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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? :)
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
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!
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.
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