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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."
Graphics card OEMs have been being perpetually undercut by lower-margin competitors basically since they became significant. Visiontek became dominant by being able to undercut the likes of ELSA, Diamond, Canopus, STB, and (the original) Hercules, among others. Yes, none of them are around anymore.
In a way nVidia themselves have been shielded from this madness by not producing boards themselves. Its probably one of the reasons they still exist.
"(Man) tries to live his own life as if he were telling a story. But you have to choose: live or tell." --Sartre
While the choice to produce their own boards was certianly a substantial part of the problem, the large problem was simply that of being complacent.
When the Voodoo first came out it quite simply shocked the industry. When 3dfx first demoed their technology on a simulator, their competitors lauged at them, saying they could never get real silicon to do that. 6 months later those competitors were sitting and taking notes when a real Voodoo was being demoed.
Now when the Voodoo 2 came out 3dfx was able to keep their commanding lead as THE 3d kings, but there was a problem: The Voodoo 2 wasn't really a new card. It was just the next generation of Voodoo technology. Ok, fine, all the time companies release refinement on what they have already, this is no big thing.... Except 3dfx just kept doing it.
The Banshee was just Voodoo technology, and even the Voodoo 3 was nothing more than a fast Voodoo 2 compressed to a single chip. Now all the while, nVidia had been sneaking up on them. With the TNT they introduced a card that, while not as powerful as the current Voodoos, had features (32-bit support being the most important) that they didn't. With later TNT2s, nVidia actually became the first to dethrone the Voodoo3 as the speed king.
Well No problem said 3dfx, they had this new VSA-100 technology in the pipe (what the Voodoo 5 used) that kicked the crap out of the TNT processors. Fine, but one huge problem: VSA-100 was still well over a year off from being real silicon and nVidia was NOT sitting still. By the time VSA-100 saw the light, the GeForce and then GeForce 2 had seen the light of say, and 3dfx just couldn't keep up.
3dfx got complacent, they forgot that their competition was fighting hard to beat them and to produce better GPUs. They keep trying to milk more out of their again Voodoo architecture and ny the time they had something new out the door, nVidia had them beat.
I was a huge 3dfx fan and owned a dual 12mb Voodoo2 rig that cost about $600, and then replaced that for a Voodoo 3 later, but when the GeForce came out I just couldn't stick with 3dfx any more.
And why I hate OCP for that matter.
This seems like a big enough story that I'm surprised that it's scooped in a dopey source like HardOCP. What really bothers me is that they didn't even bother getting any reply from Visontek. I tried calling their HQ but it's before start of business.
I wander if some PR flack will soon be looking for a job.
Unless the story is true, but I doubt that it is. My guess is there is a germ of truth to this story, but no more. There may be a reorganisation in the works, but I dount it is more than that. Even if there is, it is pretty irresponsible journalism to publish such a big story with no verification.
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