I remember a time when NVIDIA, ATI and 3dFX were neck and neck.
What ever happened?
It shows that the most important move is to simply stay in the game, not just maximize profits
Edit: added ATI which I just remembered!
What ever happened?
It shows that the most important move is to simply stay in the game, not just maximize profits
Edit: added ATI which I just remembered!
3dfx stagnated and fell behind due to bad management decisions. They seemed stuck on designing 3d accelerators like it was still 1996, which were just drawing triangles and doing texture mapping, while banking on higher clocks and adding multiple chips on board and even multiple cards in SLI to boost performance, while having the CPU take care of the rest in SW.
But it was 1999 already and Nvidia moved to graphics processing units (GPUs) which could also offload the CPU and do transform, lighting, triangle setup/clipping, MPEG2 motion compensation and a multi-pipeline rendering engine for more polygon thruput at same clocks, along with being fully DX7 compliant, all in a single chip.
The market decided that Nvidia's new direction is the future and not what 3dfx was doing. 3df tried to change course and catch up but it was too late, the GPU race was too cutthroat in those days. Nvidia was launching a new GPU generation every 6 months(!) instead of every 3 years like today, so a 6-12 month setback was a guaranteed death sentence no matter what you did.
Also, one of 3dfx biggest blunders was trying to become a board maker themselves by spending a lot of cash buying a board manufacturer, which emptied their bank accounts and angered their other board partners who now saw them as unfair competitors so they moved to making ATI/Nvidia boards instead.
>It shows that the most important move is to simply stay in the game, not just maximize profits
How do you stay in the game if you go bankrupt because your products aren't competitive?
https://www.acquired.fm/episodes/nvidia-the-gpu-company-1993...
https://www.acquired.fm/episodes/nvidia-the-machine-learning...
CUDA itself is also a non-negligible factor in their success.
If you look at the same landscape from AMD's side, it's lackluster to say the least. And they're only now trying to catch up... And they have to make it CUDA compatible!
Nvidia won on the tools side, the GPUs aren't necessarily faster, but the only way to use them easily is CUDA.
For 3dfx, the Voodoo 3 happened.
Whereas previous Voodoo cards were sold by a large variety of OEMs (like Diamond or ELSA), 3dfx decided to make the Voodoo 3 graphic card on their own. It was a perfectly fast and capable card, but also expensive (for its time), not as easy to get as OEM cards were, couldn't do 32-Bit textures (16-Bit only), and didn't support AGP Texturing.
nVidia's TNT2 was a bit slower, but not by much, and thanks to the many OEMs making cards, you could pick one up anywhere and usually pretty cheap. (Just make sure you're not getting the M64 by accident. But even then, that one might've been a good way to get a capable 3D graphics card for cheap).
3dfx was still competitive here and probably the best gaming card, but they had clearly bitten off more than they could chew, and it looks to me that their R&D just didn't produce anything else than "Voodoo 2 but a bit faster and delayed multiple times".
When nVidia released the Geforce 256 (Hardware Transform and Lighting!), that was it. Both the Voodoo 4 and 5 were duds (though seeing 3dfx's complete brute force approach with the never-released Voodoo 5 6000 still brings a smile to my face), they couldn't get other products to the market quick enough, and went bankrupt starting in mid 2000.
I don't even think it was about "GPU" stuff: The first programmable shader card (and thus "GPU") was the Geforce 3 in 2001, at which point 3dfx was already out of money and without perspective.
I'm not sure if they could have been saved if Sega would have chosen them for the Dreamcast (seeing how the Dreamcast sunk Sega's console business) and it might have been possible to save 3dfx still, but realistically, the one-two punch of the Voodoo 3 and Geforce 256 killed them.
That's how my parents got scammed when I asked them for a PC for Christmas. Yes, I got one with a TNT2 M64 because that was on sales in Christmas 2000/2001. Childhood ruined.
Cg made programmability of shaders widely accessible, since C was (20 years ago) widely known?