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3dfx Drops Video Card Division
Uglor writes: "3dfx is getting out of the video card market. After two years of shrinking revenue, stock price and market share, they are going back to a chips-only company. Will this let them reclaim the top spot on the 3d market? Or could this just make nVidia work twice as hard to beat them?" So it doesn't mean that you won't be able to buy a card whose guts are made by the 3dfx folks, only that the box will probably have someone else's name a whole lot bigger.
And ewhac points to an Adrenaline Vault story, which "suggests that 3Dfx is going to move away from the PC hardware arena and refocus toward licensing their technology for use in visual simulation and training systems. If true, this would basically leave NVidia and ATI as the remaining major 3D graphics players. (Now if NVidia would just crack open their docs so we can support their chips...)"
3dfx learned a very difficult and expensive lesson with its purchase of STB: it's too easy to spread yourself too thin. As a chip manufacturer, 3Dfx only had to deal with designing the chips, manufacturing them, writing drivers, and selling the chips to manufacturers.
Once 3dfx decided to make its own video cards, it had to worry about technical support, more extensive marketing (actual product promotion, not just brand promotion), the manufacturing of the rest of the components, etc. It's very hard to do all of these and do a decent job of them. The once-nimble 3dfx fell behind nVidia in product release schedule, and many of the products it did released were far from polished enough (remember the shoddy quality of the first Voodoo 3 drivers?) to win over the very same gamers that once used Voodoo 2 SLI rigs religiously.
The only company to date that's pulled this off well is ATI, and they didn't exactly do it right overnight. The constant delays of the Rage 128 line cost ATI valuable market share, because in the time that ATI took to finally ship the Rage 128 nVidia had released the TNT2, which was superior to ATI's offering. Had ATI not needed to worry about actually manufacturing and supporting the video cards, it could have probably gotten the Rage 128 out on time, and ATI could have gotten a lot greater sales out of it. ATI only managed the minor coup that it pulled with Radeon because it has expanded greatly in the past year or so to be able to manufacture both chips and cards.
Incidentally, this is hardly the first failure of video-chip-manufacturers-turned-video-card-makers. S3 also suffered huge losses after buying Diamond Multimedia, with a large part of the blame lying in the decision to maufacture their own video cards, and they eventually had to sell their graphics chip business to Via. Of course, Diamond's infamously bad tech support and drivers probably helped destroy S3's video business just as much as the extra "dead weight" that video card manufacturing brought on, but then again S3 wouldn't have had to consider that if they just manufactured video chips and left the product support to somebody else.
On a lighter note, do you think they'll bring back the capital D in 3Dfx? :)
Didn't the majority of the graphics gurus leave SGI for nvidia a few years back?
Obviously, faced with that influx of talent into their competitor, 3dfx was doomed. SGI is the leader when it comes to OpenGL drivers and hardware.
Great big googly moogly, 3dfx's next board was going to be 2X the price of their competitor for similar performance -- not exactly the sharpest strategy to gain market share.
Treatment, not tyranny. End the drug war and free our American POWs.
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the inherent superiority of 3dfx's alpha blending and lightsourcing makes for a more visually pleasing gaming experience
I don't know if they fixed it between the Voodoo 3 and the Voodoo 5, but the V3 was horrible at Alpha shading, as it relied on the CPU to handle the alpha calculations for it. (at least in OpenGL)
Doh!
I was referring to quality over speed. I had the V3 before the V5 and even it looks better than a GeForce. Try running 3dMark 2k on both if you get the chance. The speed is acceptable with both cards, but the voodoo just *looks* better.
-atrowe: Card-carrying Mensa member. I have no toleranse for stupidity.
"I'm sure they'll have no problem getting back in, provided that they don't have an EXCLUSIVE agreement w/ nVidia."
You've got a real good point there. nVidia is getting to the point where they have real monopoly power from a boardmaker's perspective, since ATI and Matrox don't sell chipsets. S3 (who sold their graphics division to VIA) still sells chipsets, but seems to be focusing on cheap integrated video and probably won't be coming out with anything new for a long time.
