Intel files lawsuit against Nvidia

[Cookie Monster]

Originally posted by: magreen
Wow.

Well, nvidia wasn't much better than that intel card back then.
What happened to 3dfx? They were stomping on everyone back then.

Yes, thats because the RIVA 128 was like a 8 month old product compared to the i740! Yet it was like on par with the newly launched i740. When the RIVA TNT launched after a few month from i740, think it surpaassed it with ease.

nVIDIA literally took 3DFXs house, wife and the dog.

 

[Idontcare]

Originally posted by: Cookie Monster
nVIDIA literally too 3DFXs house, wife and the dog.

Poor Ricky Bobby. But it explains a lot about Jensen's antics, "if you ain't first, you're last!".

 

[aigomorla]

well you guys are talking to a money is no object person when i build computers.

i said for its time... 😛

I was on the 3dFX Voodoo2 solution back then on SLI. 😛

ahhhh that was nice...

So was sound blaster sound cards. 😛

 

[Idontcare]

Originally posted by: aigomorla
well you guys are talking to a money is no object person when i build computers.

i said for its time... 😛

I was on the 3dFX Voodoo2 solution back then on SLI. 😛

ahhhh that was nice...

So was sound blaster sound cards. 😛

About all I remember of my gaming days in the Voodoo era was that if you wanted Carmageddon to look awesome and not be a slideshow then you needed to pony up for a decent voodoo card.

I remember this because I didn't have one and my room-mate did. Like butter on his rig, mine not so much.

 

[Fox5]

Originally posted by: Idontcare

Originally posted by: magreen
Thanks. That is sad... and fascinating.

Some of this stuff was news to me in hindsight. For instance this part:

Third, Greg Ballard became CEO of 3dfx in 1997, and analysts marked it as a turning point since Ballard was a marketing guru. However Ballard failed to understand R&D in the graphics industry. Single-card 2D/3D solutions were taking over the market, and although Ballard saw the need and attempted to direct the company there with the Voodoo Banshee and the Voodoo3, both of these cost the company millions in sales and lost market share while diverting vital resources from the Rampage project.[4] Then 3dfx released word in early 1999 that the still-competitive Voodoo2 would only support OpenGL and Glide under Microsoft's Windows 2000 operating system, and not DirectX. Many games were transitioning to DirectX at this point, and the announcement caused many PC gamers ? the core demographic of 3dfx's market ? to switch to Nvidia or ATI offerings for their new machines.

Yeah I'd say he isn't the third reason, that reads to me like he is the most probable sole reason (destroy your cash-flow and the best R&D in the world will die before they get a company saving product out the door) for their demise if this info is true.

Sadly it reads (to me) as a parallel to AMD's marketing dept insistence that monolithic quads were necessary for AMD's customers to succeed.

From what I remember:
Voodoo Banshee was a bit of a failure, but Voodoo 3 was their best selling card at the time. Of course they lost market share, they finally had real competition.
What really hurt them with the Voodoo 3 was that it had really low margins, and an unexpected increase in DRAM prices actually caused them to lose money on it temporarily. 3dfx continued to dominate retail sales until the day they died, but they never made any headway into OEM presence, which ATI and nvidia were strongly doing with lower end products with additional features (MPEG acceleration, tv out) that 3dfx didn't offer.

Rampage seemed like a failed project from the start. Originally it was to be about the same performance as a voodoo 3 but over-featured, even beyond what Matrox and nvidia cards were offering at the time. Rampage was pushed back again and again, and by the time it was nearing production, it was looking pretty archaic. Not to mention 3dfx missed the boat with T&L, they were producing a separate T&L coprocessor to go along with Rampage and even planning models without it despite its incorporation into directx.

So what happened to 3dfx? They never had an OEM presence, they had a dominant retail position that they swapped from selling high margin cards to low margin cards (I believe it was Sellers(?) plans to achieve market share dominance at the expense of short term profits), they were late to market with their multi chip solutions that were way more expensive to produce due to outdated fabrication tech, and their world beater was about 2 years too late.

 

[myocardia]

Originally posted by: DrMrLordX

Originally posted by: aka1nas
Yeah, but what do you actually get out of that? A basic 8(or even 16-bit) x86 processor can't run modern software. They would really need an x86-64 license (among others) to make something usable.

It gets you a 32-bit processor (286s, 386s, 486s, and Pentiums were all 32-bit) that could boot Windows 7, at least in theory, if not in practice.

386's were the first 32-bit processors. The 286 was 16-bit, as was the 8086.

 

[DrMrLordX]

Huh, I had thought the 286 was also 32-bit but that you had to reboot the whole darn machine just to get it to switch between 16-bit and 32-bit code. Oh well. It did have protected mode which is probably what I was thinking about (sort of).