Graphics card maker Point of View goes bankrupt

Yesterday a Dutch court declared Netherlands-based video card maker Point of View bankrupt. The company was founded in 2000, they were primarily known as an NVIDIA AIB partner but in recent years they also offered a variety of other products, including laptops, smartphones, tablets, and accessories. The company had offices around the world but derived most of it sales from Europe.

Perhaps the lack of news coming from Point of View was a good indicator that something was amiss. For example, the company didn't launch any NVIDIA Pascal-based video cards and even their GeForce 900 lineup is quite limited. Two years ago the company scored quite a lot of bad press after the discovery of hundreds of fake Point of View GeForce GTX 660 video cards that featured the much slower GeForce GT 440 GPUs. At the time, Point of View claimed it was duped by one of its Chinese manufacturers.

While we don't know the exact reasons behind the Point of View bankruptcy, I think lack of innovation could be one of the prime drivers behind the demise of the company. I remember Point of View mostly from its rebadged NVIDIA reference cards, they often had low pricing but the company rarely offered enough added value versus the offerings from larger rivals like ASUS, Gigabyte and MSI. The same thing probably happened in the tablet market, it's a very competitive market so rebadging a couple of Asian-made tablets isn't going to cut it.

The only Dutch video card brand left is Club3D, but a look at their website reveals things may not be that rosy either. Club3D launched a new adapter earlier today, but they have still not launched any AMD Polaris-based video cards.