Now that 3dfx is now on shaky financial ground, it's sort of like the situation that used to exist with Intel, when AMD was still weak. A company could piss off Intel, but had to worry about the future possibility of AMD going under. If, say, Creative wanted to make 3dfx boards, nVidia could simply threaten to cut them off.
Actually those drivers did perform pretty well though. All inputs worked, you could tune to different stations, xawtv was fine, hardware scaling, automatic stereo detection, pal/ntsc independent!!!(this is something that the official win-drivers didn't support - only components that are pal/ntsc-dependent are the tuner and stereo-decoder).
Once I got my ntsc-version to display pal-source on screen and after some negotiations with 3dfx gave up on the possibility to use their realtime mpeg2-encoder (licensed from another company) I lost my interest alltogether-I was hoping to make something like tivo back then(before tivo existed, I think..). There are still some people, to my knowledge, playing with the source at sourceforge, project v3tv if anyone is interested.
Don't count out the Bitboys! They'll be making waves Real Soon Now(tm).
--
1) Why should NVIDIA OSS their drivers? You do realize that an OpenGL driver is a *COMPLETE* implementation of the OpenGL pipeline, not just hardware specs. Designing a GL driver is hard. Matrox, ATI, NEC, everyone is having problems with their GL drivers. Why the hell should NVIDIA help them out?
2) Bitching at other people to open drivers is not the OSS way. The OSS way is
A) Reverse engineering the specs and writing your own driver, OR
B) Design your own damn hardware and OSS those drivers.
Remember, NVIDIA is a CORPORATION. They don't have to, and SHOULDN'T care about the users, UNLESS it servers their interests. NVIDIA pays good attention to users because it allows them to stay on top in the graphics industry. I have never had a problem with an NVIDIA card (if you bought early-gen Athlons or cheapo Socket7 AGP boards, that's your own damn fault) and ever since the early days of the TNT (after the first few driver releases) their drivers have been totally solid. They're also one of the main reasons why Win98 seems plausibly stable to me.
So quit your bitching and try to see it from their point of view. If they see that there is more money to be made through OSS drivers, and it does come down to money in our society*, then they'll OSS the drivers.
* That's how capitalism works. Companies making lots of money is GOOD for the people. Bitch about MS all you want, if it hadn't been for them, the economy wouldn't be nearly as good as it is today.
PS: Yea, I know NVIDIA isn't giving BeOS the specs to build 3D drivers. Yes it does suck. No its not the same as asking them to OSS their drivers. BeOS GL drivers would be under NDA, Be would write the drivers, and nobody would know NVIDIA's secrets. Methinks that the main reason we're not seeing BeOS OpenGL drivers is that NVIDIA is in bed with SGI and SGI is trying to protect its Linux initiative.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
this is exactly what i was looking for in a graphics maker. I stood by 3dfx before...and now i'll stand by them again as i try to get support for some card made by X company with a 3dfx chipset in it.
3dfx: "Um...we don't support linux, talk to the vendor, they should have updated drivers"
Vendor:"Um...we don't support linux, talk to 3dfx, they should have updated drivers"
while (times_talked_to_companies < sanity_threshold){
talk_to_company(x);
};
FluX
After 16 years, MTV has finally completed its deevolution into the shiny things network
"It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once." -David Hume
Now I'll NEVER get a driver update for my ailing STB TV card.
We need Captain Open Source!(seriously, I'm not being sarcastic about it this time)
Thing is, the Voodoo 2 was made in the day when the licensed their chips - which is what they're going back to. They started to make their own cards with the Voodoo 3, and couldn't handle the competition from that point on... I think going back to the old way is a good idea - then we might actually see some good stuff from them again (since they can focus on what they're good at!)
Hopefully Creative takes up the bulk of the slack.
- I don't care if they globalize against free speech. All my best free thoughts are done in my head.
