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Goodbye, Number Nine
homerj79 writes: "Just got word from Ace's Hardware that Number Nine Visual Technology has shut its doors forever. This is sad news to hear about an old schooler in the graphics business. #9 was a pioneer in the graphics industry, introducing the first 128-bit chip, and the first 256-color and 16.7 millon-color cards. #9 was on a downward spiral as of late, with the company selling all of its technology and assets to S3 last year. This is the saddest news I've heard since Hercules announced it was going under. EBNews has a nice article on the company here."
Number Nine has good OEM Sales.
Microsoft releases DirectX.
Number Nine declines DirectX support.
OEM sales subsequently fall.
:(
Number Nine USED To have good OEM relations, until they refused DirectX. That is what crippled them. It's not the fact that they didn't have OEM sales to begin with, because they did.
It's all moot anyway...They're dead now.
-- Give him Head? Be a Beacon?
-- Give him Head? Be a Beacon? :P)
(If you can't figure out how to E-Mail me, Don't.
Want to work at Transmeta? MicronPC? Hedgefund.net? AT&T?
Can your IM do this?
I was left holding the bag for these cards. I threw them out after a few years, as I never could get them to work right.
Others won't agree, but I'm left unmoved by their departure.
Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.
Hmm, I think you mean Savoy Truffle.
And, hell yes, I would. I mean they would have a way cool tune for the commercial, and they could re-write the words:
Cool TNT, or a nice Matrox part?
My game of Quake is a finely tuned art.
3dfx, I've heard is really good news...
But you'd have to have them all pulled out to get the Savoy Truffle(tm)!
Babar
S3 were huge back then too (#1 in fact) and they are now out of the graphics card business
:-)
They own Diamond, ya know.
<i>This isn't that strange. Your #9 analysis is very weak. The Imagine 128 Series2 was still a major card and it was PCI. It wasn't the fast bus which sealed their fate, it was 3D. </i>
I talked about the Imagine series--my point was that the fast bus killed the viability of their ridiculously profitable cards extremely quickly. They did come up with the Imagine series, which did well for quite some time(PCI is several years old, ya know), and we're in strong agreement that it was the rise of 3D that #9 couldn't keep up with.
I'm not sure it's fair to say the key in the card business is IHV support--it sure works for ATI, as I talked about, but both nVidia and 3DFX went extremely long amounts of time with frustratingly low levels of IHV support. It's the IHV's that kept ATI alive through their years of having substandard products(though they pulled a great coup with their niche-fitting All In Wonder series), and it's the IHV's that are keeping Trident alive today. But I remember being shocked to find systems booting up with nVidia TNT's, and I don't think I've ever randomly come across a system that pre-shipped with a Voodoo 3, no matter how much I know they must be out there.
Matrox has 3D that's usually about half a generation behind, but their niche plays(like being able to view the cinematics of Star Trek Armada on a separate screen!) are genius.
I don't think we really disagree, Performer Guy. You yourself spent most of your time talking about *other companies* in an attempt to analyze the fall of #9.
Who else do you think is on life support? We do disagree about Matrox--they're having enough problems fulfilling their demand
Yours Truly,
Dan Kaminsky
DoxPara Research
http://www.doxpara.com
S3 has announced it's intention to sell (and may have already sold) it's graphics business to someone, probably VIA was the speculation last I looked, just check the press, it's official. They may own Diamond but Diamond never designed graphics chips, and infact with the reference designs produced by the chip vendors Diamond never did much of any graphics hardware design. It's is probably a healthier business to be in but it means they simply sell other folks designs with minor tweaks at best, often just software tweaks if that. Also it's only healthier if you're not shackled to a flagging chip vendor who can't design a competitive card for you to move through your sales channels.
S3 made a loss of $98 million in FY98 on declining revenues (halved from FY97), from FY96 profit of $42 million. It's not a pretty picture, and they are bailing on the graphics business.
There's no question that support by OEM's et.al. is key to any graphics chip company (which I was calling an IHV). It's their bread & butter. That's why the supply dries up so darned quickly when you fall behind in the performance stakes. They drop you like a ton of bricks when you fall behind, it's totally cutthroat and very non linear.
I agree with your assessments.
What is amazing about nVidia is the fact that their first graphics chip product (NV1) was considered a major breakthrough because (in theory) you didn't need draw thousands of flat triangles to represent curved objects. Unfortunately, the implementation didn't quite work, but it laid the groundwork for better things to come.
The arrival of the Riva 128 chipset was the breakthrough that nVidia needed: it processed 3-D graphics quite quickly for its day, and it supported 8 MB of RAM, also a lot in those days. It worked particularly well with DirectX 5.0, in fact it was in many ways almost as fast as the original 3Dfx Voodoo chipset (but didn't need to hog a precious PCI slot).
nVidia really hit its stride with the Riva TNT and Riva TNT2 chipsets, which offered a major leap forward in 3-D performance and compared well with even Voodoo3. The GeForce 256 and GeForce GTS are outgrowths of the technology pioneered by the Riva TNT/TNT2 chipsets, which have far surpassed 3dfx's efforts (there are much doubts about Voodoo5).
