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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."
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!
Grrrrr closed source.
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sexy sexy wallpaper mmmmmmmmmmmm
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.
So, you have a banshee in a box that you put under your PC and it'll run UT so well you can hear it? How does that work?
:-)
Try NetBSD... safe,straightforward,useful.
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.
but today there is little need for faster graphics.
The need for faster and better graphics is exactly why 3dfx died. nVidia caught up and passed them while they were making mistakes like telling people they didn't want or need 32bit colour in 3D games or making 2d/3d cards that didn't hold up to their 3d-only boards.
-PainKilleR-[CE]
The notion that the death of a business is no big thing ignores the human element and several economic facts.
...
First of all, the death of a business creates all kinds of collateral damage, from employees who lose their jobs to creditors and shareholders who never get paid. When the going is good, wealth is created, which creates benefits not only for the company, its shareholders and its employees, but also for its vendors, the municipality it resides in, and surrounding businesses where employees shop (this is known as the "multiplier effect," if you've studied economics). Many, many people and entities gain from a healthy business.
Second, the idea that a business should "quit while the going is good" is ridiculous on its face. Businesses are started to create wealth. They are best at creating wealth "when the going is good." It makes no sense to start a business at all if you're planning to close up shop when you start to be successful. "We just made our first profit! Time to liquidate!" Sure
Businesses certainly can quite easily become irrelevant, but when that happens, there are real costs associated with that, to many consituencies. A business dying is quite far from a neutral event.
I used to work at a company called Real3D. The company was thoroughly mismanaged -- despite having an excellent engineering group. It's a similar tale to 3DFX, only R3D never quite penetrated the market. Eventually the company folded, all the engineers were laid off, and most of them have gone to work for ATI. Whatever was left of R3D was eventually consumed by Intel.
I remember walking by the manager of engineering 's office -- he was busy day-trading stocks all day. Our marketing department kept trying to add new features to our board (feature-creep-itis), trying to scramble to catch up to the competition. The introduction of new features really pushed back our schedules in a big way.
Poor management and poor marketing are what really killed R3D.
The PC Weenies: 11 Years of Online Tech 'Too
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.
Simple; Creative does it with Creative marketing.
The Audigy, for instance, is little more than a gamer's card. Any serious review of the card that you come across on the internet will tell you this, or if you bought it hoping for some advanced features, you'll find it out for yourself.
Here are some examples of this Creative marketing:
- The Audigy does support 24bit/96kHz sound playback, as advertised, but does not actually play it at that. The second it hits the main chip, it's downmixed to 16/44. So while you can play sound at the higher frequency to it, you're not actually going to hear it. (This is what they mean when they plaster 24/96 all over the boxart.)
- The Audigy does not have independant recording and playback volume controls on the line in. If you wish to record something on a TV tuner, for instance, then you'll have to either listen to it while it records, or turn off the global volume on your soundcard. (Or turn off the speakers.) This makes it impossible to use an Audigy in a PVR setup.
- The much-touted sub 100dB SNR is only on playback. On recording, the SNR is much higher.
I haven't been this disappointed in a card since my SB 128 upgrade ran slower than my SB 64. (I suspect the 64 did the soundfonts in hardware; the 128 did them in software.) Looking at the new Audigy 2, it appears that they'll be offering the 24/96 functionality that was insinuated to be present in the original Audigy, but I don't think I'll bite. I think my next card will be a Hoontech.
And, of course, this is all off-topic..
Sorry, but you're completely wrong.
1. The Voodoo 3, 4, and 5 all had integrated 2D and 3D.
2. If OEMs didn't like add-on cards, why did they sell them preinstalled? I was shopping online for my PC way-back-when, and Voodoo 1 (and eventually Voodoo 2) cards were offered as (overpriced) options. Just like you can get NIC's and CD-RWs as options now.
3. The GeForce and Radeons weren't the main killers of 3dfx. The other contributing factors were:
a. Technical limitations. The Voodoo 3 and 4 line weren't much more than fast Banshees. My Voodoo 3 card has most of the same limitations as a Voodoo 1 (16-bit color, 256x256 textures), but almost no additional 3D features (primarily higher screen resolution).
b. Marketing. The Voodoo 1 and 2 lines were always the fastest in benchmarks. NVidia's TNT line was slower (but had more stable framerates), and Matrox was known for picture quality. When the Voodoo 3/4 came out, 3dfx lost the speed crown, and started talking about "image quality".
c. NVidia's 6-month release cycle. 3dfx couldn't keep up, and their "older" cards had an outdated feature-set. The GeForce was a big advance, but only in terms of fill-rate; there weren't any games (at that time) taking advantage of the new features. 3dfx lost a lot of the hearts of gamers and enthusiasts when they started pushing back release dates.
d. Buying STB. I don't think that the purchase was the final nail in 3dfx's coffin, but it certainly didn't provide the desired benefits.
- The Audigy's driver rejects all audio streams above 16/48. It doesn't even downmix it for you -- it just rejects everything above that outright.
- The DACs are 24/96 capable, but the DSP doesn't seem to be. That's how they get away with advertising 24/96.
- You could, in theory, get 24/96, but only if you had a 24/96 digital source and outputted it directly to the SPDIF port, bypassing the DSP entirely.
- Creative is full of shit.
Although the last one is not much of surprise to people who dealt with the SB Live! fiasco. (The SB Live!, due to not being 100% PCI compliant, couldn't share IRQs correctly; but ACPI requires that all PCI devices share the same IRQ, so if you had an ACPI-compliant board and OS, you were screwed. Creative's tech support blamed the motherboards, telling people that their boards were unsupported and that they should build new computers with motherboards that didn't enable ACPI's IRQ-sharing feature.)- Bunch of cool geeks come up with great idea, and start a company.
- They don't have lots of money, so they release a limited compromise version of the product. Even this version is really cool.
- To handle all the sales and manufacturing tasks necessary because of the new best-selling gear, the vulture capitalists call in "professional" management, which might be someone who last ran a garbage truck company, or a carpet cleaning company.
- The new management has no understanding of the market, so they look at what the biggest company in the market is doing, and say "We want to do that!".
- In the meantime, this bunch of cool geeks is working on the great idea that will be the company's next product. There still isn't lots of money or people.
- The new management says "Don't do that, we need this other product first!".
- The new management strips the engineering team of the cool product. The engineering team pleads for more good people, but the new management says "that'll hurt our margins too much."
- The other product flops.
- The cool product has gotten obsolete while the other product flops.
- Management panics and hires lots of dunderheads.
- Meanwhile, management decides they can make more margin in another business, and put all the money from the sales of the first product into that new business.
- The new business flops.
- The cool product is being worked on by a few die-hard engineers, but is starved of resources. Delivery date gets shoved off further and further in the future.
- Company realizes mistake. Hires a bunch of bodies off the street to work on cool product. Unfortunately, the bunch of bodies are dunderheads and make the project even *LATER*.
- The first product becomes obsolete.
- Sales plummet.
- Company dies.
I've seen this happen so many times. The point:Send mail here if you want to reach me.