Really! I've been playing the latest 3d games with my matrox card for quite some time. Perhaps it's all been a hallucination! :(
I said keep up, not be able to produce a product. The 3D market is very volitile; one year, you make the fastest / cheapest card and you're topping the sales charts, then the next, you're merging with another company because you can't hold your own.
Matrox is in no danger of going under, 3D isn't their primary market. I respect Matrox since I've always thought of them as a quality company.
I don't forsee them even leaving the 3D market, but if you're a gamer, the Matrox card isn't the best buy for your money. I've never seen any review that has suggested otherwise.. The main things that might persuade a hard-core-gamer to choose the Matrox card is their Dual monitor or large monitor support.
That being said, any given business should probably opt for Matrox cards (due to quality, features and drivers for things other than games), so if you game-play at work, then Matrox is an obvious choice. But most of us don't get to choose the graphics cards at work (well, I do, but I bring my own machines to work).
-Michael
-Michael
This story is not completely true. They are NOT leaving the card business, the only thing that they will do is outsource the making of the cards. The brand 3dfx will remain on the boxes, and it will be their cards. They won't go back to just selling chips. The following comes from Alf, a guy working for 3dfx:
"I can confirm elements of it that are already public knowledge, but I can also say that there will still be 3dfx brand video cards, which this article seems to say is not the case. I'm looking into it. Thanks for the heads up!
Regards,
Alf
3dfx"
So, basically, they will keep their boards, however, the rumours right now are that they might sell some chips just for OEM deals.
Blah blah blah, etc.
I'll have to remember to ask tomorrow since I work at a Railroad. (In IT, so we never see trains)
As I recall... When the Voodoo 3 (and before it, the Banshee) came out, there was a question in their FAQ's about texture size. It went something like this:
That was my first clue that 3dfx was dying (I was a fan of theirs back then). Of course, they removed this question and answer from the FAQ after a short time, and you won't find any trace of it today.
------
When they got out of the Chip-Only business and started making video cards, they changed their name from "3DFX" to "3dfx" (No Joke.) Now that they're going BACK to the chip-only business, are they going to change back to "3DFX" and get a spiffy NEW logo? They're changing their market, so I can almost bet they'll change their logo again. I guess we'll see.
-- Give him Head? Be a Beacon?
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This simply means that there will more competition between 3dfx card vendors, which will result in a lower priced 3dfx which will be able to compete better agianst the evil^H^H^H^H heavily proprietry Nvidia.
Im sure this will lead to 3dfx becoming a stronger company.
Well, the only thing I see good about 3dfx is the fact that their drivers are open source,
unlike Nvidia. I own a V3 3000, and havn't had any problems with it, and don't care
for getting a larger card untill games start requiring it. With 120 max fps in q3 on a V3,
im not complaining.
ETRN x
But they've learned their lesson.
3dfx did some cool stuff with glide. And I thought there'd be no stopping them when they started licensing their chipset. I remember my buddy having a couple of Creative Voodoo's running SLI, and the games just flew. The minute I saw 3dfx decide they were going to do it themselves, I was pretty disapointed.
Hopefully they'll learn from their mistake and realize they can't take on the world by themselves. Nvidia realized that, and cards with their chipsets are the fastest you can buy. Then we'll see some serious competition, as we haven't really seen any for a while. It'll only benefit the consumer.
Now if we could just convince ATI to do the same thing....:-)
-Orty
Ignoranus: A person who is both stupid and an asshole.
when they try to contact their old chip customers. I used to work for a major player back when we were using 3dfx chips for our video cards. When 3dfx decided to have a go at the video card market by themselves, they really pissed us off. Knowing our CEO, there is very little chance of those guys coming back to become a chip supplier again. Looks like their only chance is to line up some taiwanese card makers and hope to compete on price alone. How that will improve their margin model I fail to see. Anyway, my $0.02 worth.
Wrong.
Quantum3D did make those Voodoo2 SLI boards, but they stopped selling them. Go to their website. Find anything that fits in a PCI or AGP slot. You will not find it!
