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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
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...
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.
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.
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.