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I'm not really convinced that the story of Nvidia's origin does have the profound meaning the author seems to think it does. > the Nvidia GPUs [...] were origi
by qwery 3y ago
I'm not really convinced that the story of Nvidia's origin does have the profound meaning the author seems to think it does.
> the Nvidia GPUs [...] were originally inspired by [...] the needs of computer graphics artists in the gaming industry.
I think this passage demonstrates a misread of the quoted section[1] from the interview with Huang. The RIVA 128 was a 3D accelerator / video card for gamers, not game artists. Further, it was pretty clear by 1997 that 3D graphics for games was not a fad nor by that time was it a radical new approach -- Nvidia successfully entered an established market.
[1] Huang liked video games and thought that there was a market for better graphics chips. Instead of drawing pixels by hand, artists were starting to assemble three-dimensional polygons out of shapes known as “primitives,” saving time and effort but requiring new chips.
- evanweaver 3y agoYeah, this history is just wrong. What really happened is as so: Early 90s: SGI invented OpenGL to make realtime 3D graphics practical, initially for CAD/CAM and other scientific/engineering pursuits, and started shipping expensive workstations with 3d accelerated graphics. Some game artists used these workstations to prerender 3d graphics for game consoles. Note that 2D CAD/CAM accelerators had already been in market for nearly a decade, as had game consoles with varying degrees of 2D acceleration. Mid-90s: Arcades and consoles starting using SGI chips and/or chip designs to render 3d games in real time. 3DFx, founded by ex-SGI engineers, created the Voodoo accelerator to bring the technology down market to the PC for PC games, which was a rapidly growing market. Late 90s: NVIDIA entered the already existing and growing market for OpenGL accelerators for 3D PC gaming. This was a fast-follow technical play. They competed with 3DFx on performance and won after 3DFx fell behind and made serious strategy mistakes. Later 90s: NVIDIA created the “GPU” branding to draw attention to their addition of hardware texture and lighting support, which 3DFX didn’t have. Really this was more of an incremental improvement in gaming capability. Early 00s: NVIDIA nearly lost their lead to ATI with the switch to the shader model and DirectX 9, and had to redesign their architecture. ATI is now part of AMD and continues to compete with NVIDIA. Mid 00s: NVIDIA releases CUDA, which adapts shaders to general purpose computation, completing the circle in a sense and making NVIDIA GPUs more useful for scientific work like the original SGI workstations. This later enabled the crypto boom and now generative AI. Of course, along the way, OpenGL and GPUs have been used a lot for art, including art in games, but at no point did anybody say "hey, a lot of artists are trying to make 3D art, we should make graphics hardware for artists". Graphics hardware was made to render games faster with higher fidelity.
- benbreen 3y agoAuthor here - thank you for this. I definitely don't claim to be an expert on the history of 3d graphics, and you clearly know a lot more than me about the detailed history of NVIDIA. That said, starting in the early 1990s is missing the whole first half of the story, no? Searching Google Books with a 1980-1990 date range for things like "3d graphics" "art" or "3d graphics" "special effects" yields a lot of primary sources that indicate that creative applications were driving demand for chips and workstations that focused on graphics. For instance this is from a trade journal for TV producers in 1987: "Perhaps the greatest dilemma facing the industrial producer today is what to do about digital graphics... because special effects, 2d painting, and 3d animation all rely on basically the same kind of hardware, it should be possible to design a 'graphics computer' that can handle several different kinds of functions." [https://www.google.com/books/edition/E_ITV/0JRYAAAAYAAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&bsq=%223d+graphics%22+%22special+effects%22&dq=%223d+graphics%22+%22special+effects%22&printsec=frontcover https://www.google.com/books/edition/E_ITV/0JRYAAAAYAAJ?hl=e...] It's not hard to find more examples like this from the 1985-1989 period.
- sonicanatidae 3y agoHi Ben, It was mostly gamers. As a gamer from that time, the hardware was marketed to gamers, hard. I don't doubt that artists had an impact, but the world had many, many more gamers, than artists and gamers spend money for the best/mostest/etc. I mainly know this from living through the CGA/EGA/VGA/SVGA/3D add-on card/3D era. Thank you for taking the time to delve into this. While I may not agree with your conclusions, I respect your work, and the effort put in. :)
- benbreen 3y agoI think we agree, just define terms differently -- video games are art! In other words, gamers are consumers of artwork, and that consumer demand for a new kind of art drove demand for the hardware to go with it. (Naturally that wasn't the only source of demand - engineering and research applications were there from the beginning too). Edit: this discussion is interesting because I have always just taken it for granted that video games are a form of art. Clearly others don't see it that way, which is fair! Nevertheless, I think a strong case can be made: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_games_as_an_art_form https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_games_as_an_art_form
- sonicanatidae 3y agoGamers drove the hardware, not artists. 100% agreed. I was in IT when we started the transition from 2D cards to 2D cards with a additional 3D card, to the final form of 1 graphics card. These 3D cards were NOT marketed to professionals, they were marketed to gamers, because gamers drove the tech.
- RandomLensman 3y agoGame creators/designers as artists - not unreasonable.
- qwery 3y agoNot unreasonable, no. As plain as day, even. Not sure if you thought I was suggesting otherwise?