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The Age of Nvidia
EyesWideOpen writes "There is an excellent (and lengthy) two part article (part 1, part 2) at Salon detailing the rise, and... rise, of Nvidia and how the company came to rest atop the 3-D graphics chip industry with a little help from Microsoft. The article discusses how Nvidia was able to persevere in the multi-billion dollar industry while other graphics chip companies, such as 3Dfx which was bought by Nvidia, did not fare as well."
Don't take everything in the article as gospel. For example, the article talks about the Voodoo3 as 3dfx's first 2D/3D card -- "at last, 3Dfx had an integrated 2-D/3-D card!", but mentions the Banshee prior to that (which was a 2D/3D card).
Read the article for the point that 3dfx had the market and then went about losing a number of gambles. While that was going on nVidia got lucky and proceeded to execute a _deliverable_ plan like clockwork.
"All the darkness in the world can not quench the light of one small candle."
Come on,
NVIDIA was able to make the fastest GPUs on the planet because of the engineers they have.
SGI was really not a very good place to be if you were interested in pushing the envelope w/regard to 3D hardware, so a new company was formed, and many extremely talented people from SGI went to work for it. That company was NVidia.
Its sad to see SGI in it's current state, but it is also good to see that SGI's technology, with the proper focus, marketing and pricing, is capable of breaking into almost every segment of the computing market.
Obviously, kudos to the NVidia management team, but lets not forget either the engineers and the company that built the foundatation of 3D graphics on the desktop.
I gots ta ding a ding dang my dang a long ling long
source: http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.html?i=162
The article is interesting, but it has several mistakes. First of all, T-Buffer tech was introduced on the V5, and the article mistakenly stated that the V4 came prior to the V5, when they were released at the same time. These are somewhat minor quibbles, to be certain.
If any of you remember, the purchase of STB befuddled everyone, and for good reason; STB's products were a mix of Nvidia and 3dfx chips, and OEM's had the freedom to pick and choose what they wanted to buy. Furthermore, 3dfx had great co-branding with companies such as STB, Creative Labs and Diamond (I still get all twittery when I remember waiting to get my hands on a Diamond Monster Voodoo II). In one fell swoop, 3dfx destroyed what was best about STB, and it's co-branding with other manufacturers.
The smart money left shortly thereafter.
The ensuing fiscal mayhem following the purchase of Gigapixel was a financial blow (coupled with late product releases) that they simply would be unable to recover from.
Had the Voodoo 4 and 5 been released on time, they simply would have crushed the TNT 2 Ultra and put them in a much better position to pay off all that enormous debt. But, the card was late, and it had to compete against a far superior offering from Nvidia, which was the Geforce.
And the smart money that left a long time ago was not wondering if, but when.
So, not any single decision led to the downfall of the once dominant player, but many. Not listening to the market (we don't have 32-bit support for color in games since people don't really need it...take 16-bit or else!). Excess execute hubris such as the purchase of STB and Gigapixel and the foundering on product release dates. Trusting on name brand and uncompetitive products all eroded the company to nothing.
In terms of Nvidia, their executive staff has always been able to seize on opportunities, and possess a remarkably clear vision of where they want their company to go in the marketplace. Their purchase of 3dfx's IP (which also included Gigapixel's IP) for only 70 million was absolutely brilliant, as was the absorption of 100 of 3dfx's top engineers ensures that Nvidia will be able to utilize all the fantastic goodies 3dfx had sitting in the R & D lab.
It's also really great that ATI is able to mount such a good force of competition in this arena; along with maybe-will-runs such as Matrox and 3D Labs...all this competition keeps em on their toes.
Have the Bit Boys ever gone into tape-out? Or did they soak up the former executive staff from 3dfx?