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VisionTek Folds
geogeek6_7 writes: "In a major shocker with potentially far reaching consquences, it seems that VisionTek, the number one producer of NVIDIA based graphics cards, will be foreclosed, and cease to exist. HardOCP has the details."
(addendum) Canopus is still around, they just don't sell commodity PC graphics cards outside of Japan anymore. Sorry.
"(Man) tries to live his own life as if he were telling a story. But you have to choose: live or tell." --Sartre
The pro cards generally had faster cores, higher quality memory and capacitors, better warranties, and drivers that were optimized for professional work. The drivers could be used on regular Geforce cards by doing some precision saudering, but the other benefits didn't materialize doing so.
Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes. --E. W. Dijkstra
I gained interest in Leadtek when I read a review about the quality of the 2D filters they use on that Ti500 card. It rivals both ATI and even Matrox! (That's what really sparked my interest since I enjoyed the sharp 2D of my G400, but it just didn't cut it when it came to 3D games.)
They also mentioned that every Nvidia-based card Leadtek releases will have the same high quality 2D filters on it. Since then, I ended up buying a Titanium 200 TDH from them and its 2D display is up to par with my G400.
I'm happy :)
Yeah, Voodoo 5 6000, with four VSA-100 chips and a "Voodoo Volts" PSU. Projected $599 retail. (With a fast CPU -- for T&L -- would beat a GF2 in many situations, tho. More fillrate and more bandwidth on the cricket bat lookalike.)
Or perhaps you mean Voodoo 5 5500 (dual chip), projected $399 retail, actually sold at $200 (to very happy customers).
You aren't wrong -- some flaws were purely chip design -- but the Juarez plant was a key mistake for 3dfx. They actually did have significant card design and manufacturing problems which contributed to belate the Voodoo 4/5 at the crucial time of 3dfx's life.
Let's see - GF4 cards are made by XFX, Leadtek/ Gainward, Asus, MSI, AOpen, PNY, Abit, Soltek, Chaintek, EVGA, Albatron, Pine, AND Visiontek (see newegg.com). Visiontek was a popular retail card in the US only and one of the few not made in China/Taiwan. You still have 12 of 13 manufacturers left - I can't imagine how they will pick up the slack!
Interestingly enough, the answer is in this weeks Slate...
Speed wise the low end Voodoo 5 was roughly GeForce level, with better anti aliasing. I seem to recall constant arguing about quality (3dfx rulez!) vs. speed (nvidia rulez!). 3dfx drew a lot of die hard fans, though I never was one :)
The company was founded by SGI people which is why I cared at all. Apparently they had the mad business skillz of SGI too (evil cackle).
3dfx's heyday was when they made separate 3D cards that plugged into the VGA passthrough on your 2D card. I never bought into that setup and only having one AGP slot makes it undesirable now.
I never actually owned a 3dfx, so this is just my frail memory and what I could find on google.
I _do_ own a VisionTek GeForce 2 though. Ugh.
-Kevin
I was going to get a Geforce4 Ti not too long ago, figuring I'd already "saved" money by leaping the GeForce3 upgrade and could therefore justify spending more to get the newest high-end card, but I just don't feel the need. Works great in Windows, works great in Linux, reasonably fast, not that hot as long as I have my extra fans on, so it's all good.
If anyone needs a fair-to-decent 3D card with good dual-boot support, grab the GeForce2 GTS like T-Kir says. It's a bargain, even still.
-B
Ash and Hickory, straight-grained and true, make excellent bludgeons, dandy for the cudgeling of vegetarians.
Wow, that was some seriously lucky timing for me. I had been saving up for a few months to buy a nice new VisionTek card, and at the last minute I decided to go with a ChainTech card, because it was the same price, and included an S-Video In/Out port, and a gold plated fan and heat sink (dont ask what the point of this is, it just looked cool and was the same price).