But nVidia can't rest on its laurels even now. Both ATI and Matrox have heavily invested in improving their graphics chipsets, and the current ATI Rage Fury and Matrox G400 are nothing to sneer at, to say the least.
Raymond in Mountain View, CA
Well, the Graphics/Video Cards section of the SGI Flat Panel Q&A on SGI's Web site says:
(production by whom? S3?) and also says:
and:
XFree86 4.0 doesn't support the Revolution IV-FP, according to the Number Nine page in the XFree86 4.0 driver status stuff:
I don't know if this means "has not yet been ported", i.e. that there is a port in progress, or not.
And re-read my post. How can you have crippled OEM sales if you never had them to begin with? ATI destroyed that potential, not Microsoft. It was a minor point in my post, anyway.
jf
Ditto. My system came with a #9 Motion 771, which used the S3 Vision968. This chip had a horrific bug: it used memory it didn't say it used. This caused all sorts of problems. Can you find any mention of it on the S3 or #9 site? No. I found out about it from a Voodoo2 installation note (the problem actually occurred with a USB controller).
I wasn't thrilled with the card anyway, because each driver kit was worse than the last. #9 taught me to never delete an old driver kit, a lesson that helped me to survive the Voodoo3.
I actually don't think there's an industry more bizarre than the one that creates Video Cards.
:-)
#9 was more than a contender, guys--they were the *leaders* in quality cards for years. They made their fortunes in the ISA market engineering the first cards that could actually push *serious* video through a seriously slow interface. Their highest end card, which was generally significantly more powerful than the machine it was placed in, sold for over a grand but enabled extremely high resolution functionality with the necessary acceleration to support it. The switch to VLB, and then PCI, really took alot of wind out of their sales--to be blunt, the bus stopped sucking and their chips weren't as necessary to achieve good performance. Their stopgap manuever--licensing S3's once market-leading chipsets of first the S3-868 and then the truly excellent S3-968--should have fortold for them the viability of licensed chipsets. But the good reaction they got to their Imagine-128 boards--expensive as they were--led them down a path where there really could only be one winner: Fastest Chipset.
3DFX truly had an intriguing business model. By not supplanting the 2D market, they could build off the engineering successes of companies like S3 while focusing on their core skills of 3D Design. And focus they did--<b>it was, and still is, unprecedented in the history of the computer hardware industry for any company to have had such a technological leap over their competition for as long as 3DFX did.</b> Their Voodoo 1 was quite literally revolutionary, and was at least two generations above <b>anything</b> their competitors could get out the door. With video card generations turning over every six months to a year, card after card came out that couldn't meet what 3DFX had long since delivered.
3DFX surpassed the hype of the "RISC programmable core" Verite video processor, and finally fulfilled the promises of a hype-addicted but surprisingly leading edge small company that decided to bring 3D to the PC desktop before anyone else...no one other than a small startup by the name of nVidia.
Does anybody else here remember the Edge3D? Proclaiming loudly the benefits of their propietary and rather unique quadratic mapping methodology(essentially, developers could specify four points that would make a texture appear to wrap cylindrically or spherically around a target polygon), it was the first 3D chip for the PC and <b>it stunk</b>. Badly. From what I remember reading, a number of developers tried porting their games to the chipset but couldn't get performance that matched a raw video card--all those years of learning tricks for extracting the most ridiculous performance levels out of the x86 disarchitecture simply outweighed the underengineered nVidia Edge3D.
About the only thing that card was good for was playing ported games from the Sega Saturn--and, since nobody else would write games to the Edge API, Saturn controllers were bundled with many Edge 3D cards. This was all rather ironic, considering that the Sega Saturn was probably the biggest console miscalculation in history--it was designed to be the ultimate 2D system just as Sony(who had once been collaborating with Nintendo for their new "Playstation" system you might have heard of) was about to bring gamers into the brave new world of 3D. A basic 3D chipset was spooged in at the last minute, but to say it was drastically underpowered would be an understatement. It was weaker than words can describe, so it's games ported quite well to the Edge 3D.
nVidia's Edge came out; it was an utter failure. Next came the S3 Virge, and for all the excitement with the "FreeD"(Free 3D with that 2D card) excitement...it turned out to be significantly faster just to play Descent on a Pentium with a *good* card. Even the Verite I spoke of earlier really wasn't all that nice, despite apparently some trademark RISC Core coding by Carmack himself. Nope, wasn't till 3DFX came along with their Voodoo 1, with the Wizard's Tower demo, this ridiculously cool thing with Dolphins jumping all around, and (finally!) a 3D Fighting Demo for PC that we finally had three dimensional graphics as de rigeur for a gaming PC.
