-range and high-end graphics chips by year-end, including a new generation of chips in September (rumored to be the DX9 capable Xabre2 series). XGI has signed distribution agreements with World Peace Industrial (WPI), Fullerton Technologies and Siltrontech Electronics, which are among the largest IT supply side distributors in Asia.

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