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Comment by agumonkey | Hacker News Reader

Always interesting to think how Nvidia struggled for its first 2 generations of graphic chips nv1 and nv2 (partnered with SEGA) but made a first big dent in the market with nv3.

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TBH, at the time I was expecting PowerVR to make a big splash. I didn't see 3dfx to be as big - it was odd with add-on cards etc. I was also waiting and waiting for SGI to finally put something out there in PC space apart from Cobalt. It never happened. That company had it all and lost it all. Nvidia today is what SGI should've been. I suspect most of people from SGI work there now anyways (and/or ATI/AMD).

NVidia was founded by ex-SUN ex-AMD folks. 3dfx was founded by ex-SGI folks. SUN used to compete with SGI in the high-end graphics workstation space so in a sense NVidia consolidated them both. AMD on the other hand consolidated independent pioneers like ATI, Tseng Labs etc.

Sun was never a competition in graphics workstation much, but workstations yes. Also, don't forget ArtX. SGI people everywhere! Everywhere, except SGI. I'm still bitter about it, I loved that company. Not their prices though. So far ahead of their time, kind of like Amiga where budget was not a question.

Considering that 3dfx was built by ex SGI employees IIRC that's two failed ventures.

It's true that Nvidia is the SGI of the era.

I can remember growing up my Dad purchased a new Pentium 133, this must have been around 1995/1996. It was absolutely cutting edge machine at the time and had a "S3 trio" PCI card in it. I have vague memories of playing Quake on it and being blown away at the graphics. A few years later 3dFX Glide cards were cutting edge for gaming.

I started university around that time stopped following gaming/computer hardware scene but really felt to me like Nvidia came from absolutely nowhere.

The big "wow, things have changed" moment for me was back when I saw Nividia put up a giant booth/pavilion at CES, not by the computer or gaming folks, but in the automative hall (which had previously been something of a sideshow to the main CES halls).

I spent all my money on a nv3 chip. It was so fast that it made games easy. I was used to precompute mentally every move because of low fps and lag. It probably also changed how physics were simulated in old games (lower time resolution probably introduced wilder results).

nvidia felt like an odd company, it was small and unknown, unlike Ati or Matrox. But their chip were cheap and competitive with champion 3dfx.

Still impressive how they stretched markets from toys to the highest sophistication.

3dfx with vga passthrough were the real life changers thanks to advanced texture rendering. Still poly were not anti-aliased. It was a real paradigm change and captured a majority (>80%) of the market. If you remember the game Turok with and without Voodoo you lived that days :)

That was a huge improvement, unmatched by anything that came after. Maybe the move to multi-core cpus comes close.

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