3dfx/Gigapixel: Where Did it Go Wrong?

nvidia3dfxatibobby writes "According to this interview & 3dfx tribute, gambling upon buying Gigapixel and then hoping to book a spot in Microsoft's Xbox is the theory or rather last gamble that failed and thus brought the curtain down on 3dfx interactive. Of course since then, NVIDIA booked their spot in the Xbox and 3dfx were left in the dust. The interview also looks at a former 3dfx employee's perspective now working for NVIDIA and hence talking for NVIDIA."

Comments

Re:My Big Concern

[FFFish]

What's missing in soundcards is quality 3D sound. The best was Aureal A3D, but that's vapour now that Creative succeeded in bankrupting them.

Creative offers EAX, which is predefined reverb effects. That's fine for ambient sound, but it doesn't provide good three-dimensional sound location.

QSound, Sensura and A3D all provide some form of 3D sound, well beyond the quad-speaker setup; they are particularly effective while wearing headphones.

What they do is simulate the delay, volume and "sound wrapping"/pitch shift effects experienced in natural sound. Part of these are obvious: it takes a fraction longer for sound to reach the distant ear, and the volume will be lower; others are less obvious, caused by the bending of the soundwave as it wraps around the head -- or, at higher frequencies, is blocked by the head.

Anyway, point is that it is difficult to simulate 3D sound. A3D had it: you could swear that the rocket went within an inch of your head; or hear the click of a trap behind you. It added a lot to the game experience -- it's like the leap from Wolfenstein to Quake III. An order or two of magnitude difference in realism.

And now that A3D is stomped, I'm very doubtful that we'll be hearing good game sound any time soon. It's like going back to Wolfenstein; sure, things will still be fun... but they won't be anywhere near as sweet.



--

My Big Concern

[FFFish]

is what will happen to ATI and Matrox.

ATI is currently a much more profitable company. It has outsold NVidia by nearly double: ATI chipsets are spec'd in nearly every laptop and many OEM boxes. But it has recently lost Apple's contracts, and NVidia is making inroads into the laptop market.

Matrox ruled the world with its 2D cards. They were fast and, every bit as importantly, incredibly stable. If you were using specialty software, you could rely on a Matrox card to work with it. The same could not be said of *many* other cards: driver incompatibilities were assured with them.

But both ATI and Matrox appear to have dropped the ball. I don't see any truly kick-ass cards coming out of them. And while Matrox 2D is still top-of-the-heap, it's not enough any more: fast 2D can be done by anyone, and not enough people require driver stability to make that Matrox's saving grace.

What happens if either, or both, of those companies fold? We'll be stuck with the same sort of abysmal situation we have with soundcards: a complete lack of innovation or advancement during the past ten years. Creative Labs owns the soundcard market, and to this day we do not have advanced sound capabilities of any sort of respectable nature.

I'd hate to see that happen, particularly with 3D. The visual presentation is nearly as important as the aural presentation, when it comes to fooling the mind into believing in the virtual environment. If NVidia becomes near-monopolistic, we'll end up with the same mediocre performance and features as the SoundBlaster.

That'd be a crying shame.

We need competition. We might not get it.

--

I was a 3dfx employee...

[synaptik]

...and articles such as this one make me sick to my stomach. Why? Because most of them are full of ill-researched speculation, that couldn't be further from the truth, but nevertheless seem plausible-- so people believe them.

Now, this particular article on Sharky isn't so bad. I've seen worse. Brian Burke was with us almost to the end, so he knows what he's talking about.

Anyway, my point to this post is to clarify a few details that people tend to get wrong in these articles:

* nvidia did NOT buy 3dfx. Rather, 3dfx became insolvent, and so asked nvidia to buy their assets, so they could afford to dig their own grave. That is why my TDFX stock is work pennies today. If nvidia had acquired 3dfx, the stock would be going up, not down (because eventually, the stocks would be one-and-the-same.)

* 3dfx did not "refuse" to let OEMs sell their products. 3dfx WANTED to sell to OEMs (such as Dell, Compaq, etc.) That was the whole reason they changed their logo-- to look more professional! But Napalm and Rampage were woefully late, and 3dfx fell so far behind on the performance curve, that OEMs weren't all that interested. 3dfx's inability to meet the OEM's product schedules didn't help, either. In the end, all that was left for 3dfx was the retail side-- something 3dfx had wanted to de-emphasize, with the STB merger.

(In defense of some of the people who made the above claim I just refuted... by "OEM" some people might have meant board companies, like CREAF-- in which case, they are absolutely right; 3dfx did stop selling to those companies intentionally. But that's not what killed 3dfx; retail sales only accounts for a very, very small portion of the 3D graphics market. By far, OEM sales (Dell, Compaq, etc.) is where the money is at. This becomes more evident if you consider the fact that 3dfx became insolvent, despite having the top-selling products in the retail channel. Reason? Because retail is just a trickle, compared to OEM sales.

* The gigapixel merger is NOT what killed 3dfx. The gigapixel purchase was the smartest thing 3dfx did in a long time. But it was too little, too late. The purchase of STB is ultimately what killed them. The problem was, the business model changed on them. Prior to the STB acquisition, companies such as Dell and Compaq bought boards from board companies. But by the time the acquisition took place, the OEMs started buying chips directly from the chip suppliers, and then contracting companies to build boards overseas. STB was a middleman; our days were numbered, but we didn't realize it at the time. And neither did 3dfx, and they paid dearly for it. What we should have done (hindsight being 20/20 and all,) was sell or lease Juarez to someone like Solectron, and return to being a chip company. 3dfx realized this, but we realized it too late; Mexican labor is considerably more expensive than that of the pacific rim sweatshops, so Juarez's market value declined before we could sell it.

Will graphics cards reach the end of the road?

[Kiss the Blade]

I can understand that the demand for increased processing power for CPU's will probably never be sated, but id this true for Graphics cards? Surely once we are in the trillions of polygons per second (at the present rate, soon, probably) and 3d graphics offer photorealism, will there still be a need for better graphics? I would have thought that in 5 or 10 years, Graphics card technology will have got as good as it can usefully get. An example is that we used to judge gaming computers by how many colours they can display, be it 8, 256, or 65536. But once we reached 16 million, there wasn't any further useful improvement that could be made.

I would guess that a similar future awaits graphics card technology. So on what criteria will Graphics cards of the future be judged upon? What will be the defining factors that will give one card an edge over an other once this graphical end of history has been reached? The only one I can think of is price.

KTB:Lover, Poet, Artiste, Aesthete, Programmer.