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> Nvidia was the feeble newcomer. Nvidia was never really feeble. Even when 3Dfx was shocking everyone with their raw throughput and had a bit of a moat (until
by justin66 9y ago
> Nvidia was the feeble newcomer.
Nvidia was never really feeble. Even when 3Dfx was shocking everyone with their raw throughput and had a bit of a moat (until DirectX stopped sucking) with the Glide API, Nvidia got their foot in the door with 32-bit rendering and decent OpenGL. 3Dfx made sense for a lot of us - anyone using Quake would get it if they could, since raw performance mattered a lot and you don't suffer too much for only having 16-bit rendering of all those shades of brown - but with anything later than the original Voodoo, you felt like you were making a bit of a trade-off.
I've still got a Voodoo 3, I think. No telling if it actually works, but it was the only add-on card I've ever had that warped with time. Poor heat sink design and/or not enough layers on the PCB, I guess.
- specialist 9y agoIIRC, which is a poor bet, I probably choose NVidia over 3dfx because of the OpenGL drivers. I was doing CAD, VRML, OpenGL stuff thru the 90s.
- justin66 9y agoIf your card was anything with "Geforce" in the name that was certainly the best choice. Even before the Geforce era, 3dfx never had anything except problematic OpenGL "mini drivers" which worked okay with Quake-based games but not much else.