What's ridiculous is that, for as long as 3DFX was on top with their Voodoo 1, just as competitors were starting to catch up they pulled out their Voodoo 2 with SLI functionality. Two cards, twice the profit for 3DFX, twice the power to keep competitors at bay--it was a beautiful thing. But as I said earlier, those cards never used their own 2D engines--they depended on other 2D cards. Diamond was quite happy to sell both their 2D solution from S3(which I bought, and if you ever get me inebriated enough I'll tell you about what happened between me, a broken Stealth, and an emotionally unstable woman in Diamond Tech Support) and their 3D solution from 3DFX--the veritable Monster 3D series. But #9, having seen good success from their Imagine 128 line and believing(quite arguably) that the declining profits of the card industry practically mandated making your money off the chip side, stuck to only selling 2D cards until they could get their 3D solution out the door.
By the time they did, it wasn't even a contender.
Also, by the time they did, 3DFX had long since finally listened to their OEMs who were complaining about cost structures from having to ship two cards instead of one and integrated 2D into their cards--first awfully, with the Voodoo Rush(ed), later castrated, with the Voodoo Banshee, and fiiiinally correctly with the Voodoo 3.
So #9 was left with a 3D card that couldn't cut it, 2D cards that didn't measure up to industry expectations, and no pre-existing relationship with any major chip vendor(at this point, just nVidia since 3DFX bought STB and stopped OEMing out its chips due to plummeting prices of their cards). Having gone entire generations without an industry-contender product--not even in a market niche!--they had nowhere to go and plenty of debt.
It was just time to turn the page. It's too bad--particularly since, if I remember correctly, they really had the Compaq/Dell/etc. style connections that have sustained ATI much to the confusion of gamers worldwide wondering how such a generally "Behind the curve" company could always get its products into millions of corporate desktops. ATI always managed to do the bare minimum to keep those OEMs--#9 just didn't or couldn't and lost what it had.
It's too bad. They made *good products*--their Motion771 was my favorite card to get for quite some time. But it's a different world right now--and it's getting even more different, with 3DFX having lost (from what I've heard) most of its core engineers and having been lapped by nVidia's GeForce2 processor(replete with Per Pixel Shading Acceleration By The GPU! I wonder if it does Quadratic Texturing too...) ATI's making noises of industry leading again, but then they did that with their Rage chipset and...well. Rage indeed. Matrox, of course, is doing well in the position #9 should have been in with their extreme quality RAMDAC's for high-res performance and now, dual head support implemented absolutely beautifully(got a TV? Play the DVD there? OK.) S3's just out their getting Savaged...though I have to wonder if they've picked up the "cheap quality 3D" market that they fed for so long with their truly lousy Virge. They own Diamond though, and Diamond (last I checked? Has this changed?) pushes quite a bit of nVidia product out the door. At +$200 a card, that's among the more expensive components left in modern machines!
As far down as #9 has sunken, nVidia has risen to the top of the heap, not as far above as 3DFX was in its prime but a good generation ahead. To think that it was three years ago that I was being laughed at for saying nVidia was to stage a massive comeback, as I had seen their Riva 128 at WinHEC and It Was Good(and I had also seen Cyrix's M2 processor struggle through Quake and had been practically ordered not to release the results of my ill-gotten TimeDemo)...
Wow. People wonder why there's so much excitement and activity on gaming sites like Bluesnews and Old Man Murray. Companies race, fight, live, and die on a field that's ever shifting, not particularly predictable, and booby trapped left and right.
In other words, the Video Card industry is pretty much Tech's Gladiator Pit. Want a Ticket?
Yours Truly,
Dan Kaminsky
DoxPara Research
http://www.doxpara.com
Unfortunately, rousing such people to do anything with the aquired "intellectual property" is pretty much impossible. The actual hardware designs are not viewed as something that could make money, but it would cost money to get somebody off their duff to dust them out and publish them, and the accountants would scream about how "hey, you're giving away something we paid for! How do we account for this on our depreciation charts?!". So dead, generally, means dead...
A shame, really. It'd be great if somebody could set up a "dead hardware specs exchange" that would pay these companies for the specs to this dead hardware, and then publish it. But the problem is, how would such a "dead hardware specs exchange" be funded? That's the #1 problem keeping such an idea from happening.
BTW, the problem of dead software companies is even worse... that's one reason why Microsoft became so big (people being scared to buy from a company that might not be around in five years, thus choosing the "safe" choice), and also, BTW, the reason why Linux has gained market share lately while, e.g., Be Inc. has not (Be might not be around in five years, while it would take a massive nuclear war with resulting destruction of humanity to rid the world's hard drives of the Linux source code).
