A Brief History Of NVIDIA And SEGA

Alan writes: "FiringSquad just posted an article on the history of NVIDIA. What makes this interesting is that they include a little bit about the NV2 chip which was developed originally for the Dreamcast. It was using quadratic texture maps (a derivative of NURBS) rather than polygons! The article is over here."

Comments

MOD THIS UP

[348]

I normally keep pretty quiet when it comes to conspiracy theories, but this poster is right on the mark.

I don't know about NVIDIA being a monopolist like Microsoft, but he's sure on to something that has some insight. Look, the HW/SW graphics development areana is only controlled by a few seledct vendors and now that hold is merging between the console industry and the desktop industry. As a consumer i want as many choices as I can get and if NVIDIA becomes the top playah with their rep, it will surely drive competition down and prices up.

I don't thing the whole console market would fall but I would sure like to get the next gen console without having to pay upwards of $350 US to get it.

The dark lining to this silver cloud.

[Christopher Thomas]

The hardware folks like open, certified specs [PCI, AGP, USB, etc.] that they can conform to. Any company with a few talented chip engineers could make a card that outperforms the GeForce 2's, make it plug into any AGP board, and compete.

While to some extent that's true, in practice you'd get your arse sued off until you could prove in court that you really *weren't* violating any of nVidia's implementation patents (or anyone else's). There were a few sabre-rattling sessions last year in this vein.

There are only a few straightforward approaches to building any given part of a graphics pipeline. Just about all of these are patented (usually preemptively) by the big graphics card companies. It's not as bad as the software patent arena, but it's still not nice.

If you have lots of money, you can hold out long enough that the big companies will offer to cross-licence technology with you. Otherwise, you'd better pray that they don't consider you a threat.

Perhaps it's not quite this bad, but you'd have to do quite a bit of patent research to avoid stepping on anyone's toes.

Lastly, a nit-pick re. AGP, PCI, and USB. For some of these, you have to pay licensing fees to get the specification manual. For all, if I understand correctly, you have to pay licensing fees to build any hardware that talks to them. The standards bodies are money-driven too.

In practice, the cost will be low compared to the cost of the rest of your card, but it's still there.

Quadratic Texture maps are NURBS?

[mTor]

What makes this interesting is that they include a little bit about the NV2 chip which was developed originally for the Dreamcast. It was using quadratic texture maps (a derivative of NURBS) rather than polygons!

I'm sorry but this makes no sense. NV2 chip used qudratic surfaces and not quadratic texture maps. This is like comparing apples and oranges.

Re:Quadratic surfaces

[[verse]Eskil]

I agree that nurbs, and most other patches suck, But that is why Subdivision is so greate, you have the arbitrary topology, yett it is curved. Some argue that subdivisions do not have a natural uv space and is therfor "broken". To me this is allso a great becouse it gives us the same level och control as whit polygons to define our own texture space. A creased subdivision implementation can do everything a polygon implementation can and more.

Dont bash curved surfases just becouse patches doesnt do what you want them to.
Sub division really is the future, maybe it is too early to implement in a game today. But it is defenetly possible to implement a engine based on subdivision surfaces and get goor results. I have done it.

http://verse.sourceforge.net/

Re:Nvidia and work ethic.

[Datafage]

A 2d graphics card that a LOT of people happen to have and lets them use pretty much all of Be. If you decide not to call that a driver you're just being an asshole.

-----------------------

Re:Quadratic surfaces

[Michiel Ouwehand]

Dont bash curved surfases just becouse patches doesnt do what you want them to.

I don't think it's bashing it. Curved surfaces have their problems too, like they don't add detail. Curviness isn't detail, it's smoothness, and even though it looks a lot better with low-poly models most of the time, subdivision doesn't add much to a model over 8000 polys. Very often you see yourself adding polygons that are not smooth, but tend to have detail (hard edges) in them.

John Carmack pointed out the texturing problems, but there are loads more, like level of detail, texture coordinates and material seams. Triangles are about as stupid primitive that you can have as a graphics primitive, but they are extremely convenient. For example, their bounding volume is bound by their control points, they are discrete (i.e. can be detached and manipulated individually) and they can be textured in any way possible.

I have the feeling that most graphics primitives (such as curved surfaces, maybe not including subdivision surfaces) are going to lose from triangles.

