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My understanding is that ATI's management bungled the software aspect, fell super behind on driver development, and gave NVIDIA way too much time to catch up, b

My understanding is that ATI's management bungled the software aspect, fell super behind on driver development, and gave NVIDIA way too much time to catch up, but you'll probably have to talk to someone that was there at ATI to figure out what really happened.

radicalbyte 6y ago
I had a Radeon 9500 variant and it was an amazing card. ATI got lazy and NVIDIA had better job with their drivers (heavily tweaking them for the big games for big gains). I also remember that ATI really messed up with the fabbing leaving them basically a generation behind NVIDIA for a decade or so. I was lucky with drivers but I heard a lot of horror stories so also switched to NVIDIA when I finally got around to upgrading.
tunap 6y ago
Nvidia acquiring 3DFX Interactive certainly helped. IIRC, 3dfx was spanking both Nvidia & ATI, who's offerings were superior to Nvidia, in the PC graphics market.
- msbarnett 6y ago
  Not really. NVidia bought 3DFX for the Voodoo/Rampage T&L IP in 2000, around the same time that ATI bought ArtX. The R300/Radeon 9700 (based on the ArtX IP) came out late summer of 2002, and several months later NVidia launched the dismal GeForce FX series (which is the project that most of the 3DFX “rampage” team went to work on after acquisition). The fundamental problem with NVIDIA’s design was that it was optimized for 16-bit precision pixel shaders, and then-new DirectX 9’s “pixel shader 2.0” model mandated a 24-bit minimum precision. The R300 ran FP24 math natively, and consequently ran circles around the FX series in DX9 performance. NVidia didn’t really catch up to and surpass ATI until much, much later.
  - tunap 6y ago
    My timeline was off,in the late 90' the 3DFX Voodoo(3?l was eating both their lunches. I agree ATI still dominated Nvidia in sales well into the 00's, Nvidia took a long time to offer competitive cards. The solder issues & Cap Plague didn't help them any, either.

radicalbyte 6y ago

I had a Radeon 9500 variant and it was an amazing card. ATI got lazy and NVIDIA had better job with their drivers (heavily tweaking them for the big games for big gains). I also remember that ATI really messed up with the fabbing leaving them basically a generation behind NVIDIA for a decade or so. I was lucky with drivers but I heard a lot of horror stories so also switched to NVIDIA when I finally got around to upgrading.

tunap 6y ago

Nvidia acquiring 3DFX Interactive certainly helped. IIRC, 3dfx was spanking both Nvidia & ATI, who's offerings were superior to Nvidia, in the PC graphics market.

msbarnett 6y ago
Not really. NVidia bought 3DFX for the Voodoo/Rampage T&L IP in 2000, around the same time that ATI bought ArtX. The R300/Radeon 9700 (based on the ArtX IP) came out late summer of 2002, and several months later NVidia launched the dismal GeForce FX series (which is the project that most of the 3DFX “rampage” team went to work on after acquisition). The fundamental problem with NVIDIA’s design was that it was optimized for 16-bit precision pixel shaders, and then-new DirectX 9’s “pixel shader 2.0” model mandated a 24-bit minimum precision. The R300 ran FP24 math natively, and consequently ran circles around the FX series in DX9 performance. NVidia didn’t really catch up to and surpass ATI until much, much later.
- tunap 6y ago
  My timeline was off,in the late 90' the 3DFX Voodoo(3?l was eating both their lunches. I agree ATI still dominated Nvidia in sales well into the 00's, Nvidia took a long time to offer competitive cards. The solder issues & Cap Plague didn't help them any, either.