-E
Send mail here if you want to reach me.
As someone who actually bought shares in 3DFX I know personally how competitive this industry can be. It seems like no one company has been able to stay on top of the video card/3D accelerator market for too long.
nVidia is there right now. Who will it be in the future?
This pattern also seems to be followed in other PC peripheral markets as well. Hayes went out of business after falling from the top of the modem market. Sound card hardware has been commoditized to the point where I doubt anyone is making much money in that market, accept for nich, high end hardware.
The moral of the story, if you are the owner of a high flying PC peripheral company, sell out sooner, rather than later.
-josh
They ran out of Beatles songs to keep the product line going...
I mean, would YOU buy a AGP called "The Savory Truffle"?
-- What you do today will cost you a day of your life.
But failure to design its products in compliance with the then-emerging DirectX software interface from Microsoft Corp. crippled the company's OEM sales.
Number Nine had some serious breakthroughs in it's day, three of which were mentioned above. However, simply the lack of early DirectX support doomed the company? Sheesh.
Number Nine is one of the first companies to offer its users drivers certified by Microsoft's Windows Hardware Quality Labs (WHQL). (From Number Nine's site.)
Seems like a case of Too Little, Too late. Number Nine didn't support DirectX early on, and their sales to OEMs started to slip. Later on, they scrambled to gain sales back and in (what seems to be) desperation, they slapped on a WHQL certification.
It's a shame to see a pioneer fail....especially due to something so small.
-- Give him Head? Be a Beacon?
-- Give him Head? Be a Beacon? :P)
(If you can't figure out how to E-Mail me, Don't.
18 months ago year, I inherited a 3 or 4 year old #9 video card. I had no documentation for this card. I emailed a quick driver question to their customer service, and from that mail they offered to email me an updated video BIOS chip. Mind you, I was NOT reporting a problem, but they wanted to do the "right thing" since the card was not registered (even if they did send postcards or email notifications). How many companies would do that today, even if you DID register? Registering typically is a way of harvesting demographic information (Microsoft is a particularly selfish example...) \
I suspect that the greatest cost of a graphics card is merely the fact that it is a card, and plugs into a slot. Once you get past that expense, you get to the things we have, today.
The 'base function' graphics that you refer to isn't worth the slot to plug it in. In fact, it's usually integrated on the motherboard. I would expect the base function graphics card market to completely dry up and blow away because of this.
The curious part is if the base function graphics will get sucked into the Northbridge, using UMA for the display buffer. Sure, it's no high-performance solution. If you want that, buy a card and use a slot.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
As someone posted on TMF's message board:
Another one bites the dust
Another one bites the dust
And another one's gone
And another one's gone
Another one bites the dust
Hey, I'm gonna get you too
Another one bites the dust
Just look at all the companies that have either gone under, left the graphics ring, or were bought out...
Hercules, Tseng Labs, Cirrus, NeoMagic, Oak Technologies, Paradise, Chips and Technologies, Real3D, etc...
So who's next? The investor linked above suggests 3D Labs, as it's burning cash at an alarming rate. Trident hasn't been doing too well lately either.
Number Nine was one of the least-friendly companies about questions like "why don't you have Mac drivers?" or "what about Unix, then?".
As I recall, they had some Mac cards at one point,
which were the same hardware as their PC cards, and cost 3x as much. At the time, I was looking for Mac cards, and believe me, when I established that they had "identical" cards at wildly different prices just to gouge the mac market, I started ignoring their cards entirely.
I think they died because they botched, and because they didn't react well to the market.
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
well, i saw the fall for #9 coming a long time ago , after the Imagine 128 series 2, the 3d revolution took place and they never caught on. Their "Revolution 3D" and "Revolution 4" card sucked at 3d, even my lowly matrox g200 can beat the crap out of it.
It's sad to see a company that produced excellent video cards [i still remember the first Imagine 128s, 4 MEGS OF RAM BABY! (= ] but when you don't keep up with your competition you are gonna get blown out of the water (duh) A few years ago, Matrox was in a similar position as #9, both companies produced excellent 2D cards with no 3D capabilities. But Matrox managed to stay alive with the G200 which offered acceptable performance at the time and then the G400 was much faster and it had unique features like EMBM and Dualhead display. #9 OTOH, didn't produce anything good in the past few years, and once they sold their technology to S3, it was pretty much all over... Goodbye #9...
Zetetic
Seeking; proceeding by inquiry.
Elench
A specious but fallacious argument; a sophism.
#9 missed out on the 3d card 'revolution'. Always a step behind 3dfx, nVidia, and even Matrox. Who would have thought only a few years ago that those crappy S3 Virge cards could have financed the buyout of Diamond Multimedia and the eventual demise of S3? #9 was almost always good about customer support, and the hardware was decient to say the least. -- they will be missed.