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The Last Days at 3dfx
sand writes "FiringSquad has a detailed account of what happened in the final days at 3dfx. Every 3dfx product that was released or upcoming is discussed by a former 3dfx employee with inside knowledge on what caused the product delays (including an employee who forgot to fly to Asia to pickup the first Voodoo5 chips). He also discusses money mismanagement and the STB merger. It's a very enlightening article for anyone who's interested in 3D graphics and what goes on inside these companies."
There is no rule that says that business have to survive.
3dfx changed the graphics scene at a time when this was worth doing,
but today there is little need for faster graphics.
It's natural and normal that the market moves and the companies move with the market.
When a company is so focussed on a single segment, they usually go broke during such changes.
Sad, but presumably their excellent people will find good work elsewhere.
Sig for sale or rent. One previous user. Inquire within.
Just love getting the skinny on failed companies. Wish people from other companies would come out and do the same.
This is what competition is all about. When a company cannot deliver the best product to the best price they don't get any income. If you don't have and income and spend alot without being able to overtake your competators, you will enventually run out of money. It is not fun, but reality in a market economy.
Eventually we will see this when it comes to ATI and nVidia, or they will find a niche market to survive in. The big profit will go to the one making the best product at the best price.
Note - I do not critisize market economy, without it we would probably not have hardware accelerated 3D for home computers at all!
They did truely sell out. The people who bought their shares were left with nothing. And once again the CEOs and all the big-urns gets a fat bonus with a big grin on their faces as they make this oh-so-tough-decision. It was so very pathethic to get the letter for 3dfx.
They should have added useful features and clever thinking that circumvented the problems that plagued the other companies. AGP Texture bandwidth could have been solved by texture compression, but S3 ended up doing that. 32 bit colour was implemented by everyone except 3DFX. They could have saved a lot fo bandwidth if they'd have come up with better Z buffer algorithms, but PowerVR did that. They could have added programmable graphics, but that was left to ATI. They could have put T&L on the card, but that was left to Nvidia.
3DFX failed because they didn't innovate
At the start of the consumer 3d graphics business Voodoo were clearly superior, I still have a Voodoo 1 laying around somewhere, there were problems; the whole passthrough cable thing, the lack of windowed support & 16bit clour were all problematic. As an upgrade Voodoo offered the second revision that could run in SLI mode. It required two PCI slots in addition to your 2d graphics card and was horrendously expensive.
nVidia released the TNT that offered similar performance, in one card (not 3!), did 32 bit colour and was significantly cheaper.
3DFX was never competitive from then on, offering weaker, more expensive products that relied on brand name support.
The widespread adoption of D3D / OpenGL around this time over the proprietary Glide API was the nail in the coffin.
Up until the TNT (TNT2), 3dfx was still king of the hill... It would be like buying a Maxtor drive back in Western Digital's heyday.
:)
You *know* what works, so why buy anything else? On the other hand, that's why I like hardware review sites like anantech and Tom's. You may not want to trust them completely, but they do give you a free peek at hardware capabilities.
I like many others was not concerned with them going. Thier attempt to lock the market in via the proprietray GLIDE API was a blatant move to control the market.
:-)
I'm happy to see the tail end of any company that does this.
Thier lawsuit against the guy doing the GLIDE wrapper didn't help improve my opinion of them.
However, they do not appear to be popular, or even widely available, here in Europe. Until extremly recently, every sound card I have ever seen for sale, or installed, or owned myself, has been a Creative card of some description. As it happens, this computer I am using (Company owned) has a Turtle Beach in it, and that is the first time I have ever seen one. At home I currently use the onboard Via 82Cxx Ac'97, because it was there, and it is the first time I have heard on board audio actually sound passable.
Creative have been at the top of the pile for so long that it is difficult to imagine them going the way of 3dfx. However, sound cards are becoming a comodity item, and it seems that they are bailing out of the low end market as quickly as possible. The low end is being eaten up by integrated motherboard chipsets.
Well this has certainly been a bit of a rant without much of a point. Or direction. Oh well.
They day 3DFX bought STB was the beginning of the end. The sheer arrogance of believing they could cut off all their customers and just have the whole business to themselves. That they could compete with both chip *and* board manufacturers, and still come out on top. Sure, they had a head start, but Creative, Diamond, etc, would inevitably throw their considerable support behind another chip company.
The management overplayed their hand, big style, they were bound to lose. They were just way too cocky. Of course you can see that just from the lunch budget.
Most secret technology is often sent through methods that can be intercepted by halfway decent corporate spies.
I think one thing that really started to kill 3dfx was the fact until Voodoo5, 3dfx acceleration required you buy a separate board in addition to the main graphics card, something many users and OEM's intensely dislike.
When both nVidia and ATI started offering better 3-D graphics cards that didn't need a second card for good 3-D performance, that seriously hurt 3dfx very quickly. It also didn't help that 3dfx's offerings when the Voodoo5 did finally get released didn't compare well with the nVidia and ATI competition, either.
What finally killed 3dfx was the release of nVidia's GeForce 256 chipset, which offered a quantum leap forward in 3-D acceleration. ATI's rapid development of the Radeon R100 and R200 chipsets didn't help things for 3dfx, either.
Yep, it's all very simple:
;)
If a company fails because it tries to do the wrong things, the management is at fault because they are supposed to tell the rest of the company what to do. If the rest of the company fails to do the things the management asks of them, the managers are at fault because they hired these guys.
In short, always blame the boss when something goes wrong.
The Drowned and the Saved - Primo Levi
Makes me wonder how Creative have managed to stay top of the soundcard pile
A combination of great marketing and incompetent consumers. The Ensoniq AudioPCI had superior sound. Aureal had superior sound. Right now, Turtle Beach has superior sound. It doesn't seem to matter to consumers (ironic considering that Creative is going to lead them into the path of audio slavery with their DRM "support").
At first, the reason for Creative's success was that "Sound Blaster" was the standard, and it was quite difficult (well, a hassle at least) to develop for different sound cards in a DOS environment. This created a "I should buy Creative if I expect sound" mentality for game players (and even though no one would like to admit it, games have been driving the hardware market since 1990). After the introduction of abstracted sound APIs supported by the OS, that "SB compatibility" isn't as important, yet people still had that "I should get Sound Blaster if I want to play games" meme stuck in their heads.