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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."
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