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Pretty much. With the advent of semi fabs like TSMC, STM, etc. making their processes more accessible to smaller fabless companies, 3dfx, PowerVR, ATI, Nvidia
by ChuckNorris89 5y ago
Pretty much.
With the advent of semi fabs like TSMC, STM, etc. making their processes more accessible to smaller fabless companies, 3dfx, PowerVR, ATI, Nvidia and other startups in the 3D space back then, realized they can replace all those expensive discrete RISC chips SGI was using for their massive 'reality engine' PCBs, and instead design a cheaper and more efficient custom ASIC from the ground up that does nearly the same things SGI's reality engine was doing (triangle rendering and texture mapping was enough for a PC 3D accelerator back then), but at 1/100th of the price, and sell it to consumers.
Fast forward, and we all know how the story played out and where the industry is today.
>There was a time practically everyone playing Quake had a Voodoo card.
Yeah they were the most desirable piece of tech back then, plus, the marketing and advertising 3dfx had at the time was wild as hell.[1]
Even the box-art on their GPU boxes was the most memorable of any HW of that era. Anyone remember those eye glaring down on you from the store shelves?[2] I feel like this is now a lost art.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1NWUqIhB04I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1NWUqIhB04I
[2] https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EkiRZhLW0AQzR7g.jpg https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EkiRZhLW0AQzR7g.jpg
- olivertaylor 5y ago> Yeah they were the most desirable piece of tech back then, plus, the marketing and advertising 3dfx had at the time was wild as hell.[1] Haha. Amazing commercials. I don’t remember those at all, but they’re 100% on brand for the times.
- justsomehnguy 5y ago> realized they can replace all those expensive discrete RISC chips SGI was using for their 'reality engines', and instead design a custom ASIC from the ground up that does nearly the same things SGI's workstations were doing This one. It is amazing seeing how some monstruosity of a full-length, full-heigth cards were replaced by, essentially, a single chip solutions. I would recommend something akin to a computer museum to see exactly how it came to be. On mobile ATM, if someone is interested - leave a reply, I would provide some links on the most interesting ones.
- ChuckNorris89 5y ago>It is amazing seeing how some monstruosity of a full-length, full-heigth cards were replaced by, essentially, a single chip solutions. Yeah, I'm surprised SGI didn't see the tides turning as the ground shifted beneath them and the rest of the industry leapfrogged them. But that's what made SV great, young visionary companies could come out of nowhere and eat the lunch of old dinosaurs who lacked the vision.
- jandrese 5y agoI did a stint as a co-op for SGI back in the late 90s. What was clear at the time was that there was a flight of the smart people out to the early PC graphics card industry causing serious brain drain in the company. This was also the time the company was making astoundingly overpriced PCs that made the bad bet on RAMBUS. The reality is the company suffered from the same fundamental market forces that killed off most of the Workstation market in the 90s. No niche company could spend what Intel was spending on R&D every year so their performance advantage was continually eroding, while the price points for the hardware were not. Trying to transition to being a PC manufacturer wasn't totally crazy, but it would mean competing a highly price competitive market which SGI was absolutely not equipped to do. I had the impression that the smart people in the graphics department saw that management was never going to go along with their "lets build far cheaper and better versions of our existing products on a PCI card that you can stuff in a cheap off the shelf PC" that would massively undercut the core business. So they quit the company and started nVidia.
- ChuckNorris89 5y ago> there was a flight of the smart people out to the early PC graphics card industry causing serious brain drain in the company Yeah, I can imagine you could count on the fingers of your hands, the number of people could, back then, design 3D acceleration hardware, so it must have been a pretty exclusive club in the Bay Area at the time where everyone in this field knew each other, I can only assume.
- linspace 5y ago
- Sohcahtoa82 5y ago> 3dfx came with their Glide API As a teenager/young adult in the late 90s/early 00s, I was so glad to see 3dfx fail. I hated how popular the Glide API was since you could only run it on a 3dfx card. I had asked for a 3dfx Voodoo for Christmas one year, and my dad got me a Rendition Verite 2200. It supposedly had better performance than a Voodoo while having a lower price, but it couldn't run Glide, so couldn't play half the games I wanted a Voodoo for. I didn't want to feel ungrateful to my dad, so my frustration got targeted to 3dfx for making a proprietary API when OpenGL and Direct3D existed. I eventually got a Voodoo Banshee, but by that time Glide was falling out of favor.
- ChuckNorris89 5y ago>my frustration got targeted to 3dfx for making a proprietary API when OpenGL and Direct3D existed Do you happen to know a fruity HW company that today runs it's own proprietary graphics API when the open Vulkan or OpenGL exist? /s All jokes aside, back then it made sense why every 3D HW company was baking their own API. It wasn't just for gatekeeping/rent seeking, but the consumer 3D graphics acceleration business was brand new, there was no standardization, so nobody knew where the future was heading, so they wanted to have full control over it as they built it. Plus, they were shipping hardware before Microsoft had come up with DirectX so they needed some API until then, and I assume they were afraid to touch OpenGL, the API of their biggest competitor.