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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."
They innovated once then just tried to scale the same tech (adding ram or linking a bunch of chips together) to compete.. Nvidia introduced the GPU and introduced a whole new set of features for developers to play with.
EA David Gardner -"... but the consumers have proven that actually what they want is fun."
Of course, there are great reasons for them not to support Glide:
1) Nobody has been using it for a few years
2) If they supported it, people might start using it again which would suck
I have used both NVidia and ATI video cards recently. I found that the 2d image quality on the ATI card (a Radeon 7200) was superior to that of the Nvidia 2MX card that I had. This was only noticable on my apature-grille monitor but it _was_ quite noticable.
I also dislike the fact that NVidia's Linux drivers are closed-source, though of course most people do not care about this.
Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia.
That may be an unfortunate turn of phrase. Hopefully Gordon was thinking of the automobile manufacturers.
I know a lot of gamers don't care about driver stability since they enjoy fooling around with their system hours on end.
However, rock solid drivers are nvidia's underrated asset. You don't know how much you miss stability until it's gone. Love to see them get more props on this.
I think the author overstates the influence of DirectX (nee Direct 3D) on early 3D gaming. Glide was certainly influential -- not to mention the fact that it actually worked -- but worthy of at least as much credit was OpenGL.
The reason OpenGL was (and is) important is because that's what you had to have if you wanted to run 3D-accelerated Quake. And Quake was the undisputed king of first-person shooters. OpenGL support for Quake required downloading a new executable, but Quake2 shipped with it.
OpenGL's API, designed over the course of more than a decade by SGI engineers, beat the crap out of Micros~1's Hacked-Up Losing Kluge. Only now is DirectX starting to approach OpenGL's usability.
Things are a bit more flexible these days, but back then, if you wanted any hope of selling your 3D card, you had to run Quake. And to do that, you had to support OpenGL. Period.
Oh, and NVidia has always had the best OpenGL implementation out there. Funny how that worked out :-). (Permedia's might technically be better, but have you seen what those cards cost?)
Schwab
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
In the area of Drivers, I'm amazed by the fact that they have one set for all of their video cards (Detonator), and how they have managed to supplement the power of each card purely on the software side. Because of that, the life of my TNT 1 video card was extended by another year, due to a 40% speed increase after upgrading from Detonator 2 to 3. It blew me away at the time (after all, there are no drivers for my other computer hardware that upgrade their performance so dramatically), and made me an Nvidia fanboy.
It is a little worrying that Nvidia are becoming so large though. Ever since the assimilation of 3DFX, the price of the top end Nvidia cards has blown out a lot. One can only hope they don't become a lumbering behemoth in future.
Gamers are not loyal at all to graphics companies, whether it be nVidia, 3dfx, or ATI.
However, gamers ARE very loyal to games they love. As I said in an earlier post, I'm loyal to some of my beloved games like Descent 1 - 3 and Tombraider 1 - 5. So loyal, in fact, that I won't buy graphicsc cards which don't work well with these games.
Graphics card companies would be wise to recognize that gamers are more than simply graphics-freaks always hopping on the latest eye-candy game. This is partly because you fall in love with games just like with cars, and partly because of gameplay. It seems like most games that come out just plain suck. So diamonds in the rough like Descent or Tomb Raider (or to some people with poor taste, Doom-like games) are highly revered.
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
Apple Computer.
This guy is an obvious M$ troll please don't feed him.
http://Lenny.com
4 great justice!
No No No, the reason why NV is king of the hill is because they successfully convinced bleeding-edge freaks like myself that it's perfectly acceptable to pay 350$ for a video card that will lose 70% of its value within 12 months. at which point you spend another 350$ to renew your setup.
Yes, I'm a Geforce addict. I bought the GF2 before the shop monkeys even had time to pull it out of the truck. I've been drooling over a GF4 for a couple of months now, waiting for the Ti4600's to get stocked up here. I'd eat Kraft Dinner for a month just to afford another pair of programmable pixel shaders.
That's why they're on top: they wooed the polygon-heads with performance, now they're sucking us dry by selling us even more performance. And we're loving every minute of it. NVidiCrack!
-Billco, Fnarg.com