4 ms·

The GeForce 256 was not the world's first GPU. The fact that the article doesn't _at all mention_ ATI, whose Rage 3D cards predated and outperformed Nvidia, or

The GeForce 256 was not the world's first GPU. The fact that the article doesn't _at all mention_ ATI, whose Rage 3D cards predated and outperformed Nvidia, or 3dfx, whose Voodoo cards were also way more popular & a bunch of whose assets Nvidia later bought, seems a little bit unfair, if not revisionist. Yes I feel a little bit like an old man yelling at a cloud here, but I had to.

tommica 2y ago
Absolutely revisionist! I remember my big brothers pcs boot screen having the good old 3dfx logo, and I remember him gushing about getting a voodoo 3 card... Damn that was a long time ago.
jwr 2y ago
Nvidia was definitely a late-comer to the game (ahem). Voodoo 3dfx was the first popular game-oriented 3d accelerator, with ATI following soon after.
phil21 2y ago
They are trying to argue semantics and rewrite history by doing so. As others have already noted - even the semantics are misleading at best, outright lies at worst. They are trying to ignore 3dfx because they were 3d only pass through accelerators vs cards that combined 2d into the same card slot. The 3dfx Voodoo1 was absolutely transformative for gaming. Back then it was the single most desired gaming accessory and it wasn’t even close. Once you saw gl_quake at a friends house or LAN party you simply had to have one before any other upgrade was considered. I cannot put into words how it made 3d graphics acceleration into a must have from an afterthought within less than a year of release. This is during an era when the lifespan of a gaming PC was measured in low double digit months. This upgrade was not cheap for the time, and superseded other spending on stuff like a larger hard drive in an era where you’d have to uninstall other software to try the new hotness. It made the GPU part of gaming. Nvidia came well after that and took advantage of the market and software ecosystem (and gamer expectations) that 3dfx and John Carmack had established. Nvidia executed better, but they were not the first and nothing they have ever released was as transformative as that first 3dfx product combined with gl_quake. It was the killer app in an era full of killer apps. This is just ugly and unnecessary from nvidia marketing. They should seriously consider a retraction and apology, as my opinion of them of a company has now switched to “peaked and dying” if they have resorted to posting revisionist marketing drivel like this. I mostly expect them to coast on inertia from here on out - once the AI gravy train ends I doubt we see much more innovation from them in the future.
- barrkel 2y ago
  Yeah, the Voodoo 1 converted a typically 320x240 pixel soup into 640x480 at about 60 fps - it was night and day, a 4x improvement. But 3dfx weren't really able to advance much. The Voodoo 2 and 3 were just more of the same, only faster and slightly higher resolution. They looked similarly blurry - aggressive MIP texture filtering. It felt like the people who made 3dfx take off were either pushed out or quit. I don't think of the article the same way you though. It's just plucking out a somewhat arbitrary starting point for the lineage of what is the current top performance publicly available compute platform for not just graphics, but AI as well.

tommica 2y ago

Absolutely revisionist! I remember my big brothers pcs boot screen having the good old 3dfx logo, and I remember him gushing about getting a voodoo 3 card... Damn that was a long time ago.

jwr 2y ago

Nvidia was definitely a late-comer to the game (ahem). Voodoo 3dfx was the first popular game-oriented 3d accelerator, with ATI following soon after.

phil21 2y ago

They are trying to argue semantics and rewrite history by doing so. As others have already noted - even the semantics are misleading at best, outright lies at worst. They are trying to ignore 3dfx because they were 3d only pass through accelerators vs cards that combined 2d into the same card slot. The 3dfx Voodoo1 was absolutely transformative for gaming. Back then it was the single most desired gaming accessory and it wasn’t even close. Once you saw gl_quake at a friends house or LAN party you simply had to have one before any other upgrade was considered. I cannot put into words how it made 3d graphics acceleration into a must have from an afterthought within less than a year of release. This is during an era when the lifespan of a gaming PC was measured in low double digit months. This upgrade was not cheap for the time, and superseded other spending on stuff like a larger hard drive in an era where you’d have to uninstall other software to try the new hotness. It made the GPU part of gaming. Nvidia came well after that and took advantage of the market and software ecosystem (and gamer expectations) that 3dfx and John Carmack had established. Nvidia executed better, but they were not the first and nothing they have ever released was as transformative as that first 3dfx product combined with gl_quake. It was the killer app in an era full of killer apps. This is just ugly and unnecessary from nvidia marketing. They should seriously consider a retraction and apology, as my opinion of them of a company has now switched to “peaked and dying” if they have resorted to posting revisionist marketing drivel like this. I mostly expect them to coast on inertia from here on out - once the AI gravy train ends I doubt we see much more innovation from them in the future.

barrkel 2y ago
Yeah, the Voodoo 1 converted a typically 320x240 pixel soup into 640x480 at about 60 fps - it was night and day, a 4x improvement. But 3dfx weren't really able to advance much. The Voodoo 2 and 3 were just more of the same, only faster and slightly higher resolution. They looked similarly blurry - aggressive MIP texture filtering. It felt like the people who made 3dfx take off were either pushed out or quit. I don't think of the article the same way you though. It's just plucking out a somewhat arbitrary starting point for the lineage of what is the current top performance publicly available compute platform for not just graphics, but AI as well.