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Comment by varispeed | Hacker News Reader

In my opinion they set their prices too low and have not invested enough in fabs. The demand now way exceeds their capability to manufacture and unfortunately the only way to "restart" is to set prices to a level that will allow building the capacity to satisfy the demand at lower price point. They can try doing those PR tricks, but they'll just waste even more money without addressing the problem.

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NVIDIA doesn’t own any fabs, they don’t really have a choice.

Interestingly. I was watching some interviews with the founders of 3DFX, and when asked about why the company died, their straight answer was: because they bought a fab.

I thought it was because 3DFX started to compete with their own hardware partners?

3dfx was a chipset vendor - whether or not they fab their own chips shouldn't matter all-that-much: it's who makes and sells the boards that counts. The Voodoo1 and early Voodoo2 cards were made, packaged, and sold by hardware partners like Creative, Diamond, etc - but with the Voodoo3 and later SKUs of the Voodoo2, 3dfx did it all by themselves, so why would the miffed Creative Labs and Diamond lend their sales channel expertise to 3dfx? PC OEMs like Dell, HP, etc also probably had deals with Creative for their Sound Blaster, and it wouldn't surprise me if Creative politely asked them to not buy 3dfx-made boards in exchange for a sweet discount on Sound Blaster cards...

Yes, exactly this, they bought STB Systems and began manufacturing their own boards. I wasn't sure how much of the manufacturing process this entailed.

Regardless of the competition with hardware partners, GeForce 256 blew it with nothing on the 3dfx side to respond with.

Fun to read discussion here: https://m.slashdot.org/story/7743

If they raised prices they'd still make more money, rather than the money going to scalpers, and they could offer TSMC more money for more fab time, which TSMC could take into account when planning future fabs.

As far as I can tell the reason they don't raise prices is that the PR hit they'd take from all the gamers hating them for it would be a bigger deal than the additional revenue.

They went to Samsung instead to get more capacity this gen.

The had to reduce prices on the 3xxx series due to poor sales on the 2xxx series, it just so happened that crypto growth was happening at the same time. It was a bad situation, but raising prices doesn't solve the problem.

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