Put it simply: complexity of geometry tended to be a problem in 3D graphics, but with the extreme bandwidth and pipeline increases we see today, the stream of triangles is becoming less of a problem. A good LOD algorithm can get the triangles/pixel ratio down to around 1 which will be a very feasable ration in a very short while.

Most of the added processing time nowadays goes towards shadowing, detail maps, projective lights, motion blurring/oversampling/other frambuffer tricks, but it seems the triangle limit is diminishing.

All of these new techniques get easier with triangles. With adaptive subdivision these techniques get worse to implement. Try to do animated soft-skinned subdivision surfaces with adaptive subdivision and shadow-casting.

Triangles are stupid, but in the end, all graphics cards draw triangles. I think that curved surfaces won't be all what they were hyped up to be, they simply add too little at too much cost.

Michiel

Re:Nvidia and new aliances

[LinuxParanoid]

I find it interesting that the earliest NVIDIA engineers were from Sun. To me, this explains A) their pre-occupation with surfaces as a primitive, long a tendency within Sun due to their MCAD focus, and B) their appreciation for the value of short cycle times. 3dfx, by contrast, was founded in part by engineering from SGI (e.g. Gary Tarolli) who had a stronger appreciation of how to optimize great 3D technology and astutely balance technological tradeoffs, but perhaps less cultural appreciation for obscure business issues like cycle times and ability to execute.

Just as in the workstation market, Sun was able to muscle-out SGI by steadily raising the bar and focusing on good-enough-for-my-core-markets improvements, so NVIDIA beat 3dfx. Although one could always argue that 3dfx beat itself. Still, in my mind, the turning point was when NVIDIA hired a lot of key engineers fleeing SGI which was in the process of spiralling downward. If 3dfx had gotten that team, we might be looking at a different story.

In any event, it's remarkable that engineers from either Sun or SGI were able to shift their mindset from product cycles of 3 years (workstation graphics) to product cycles of 6 months (PC 2D graphics a la Cirrus Logic). If you've grown up building projects the slow way, a faster tempo is not easy to adjust to! I've always thought that besides his brilliance, the psychological development of John Carmack's early exposure to 1 month product cycles helped him learn the focus needed to keep his current 18-month(?) product cycles going, something his competitors have really struggled to match.

It'll be interesting to see if the lack of discipline and business focus so evident within SGI engineering begins reasserting itself at NVIDIA as pressures on them ease and the early SGI engineers look at the comfortable value of their options which should be fairly vested by now. As a consumer, all I can say is that thank goodness ATI is around to keep the pressure on them. :)

People matter. There's an interesting book about how the 3D hardware market was won and lost just waiting to be written.

--Greg

Re:Nvidia and new aliances

[DeeKayWon]

Right after a lawsuit by SGI against nVidia over a PCI DMA technique was settled, they allied and nVidia now has a lot of SGI IP at their disposal. The OpenGL stuff they got from SGI is probably why they can't open up the source to their XFree86 drivers.

Re:turnabout

[WasterDave]

anyone know how similiar that is to what NVIDIA tried with quadratic surfaces?

Not at all. Quadratic surfaces were a fundamentally better way of explaining what shape something was in three dimensions. The tile based rendering still has polygons, but breaks the screen up into tiles to do the final render. IIRC the optimisation runs something along the lines of "is this tile entirely covered by something, all of which has a 'nearer' Z? if so, bugger it, I won't even try".

They scale particularly well, BTW. The PowerVR chip was designed to minimise bandwidth and be scaleable to 16 ways for arcade machines. The tiles glue together in a kind of smarter SLI fashion.

There were also early PVR1 accelerators around that rendered to a lump of memory for the 2d card to then actually display. Obviously a bit flawed for today's framerates but a perfectly valid option at the time. Again, driver shiteness killed these off and I have a suspicion that NEC/Videologic signed an exclusive deal with Sega for the PVR2.

I hope they can get PVR2 accelerators together for the PC. Toms' benchmarks give the impression of an altogether more interesting approach than the Nvidia 'hit it with more grunt' thing that's oging on at the moment - and potentially a greater advantage as the number of vertices increases over sheer fillrate requirements.

Still. I'm relatively happy with a voodoo3, so don't look at me.

Dave

WTF??

[ikekrull]

What in god's name is a quadratic texture??? I can imagine 2D or 3D procedural textures defined in terms of quadratic equations, but i somehow doubt this is what michael is on about.