Preformance has been execellent, and the card never overheated (which is amazing, since the room it's in is usually 90-95 degrees in the summer. Anti-Aliasing preformance was great at 4x, 1024x768. Of course, I upgraded from a TNT2, so what would I know?
Actually, it's a somewhat different story to what appeared to be going on.
3dfx knew the Voodoo2 wouldn't be king forever. They were working on Rampage as its successor. Unfortunately, it fell to feature creep and kept getting delayed.
When 3dfx bought STB they pulled engineers off Rampage to design Banshee. Banshee went through so many respins it was silly, hence the huge delay. By now, Rampage had fallen even further behind, so much so they needed to go back to the drawing board. The huge exodus of engineers that had recently occured didn't help either.
In order to keep chips moving, 3dfx die shrinked the Banshee, put the TMU it lost from the Voodoo2 back on, increased the clock and called it the Voodoo3. The Voodoo5 started out as the Voodoo3 4000 to combat the TNT2 ultra, but then 3dfx learned about the GeForce and added the T-buffer to produce the Voodoo5.
Rampage taped out around late November-early December 2000. They even got the OpenGL drivers up to playing Quake3 (There are screenshots floating around). Unfortunately, by then it was too late. It's a shame, because I hear their "texture computer" was quite interesting.
Every major OEM still sells computers without an AGP slot. HPQ, Dell, Gateway, Sony. A significant proportion of computer users are forced to use PCI cards because of this. I was at Dell's website the other day and saw that they were selling a Pentium 4 with onboard video and no AGP slot. A Pentium 4!! So your elitist comments not only apply to the southern, white Wal-Mart shopper, but also to many suburbanites and sophisticated city dwellers.
Wal-Mart is a good choice for high-quality, low-priced tech products. Their website is selling Mandrake Linux PCs. I thought you OSS advocates have dreamed for years of a major retailer offering a Linux computer? Shouldn't you be praising Wal-Mart rather than mocking them and their customers? What a way to support the Free software community!
IIRC the first-gen TNT cards had a few significant advantages over the 3dfx cards. I originally owned a Banshee but traded it to a friend for a TNT. Why?
1. Huge texture support. The Banshee could only render 256x256 textures while the TNT could render 1024x1024 textures (correct me if I'm wrong, it's been awhile).
2. 32 bit color. Remember when quake3 first came out? The voodoos left you with 16bit color ONLY. That and the small textures made quake3 look like ass.
3. Poor OpenGL ICD that hit the market pretty late in the 3dfx cards. They got a little too comfortable with Glide.
4. Bad 2d quality. While the Banshee was a step up from the other Voodoos in this respect, it still didn't render as cleanly in 2d as the TNT cards.
5. Splintered drivers. The TNT cards (starting way back then) only had one driver set. Upgrading was easy.
So yeah, 3dfx had a good product at the time but Nvidia already had them beat coming out of the gate with their first product. After awhile the friend that traded me the TNT wanted to trade back LOL.
At .35 um, the old TNT cards ran too hot. The cards generated too much heat, limiting clock speeds until the .25 um version came out. The smaller micron die size allowed more chip die to be cut from each silicon wafer.
No, the entire PCB line did not have to be upgraded, but the tools to work on the silicon wafer did. 3DFX had to retool their etching machines for any die shrink, whereas Nvidia can solicit work from TMSC, UMC, or any other fab willing to upgrade its own line. The other video card OEMS buy the chips made in 3rd party fabs and then pick and place. My point is that Nvidia does not have to spend money retooling a die set to cut from wafers, instead they can shop around the foundaries already doing that. If Nvidia did own its own fabs, then they would have to experience that additional cost and might be tempted to make their own boards for retail. The OEMs just tweak a referance design and plug in a chip, but the foundaries are a completely different step. Intel, AMD, TMSC, and UMC are all experiencing major costs upgrading their die lines (allowing them to squeeze more chips from a wafer and having faster chips), and Nvidia is largely immune to that. Remaining fab free is a boon to them.