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."

Comments

Nary a Mention of...

[ewhac]

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