He's probably talking about these cards having hardware support for quadric surfaces.. but since its been fairly-much decided that its generally faster to decompose these kinds of surfaces to triangular meshes for rendering,especially in pipelined graphics architectures such as OpenGL, features like this don't get used much.

Raytracers like POV-Ray and others evaluate quadrics and other classes of curved surfaces on a pixel-by-pixel basis, and other renderers subdivide them down to sub-pixel sized triangles for rendering. However, this approach is seldom suitable for realtime application.

Most likely, this 'quadratic texture support' is just hardware implementation of OpenGL evaluator functions which simply assist in the decomposition of quadric surfaces to a triangle meshes.

Get a clue michael.

Re:Nvidia and work ethic.

[Datafage]

Wrong, the GeForce is now supported under Be, has been since late 2000.

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Re:NV20?

[FreshView]

I work for a low-profile SMALL game company, but we are making an X Box game, and we have NV 20 samples. In fact, I believe it would be possible for me to buy an NV 20 for about $500 directly from nVidia. I'm sure Id has a few.

Quadratic surfaces

[John Carmack]

The article hints that the NV1's quadratic surfaces might have actually been a good thing, and it was held back by Microsoft's push to conformity with triangles.

Er, no.

For several years now, Nvidia has been kicking ass like no other graphics company, but lets not romanticize the early days. The NV1 sucked bad, and it would have been damaging to the development of 3D accelerators if it had gotten more widespread success. Microsoft did a good thing by standing firm against Nvidia's pressure to add quadratic surfaces to the initial version of D3D.

There is an intuitive notion that curved surfaces are "better" than triangles, because it takes lots of triangles to aproximate a curved surface.

In their most general form, they can be degenerated to perform the same functions as triangles, just at a huge waste in specification traffic.

Unfortunately, there have been a long string of products that miss the "most general form" part, and implement some form of patch surface that requires textures to be aligned with the patch isoparms. This seems to stem from a background in 2D graphics, where the natural progression from sliding sprites around goes to scaling them, then rotating them, then projecting them, then curving them.

3DO did it. Saturn did it. NV1 did it. Some people are probably working on displacement mapping schemes right now that are making the same mistake.

Without the ability to separate the texturing from the geometry, you can't clip any geometry in a general way (not even mentioning the fact that clipping a curve along anything but an isoparm will raise it's order), and you either live with texel density varying wildly and degenerating to points, or you have texture seams between every change in density. No ability to rotate a texture on a surface, project a texture across multiple surfaces, etc. You can't replace the generality if a triangle with primitives like that.

Even aside from the theoretical issues, NV1 didn't have any form of hidden surface removal, and the curve subdivision didn't stitch, frustum clip or do perspective. It was a gimmick, not a tool.

All water under the bridge now, of course. NV20 rocks. :-)

John Carmack

Re:Quadratic surfaces

[John Carmack]

My point was that with texturing tied directly to the patch orientation, you can't do exactly the thing that you describe.

I'm not a big booster of hardware curves in any form, but I only rail against hardware schemes that use aligned textures.

John Carmack

Re:Quadratic surfaces

[Coccyx The Clown]

Heh, i thought this sounded a little too intelligent for a slashdot post.... then i see the JC...

Re:Quadratic surfaces

[John Carmack]

The hardware curved surfaces in upcoming hardware is basically ok, because you can have all the attributes independent of each other at each control point. My major point was that the 3DO/Saturn/NV1 botched it badly by explicitly tying the texture to the patch orientation, which prevents them from being able to do triangle like things at ALL.

John Carmack

Re:Quadratic surfaces

[John Carmack]

I was ranting specifically about square patches that have implicit texture alignment, not curves in general. I am on record as saying that curved surfaces aren't as wonderful as the first seem, though.

It was my experience that subdivision surfaces are much more convenient for modeling free form organic surfaces, but polynomial patches can be more convenient for architectural work.

John Carmack

Re:a scary union (definition of the word monopoly)

[malfunct]

By that definition Microsoft is nowhere near a monopoly because it has competitors that are no where near going under. Notice I said virtual monopoly, meaning that they command a large portion of the market and can for all intents and purposes choose thier prices.

I already mentioned that they were not the only company, just the only one with much power in the market. I don't put nVidia down for it, just wish other companies would jump in and make a new good product.

Re:NV20?

[Lotek]

Dude. John Carmack.