Quantum3D pulled out of this market before 3dfx did.
The Matrox G450 is a nice card for big markets, who care much about razor sharp and fast 2D - with 3D being much less of an issue. And the business market is probably bigger than the "need to have the fastest 3D card out there" market.
I'm in the market for a new machine, but holding out for new technologies (DDR SDRAM, PIV, new Athlon core) - and I really hope Matrox releases a new card with faster 3D before then. It doesn't have to be just as fast (the difference between 110 fps and 100 fps in QuakeIII is not important to me), just fast enough and with the Matrox tradition of great, sharp images.
You're missing the point.
Competition is GOOD.. Winners that gain a monopoly in the 3D video card industry is BAAD.
ATI and nVida should be good competition with each other for a while. Both making state-of-the art cards (at almost the complete price range), but once one of them goes... That's about it..
The time to enter the video card market ended with nVida, who stepped up the competition until the then king couldn't compete. With the world consolidating towards DirectX and, on occasion, OpenGL, you can't depend on your proprietary drivers (a la Glide, and many other's that I've already forgotten). Most likely, the only way you can make a faster, more cost effective card is through propriety drivers (such as the failed infinite plains card (forgot the name of that too)).
Couple that with the fact that GPU's are now as (if not more) complex as CPU's, in addition to using state-of-the-art manufacturing, it's highly unlikely that a new contender can possibly dethrown the existing big boys.
In fact, the only thing I can image you could add is move the whole damn game into the GPU (a la MicroSoft's DirectGame or Direct3DShooter... ).
ASICs wired video games as the future?
-Michael
-Michael
Matrox has never been able to keep up in the 3D market.. They've primarily been a professional 2D card company. I don't think they've ever topped the 3D charts (though you can put 1600x1600 monitors on them without a sweat).
They were innovative with their environmental bump mapping, and for a while there, they'd produce the cleanest pictures, but apparently this isnt' the case with their latest cards, and ATI (at least) has already caught up with them in the quality realm.
-Michael
-Michael
It's really a shame to see somebody who cast their lot with the Linux 'market', and then lost. 3DFX has always been relatively forthcoming with the technical data needed to build drivers; in a way that n***** isn't.
Perhaps it just wasn't yet time.
thad
I love Mondays. On a Monday, anything is possible.
Before everyone gets on their high horse (oops... too late), is this really a sound business move? It took them long enough tom overcome all the shoddy off-brand products that came with their name on in the first place, and now they want to start over again?
Maybe I'm missing the point, but although they seem to be producing a load of crap recently, at least it was crap with 3DFX!!! written across it. Oh well, wait and see I s'pose. But, it seems to be pretty unprecedented.
Ben^3 Proud owner of a V3500The Slashdot Paradox: "100% Overrated"
If true, this would basically leave NVidia and ATI as the remaining major 3D graphics players.
Not to toot my former employer's horn, but don't count Matrox out!
I'm sure they'll have no problem getting back in, provided that they don't have an EXCLUSIVE agreement w/ nVidia.
Remember, these companyies already have the support/marketing model in place, they don't have to worry about 3D engineering, and (in theory) they're already making money at it. Adding another 'variant' should only help that picture...
-- You can't idiot-proof anything, because they're always coming out with better idiots.
Have you ever actually seen that thing? Its gigantic. It requires external power to work. No doubt it generates more heat then a Nuclear Reactor.
Who would actually have bought the thing considering the cost (and considering that it still only really had 32mb of usable memory)?
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
3Dfx burned a lot of bridges when they left the OEM market.. I'm sure they'll get back in, but they've lost much of their clout.. They're going to have to make a top notch card for people to promote 3Dfx over nVida.
Additionally, I don't think _anyone_ wants to go back to the add-on-card market.. With resolutions reaching 1600x1600, those pass-through cards are simply not acceptible. Back in the days of 1024x768 at 16bit color (in SLI mode), you could always put two monitors on your computer (since you obviously had money to burn).
