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Comment by bigyabai | Hacker News Reader

It panned out great. 3DFX filed for bankruptcy less than 18 months later, and Nvidia could pivot from designing raster chips to considering CUDA's architecture.

It's not like 3DFX was the first GPU vendor. Nvidia saw the opportunity to be the first true GPGPU vendor, and they beat their competitors.

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IBM shipped the first PC GPU (the Image Adapter/A, 1989) following on the first PC 2D accelerator (the 8514/A, 1987). There was zero benefit to being first. 3dfx had the first mass market, cheap GPU in 1996.

ATI (AMD) in 1989 copied the unpatentable parts of the 8514/A, improved it, and went on to dominate 2D accelerators.

nVidia’s first 3D card was a complete flop. They did not achieve success for years.

Nvidia is in the right place at the right time.

We're talking about GPGPU products, not raster GPUs. I cleared that up pretty well in my last comment.

The IA/A was general purpose.

not to be _that_ guy, but S3 was the dominant force in 3D. ATI was nowhere to be seen with their Mach/Rage crap. It was an S3 era, and then seemingly out of nowhere 3dfx swept in with Voodoo (not seemingly though - 3dfx came out from imploding SGI). Only a bit later Nvidia, after it recovered from NV1 fiasco, brute forced relentlessly from Riva 128 to TNT to TNT2 to Geforce 256 which broke 3dfx (along with their lack of business sense) and had Nvidia bought them. ATI did their 2D schtick only during that timeline while S3 stumbled with Virge and ATI didn't come as a threat until Radeon; After they bought ArtX (which did Gamecube graphics) which turned into Radeon. S3 died off in that race with Savage3D and the only other major players were Matrox and 3dlabs. Matrox kind of found temp refuge in video segment, and 3dlabs infamously pushed for OpenGL 2 and survived for a bit on 3d workstations. The most surprising (IMO) was the downfall of E&S which kickstarted most of the things mentioned. E&S and Real3D are both a great story in themselves how first movers can become absolutely forgotten and obscure real quick (with Intel740 ended up in ATI).

S3’s stuff was no more “3D” than the Image Adapter/A was.

You should look at the IA/A - it had its own C like compiler, CPU, etc which did things reminiscent of a modern GPU or SIMD.

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