Video card makers actually ASK HIM what he wants to see in the next generation video cards, then scurry off and figure out how to do that. I don't doubt that they send him a few engineering samples once they have working prototypes.

No company is so suicidal that they are going to create a video card that won't run Doom2001 (or whatever its going to be called) Perfectly.

Unfair anti-MS bias

[b0r1s]

Although the NV1 was technologically superior to other chips of that era from a number of perspectives, the proprietary quadratic texture mapping of the NV1 was its death sentence. When Microsoft finalized Direct3D not too long after the NV1 had reached store shelves, polygons had been chosen as the standard primitive, and despite NVIDIA's and Diamond's best efforts, developers were no longer willing to develop for the NV1.

This is nonsense and self-contradicting. Microsoft's direct3d didn't kill nv1, a closed source proprietary texture mapping procedure that was incompatible with any other card killed nv1. Had nvidia worked closer with developers before direct3d became the standard, nv1 could have been accepted and implemented on a larger scale. True, direct3d replaced nv1, but blaming microsoft for the death is pointless: proprietary policies killed nv1, not its competition.

The NV2 will suffer, as it is before its time.

[Urban Existentialist]

As this chip was designed for the console, rather than the PC, I have to question how good it is going to be, and how well developed for the PC market. It is designed for consoles, which have very wide busses between graphics ram and main ram, and fast dedicated support chips for this environment.

However, the PC does not have those high speed wide busses for interchange between main and graphics ram. I fear that this may cause some performance loss, as although the chip will still be good, it will not be optimal.

The limiting factor on games and graphics performance these days is not calculation speeds;it is bandwidth, pur and simple. In ten years, everything will be bandwidth. If you consider that in one clock cycle on a mosern chip in the 1 GHz range light travel only a foot or so, we can see that information interchange between CPU's and memory will become fundamentally limited by the speed of light within 18 months, as the distance from CPU to memory exceeds the distance that light travels in a clock cycle. The only way to improve is via bandwidth increases, and better use of cache.

But that is the future, and it is the future that this chip was designed for, in the form of consoles, which are always technologically ahead.

I fear this chip will suffer through being ahead of its time.

You know exactly what to do-
Your kiss, your fingers on my thigh-

turnabout

[nomadic]

The article mentions Sega dropped NVIDIA in favor of PowerVR for producing their console's graphics processor. What's interesting is PowerVR is now trying to move in on the PC graphics card industry itself with the Evil Kyro, which uses a tile-based rendering system; anyone know how similiar that is to what NVIDIA tried with quadratic surfaces?
--

Re:turnabout

[Anonymous Coward]

Tiling and the quadratic stuff are completely different. The quadratic stuff is to have a curved primitive. While that's a good thing, most surfaces you'll want to draw won't be quadratic, so you're just slightly better off than if you had triangles. There were also problems in how to do the texturing (well, actually, texturing wasn't too important back then so it didn't go into NV2.) Note that the new DirectX 8 has cubic splines in it, which ought to be better than quadratic primitives.

The modern approach to drawing these curved primitives is to tesselate them into many triangles. If you had to draw a cubic spline using some quadratic primitive, you would have to "tesselate" your cubic primitive into smaller quadratic ones.

Tiling is where you divide your screen into tiles (say, 16x16 pixels per tile). The hardware buffers all your glTriangles (or whatever), doesn't draw a thing until you glSwapBuffers (which would normally display the picture). At that point, it will sort all the triangles into the tiles (some triangles stradle several tiles). Then, each tile is drawn one after the other. The main advantage is that this per-tile work can all be done on-chip instead of doing it in frame buffer memory. Frame buffer bandwidth is one of the most limiting aspects of modern graphics chip design.

The Kyro also uses a scan-line algorithm (if I understand correctly). In particular, it actually sort all the surfaces from front to back (or maybe back to front) to get transparencies correctly (or at least, its Sega incarnation in the DreamCast does this). Unfortunately, this great feature will run against 3d API's (both DirectX and OpenGL) which don't sit easily with that kind of business. Nevertheless, I do believe that such an extension will go into the API's in the near future; the developers are asking for it and the chip designers are trying to get it working.

I design 3d chips for an important graphics company but because of my company's culture, I'd better stay anonymous and not even say whom I work for.

Re:NV1, a crying shame.

