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The Age of Nvidia

Posted by michael on from the i-met-a-traveller-from-an-antique-land dept.

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."

3 of 234 comments (clear)

  1. Uneven article by FortranDragon · · Score: 4, Informative

    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."
  2. SGI's engineering team had nothing to do with it? by ikekrull · · Score: 5, Informative

    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
  3. Re:Why Nvidia's on top by mister+sticky · · Score: 5, Informative
    Of course there's a number of reasons NVidia is on top but their workforce does sound pretty impressive.
    Since that point many companies have tried to dethrone the undisputed king of the 3D graphics but none have as of yet succeeded; and it's understandable why. With three design teams working in parallel, employees from some of the most talented graphics firms in the industry (3dfx, Appian, Matrox, PixelFusion, etc...), an extremely high employee retention rate (over 95% employees have been with the company for the past 5 years), a gifted set of software engineers (there are more software than hardware engineers at NVIDIA) and an incredible amount of capital it is very clear how NVIDIA is able to stay on top.

    source: http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.html?i=1620