Additionally, the only reason people went add-on card was because there was no all-in-one solution that could even compete.
It would be an extremely hard sell to say the least.. Though you might find a market back in the 200MHZ legacy computer market (with a full blown GPU).
Another SERIOUS issue is AGP.. Can't do SLI with AGP (unless you're Obsidian and obsessed), and you definately can't be an add on card and use AGP.
I realize you only meant this as a "worst case", but I wanted to debunk it as being profitable for them.
-Michael
-Michael
3dfx didn't just get mercilessly ripped apart by nVidia like everyone believes, they let it happen. When the TNT2, supposedly the first consumer chip faster than Voodoo2 SLI, came out, sporting 32-bit color, support for over 32 megs of video ram and 2048x2048 pixel textures, 3dfx countered months later with the Voodoo3, which had the 16-bit color and 16-megs of ram limitation of the Voodoo2. That was really the first nail in the coffin of 3dfx. Their relase schedule can also be blamed, because nVidia has a new chip out every year or so, and sells (now sold) them to many different board manufacturers, causing competition. 3dfx makes their own boards, just like ATI.
How is it that, in January, one could buy a dang-fast TNT2 for $60, while the Voodoo2, a slower card, sold for over $100 everywhere? Simple - the different board manufacturers compete with each other, trying to sell their TNT2 board over somebody else's. The 3dfx board manufacturer just tries to sell their boards to Voodoo zealots, who are, for the most part, GeForce believers now.
Hopefully now that 3dfx has decided to go back to being a chip manufacturer, coupled with a shorter release interval (which it looks like they're trying to do), they'll start making some headway into the market. I love nVidia to death, but competition is always good.
Do you even know anything about perl? -- AC Replying to Tom Christiansen post.
While I know that they have been beaten out by nVidia lately and are making over-priced & under-performing cards, I can't help feel a little sadness over this loss. Like them or not, 3dfx did play a large role in pushing the limits of consumer video cards a while back and probably inspired much of the competition leading to the foundation of the major card companies today. Perhaps it's just nostalgia left over from the time I drooled over the Voodoo 2s, but I think 3dfx should be given some appreciation for the work they did in the past. Don't get me wrong- I love my GeForce 2 :P. I just think they deserve some praise/credit. Am I totally wrong?
Trying is the first step toward failure. - Homer Simpson
I for one remember that when they decided to make their own card exclusively, they basically screwed companies such as Creative, Diamond, Hercules, and others that were expecting to create voodoo3 cards.
Whats not saying that they will not decide to make cards themselves again when they are doing better. But then again, didn't they say that when they were initally annoucing their entry into the Dist business, it was to boost revenues?
I wish them all the luck, but its going to be hard for them to win third parties back.
3dfx has never suggested in any forum that they will leave the PC market. Why would they? At worst what we're seeing is a return to the Voodoo 2 strategy: a successful one, before they took too much upon themselves. And by the way, Quantum 3D had a kick-ass SLI product on store shelves then, too.
Derina X. Pinchfish
3dfx has lost touch with the new developments of the 3D world. All 3dfx cards could only output in 16-bit and use 256x256 textures until the release of the V5 last year (okay, the Voodoo3 processed at 32-bit, then blended down to 16, but that's not the same as pure 32!). 3dfx has ignored the innovations of cube environment mapping and dot-product bump mapping, both of which were used in Q3 and will be used in the next DOOM project.
To quote John Carmack on the issue of 3dfx: "It probably wouldn't be wise to buy a voodoo5 if you plan on keeping it for two years."
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
The aforementioned Quantum3D card was a single board with two V2 framebuffers and four V2 texture units.
Just to clarify.
Derina X. Pinchfish
(Just a plea from someone who still enjoys some older games, and doesn't have (or want) a Voodoo card.)
"...America's great minds of today, teaching America's great minds of tomorrow. Poor bastards." -- A Beautiful Min