[WasterDave]

The impression you got from the linked article was right. The impression I got from Diamond's marketing was wrong. GGNNNNNN!

I guess the idea was that you could buy one card and have all your gaming video/sound/control needs taken care of.

More or less, in theory. In practice of course, none of the games I wanted to play on it ran on DirectX. Oh well.

Dave

Nvidia earned their position

[Xevion]

Nvidia never used unfair marketing tactics. They have used some questionable ones when it came to a few websites, but that has been fixed.

Nvidia achieved market dominance by providing good products at good prices, and coming out with new ones so fast to overwhelm their competitors. This is not an unfair business tactic, they are just completely ruthless competitors.

When Nvidia came out with the Riva 128, it had one advantage over the Voodoo. It could do 2D. And everyone had a 2D card, so it really didn't matter. It was slower with the early drivers, it had crap image quality, and it ran Quake 2 at 10fps or so on my P133.

The Voodoo2 came out and Nvidia had nothing but a slightly improved Riva 128, but at this point, people still didn't really care, but the 3d only thing was starting to have an effect. People would run systems with Riva 128s and Voodoo2s for good 2d and great 3d, and the option of real openGL.

With the TNT, Nvidia had a performance competitive product that had much better image quality too, and 3dfx's Banshee was a rehased, weakened Voodoo2. When the Voodoo3 came out, Nvidia promptly took the performance lead with the TNT2/TNT2 Ultra, albeit by a small margin. From then on 3dfx was way too slow to stand a chance. ATI started to come back into the picture here, and they have been tagging along since.

Nvidia releases new products too quickly for others to remain competitive, and they work quickly towards incorporating features OEMs want, lowering their prices, and look at the extremely dominant set of video chips Nvidia has today. Everything they have out is best of class, or damn near it.

MS won the market using completely ruthless tactics, and now they are their own greatest threat. Nvidia is still pumping out products like there is no tomorrow, and they are aware that if they get lax like 3dfx did, they will fall very quickly. ATI, while lagging behind, could jump right back into the front with one botched product release on Nvidia's behalf.

Also, if ATI gets their act together quickly and writes some decent drivers, and gets a comprable card out at a significantly lower price, then ATI will be able to get some of that lost marketshare back. It will take a better deal to beat Nvidia, however, because the established brand can always charge more for the same thing. And ATI has a huge disadvantage there too because they are competing with a ton of smaller boardmakers that can charge whatever they want.

Re:a scary union

[MassacrE]

ooh, viable competitors?

who?

Matrox's latest board is actually *slower* than their previous G400 Max card, and there still have been no announcements of the G800.

ATi has been losing their OEM market, first on the PC OEMs and now from Apple. Even their notebook line is now under pressure from nvidia's chips. Without an OEM market, they are done - even with a better chip, it would take a lot before people would believe that ATi isn't releasing a piece of crap (their drivers in the past have been.. sub-optimal)

NVidia has strong alliances with Microsoft and SGI, and now with their aquisition of 3dfx technology has blanketed the field of 3d graphics with patents.

Most of the graphics-oriented people I know are about 40/40 on which of Matrox or ATI will go under first: the remaining 20% don't acknowledge that the companies are still even competing. Last I checked, there isn't even anyone else trying to make a dent in the field.

Re:Nvidia and new aliances

[nathanh]

The Matrox G### cards are pretty open, but the performance of them is only a fraction of the nVidia closed source drivers.

Perhaps because the nVidia hardware is significantly faster than the Matrox G### hardware.

Really, if you want to insult the open sourced DRI effort, at least take the time to think the argument through first.

Nvidia and work ethic.

[TheFlu]

I really can't say too many bad things about Nvidia. They constantly pump out new drivers in order to satisfy feature hungry consumers. They go so far as to offer drivers for not only Windows, but Linux, BeOS and even OS/2. At this rate though, maybe one day soon, I'll have to worry about doing driver updates on my game console in order to get that extra fps.

Penguin rhetoric. The Linux Pimp

Nvidia and new aliances

[tolldog]

What I am supprised to see is the lack of mention in the article to NVidia and SGI. The new SGI Intel boxes are running a variation of the nv15 chipset (and do a good job of it). Also, NVidia, if I remember right, has a ton of ex-SGI employees.

Hardware Monopolies

[AstynaxX]

NVidia is not, and really is not likely to become, a monopolist in any meaningful sense. The hardware side of computers is not like the software. Most specs are open, the closed ones tend not to do well [only one I can recall in recent times is the ZIP, and I think that is due to a decent product, reasonable price, and good customer service when they screw up], just look at apple, or LS120 drives. The hardware folks like open, certified specs [PCI, AGP, USB, etc.] that they can conform to. Any company with a few talented chip engineers could make a card that outperforms the GeForce 2's, make it plug into any AGP board, and compete. The reason this doesn't work in software is because the specs aren't open, they are controlled by the monopolist. So, untill NVidia releases their own slot for graphics boards, patented by them and used soley by their cards, don't get your panties in a bunch over their 'monopoly'. As 3dfx showed us, such monopolies in hardware rarely last long.

-={(Astynax)}=-

Re:a scary union

[Temporal]

NVidia does not have a monopoly in any market right now. What they do offer is the best (IMHO) consumer-level graphics card on the market. As well as the second-best. And the third-best. (I'm talking GeForce2 Ultra, GeForce2 Pro, and GeForce 2 here.) That is very different from having a monopoly.

The ATI Radeon is also a reasonably good card, especially if you get the all-in-wonder version. EvilKyro, or whatever it is called, looks interesting, but I don't know all the details about it yet. The point is, NVidia does not have a monopoly.

If you think about it, NVidia is now at the point that 3dfx was at a few years back. A year ahead of the competition. However, unlike 3dfx, NVidia is not encouraging people to use a proprietary API that only works with their own hardware. The best way to access an NVidia card is via OpenGL (even on Windows), which is the most open, cross-platform 3D API starndard out there. NVidia has implemented proprietary extensions to OpenGL, but the extensions are purposely laid out such that it is easy to write software which only uses the extensions if they are available, and uses GL standard calls otherwise. (I know this from experience...)

Furthermore, unlike some well-known monopolistic companies, NVidia is still innovating at an alarming rate. As long as they keep doing so, and their prices stay where they are (GeForce 2 for $130, anyone?), I'm happy.

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Re:a scary union

[GrandCow]

They are surprisingly simalar to Microsoft, except there is no equivalent Apple in the graphics field to provide a counterpoint.

The difference here between Nvidia and microsoft is that Nvidia isn't using monopolistic tactics, and there are viable competitors on the same platform. Nvidia just has better products, and noone else has a better card. Would you say that the Radeon isn't a good card with a nice bit of market share? If you go to any Gateway store (I was there earlier today) and want one of the flat panel monitors, which card do you end up with? Not the Nvidia product, but the 32mb Radeon.

Sorry, but it's really not fair to put them in the same category as Microsoft just because they have the best cards out there that people want.

Re:Not ready for prime time

[coupland]

Uhm, sorry but are you dumb? 3dfx had a complete strangehold on the 3D market by locking down performance, price, and reputation. NVidia single-handedly dethroned them using superior products and a better R&D pipeline. You talk like NVidia has always been the big guy on the block when EVERYONE knows they fought a tremendous battle against an undisputed market leader. And won.
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NV1, a crying shame.

[WasterDave]

I had one, on a Diamond Edge2000. It shipped in a huge pile of hype about being:
(a) The first Direct3D accelerator and
(b) Compatible with the Sega Saturn.

Both of which turned out to be bullshit. While it did ship some actually quite good DirectX drivers, the direct 3d aspect of it was being "worked on". They did eventually ship some, with a huge disclaimer along the lines of "we know these things blow chunks, it's all due to this quadratic surface thing". This was all in the middle of John Carmack's big Direct3d rant on usenet ("I am looking forward to doing an apples to apples comparison of Direct3D and OpenGL" turned into "I am not going to finish, and there will never be, a Direct3d port of quake").

It also had onboard sound that was also very damn good. The MPU401 in particular was of near sound canvas quality. Unfortunately it was not sound blaster compatible and since the direct 3d port of quake was never going to happen, games basically stayed in DOS and sound effects had to be sent to a separate card.

Saturn compatibility turned into "Sega will be porting games", which of course they never bothered to do because only eight people bought the cards.

And Diamond were just shit about the whole thing. Haven't bought a thing from them since, don't know anyone else who has either.

So in essence: Great silicon, some serious forward steps were taken; Shitty marketing, I guess they learned.

Dave

BTW, while we're on the subject of bullshit graphics accelerators, did anyone ever get texture mapping going on a Millennium2?