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When the reveal the information about SEGA the whole leadership team should have been on a plane to Japan the next day, all to apologize bow and scrape. And tr

When the reveal the information about SEGA the whole leadership team should have been on a plane to Japan the next day, all to apologize bow and scrape. And trying to make your own board in that moment, was just an incredible self own.

rob74 2y ago
> And trying to make your own board in that moment, was just an incredible self own. ATI built their own boards too at the time (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radeon_R100_series#/media/File:Radeon7500agp.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radeon_R100_series#/media/File...), so the strategy of wanting to control more of the value chain doesn't sound that misguided to me. Not sure when ATI stopped doing that - was it after they were acquired by AMD in 2006 or before?
- panick21_ 2y ago
  The problem is, they already had a large group of board providers, it was a big market advantage for them. If you listen to the Computer History Museum interview, many of these providers jumped ship. Also the bought a board provider that wasn't very successful, and their resulting boards weren't very successful either.
- Delk 2y ago
  The same article also has another photo of a Creative-branded card. Other card brands also definitely marketed cards with ATI chips. I remember I had a R200-based card from some third-party manufacturer. ATI and Nvidia also had reference cards but I don't know if those ended up being sold in the mass market or not.
speed_spread 2y ago
The board I can understand, the guys having worked at SGI before and seeing how much more you could extract of the arch by having total control over the hardware (minus the CPU, obv). Essentially building customer-oriented x86 SGI machines, branching out of the gaming market and challenging workstation vendors. A 64 bits Opteron+Voodoo based Windows machine would have been something to behold. But the Sega thing probably torpedoed the funding that would have been required for them to become independent of graphic card vendors. They knew it was a matter of time before their advantage eroded. I think what really did them in was DirectX, they stuck with Glide and allowed NVidia to develop a proper implementation of the new Microsoft thingie which was heavily marketed to developers. Their moat became a prison.
- panick21_ 2y ago
  I think the whole 'moat prison' thing is overrated. They could release future version that support DirectX and Glide. They simply didn't focus enough on the next generation chip.
  - reginald78 2y ago
    Yes, I remember toward the end it seemed like they were just releasing souped up versions of last year's product. I don't know if it was a resources issue or they just didn't expect the market to advance so fast.
fidotron 2y ago
Having encountered some of the 3dfx people involved with that, bowing, scraping or apologizing was not really their m.o.
- panick21_ 2y ago
  I worked for an elevator manufacture that killed somebody, they fucked up the whole apologize in Japan thing too. Even if it wasn't actually their fault.

rob74 2y ago

> And trying to make your own board in that moment, was just an incredible self own. ATI built their own boards too at the time (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radeon_R100_series#/media/File:Radeon7500agp.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radeon_R100_series#/media/File...), so the strategy of wanting to control more of the value chain doesn't sound that misguided to me. Not sure when ATI stopped doing that - was it after they were acquired by AMD in 2006 or before?

panick21_ 2y ago
The problem is, they already had a large group of board providers, it was a big market advantage for them. If you listen to the Computer History Museum interview, many of these providers jumped ship. Also the bought a board provider that wasn't very successful, and their resulting boards weren't very successful either.
Delk 2y ago
The same article also has another photo of a Creative-branded card. Other card brands also definitely marketed cards with ATI chips. I remember I had a R200-based card from some third-party manufacturer. ATI and Nvidia also had reference cards but I don't know if those ended up being sold in the mass market or not.

speed_spread 2y ago

The board I can understand, the guys having worked at SGI before and seeing how much more you could extract of the arch by having total control over the hardware (minus the CPU, obv). Essentially building customer-oriented x86 SGI machines, branching out of the gaming market and challenging workstation vendors. A 64 bits Opteron+Voodoo based Windows machine would have been something to behold. But the Sega thing probably torpedoed the funding that would have been required for them to become independent of graphic card vendors. They knew it was a matter of time before their advantage eroded. I think what really did them in was DirectX, they stuck with Glide and allowed NVidia to develop a proper implementation of the new Microsoft thingie which was heavily marketed to developers. Their moat became a prison.

panick21_ 2y ago
I think the whole 'moat prison' thing is overrated. They could release future version that support DirectX and Glide. They simply didn't focus enough on the next generation chip.
- reginald78 2y ago
  Yes, I remember toward the end it seemed like they were just releasing souped up versions of last year's product. I don't know if it was a resources issue or they just didn't expect the market to advance so fast.

fidotron 2y ago

Having encountered some of the 3dfx people involved with that, bowing, scraping or apologizing was not really their m.o.

panick21_ 2y ago
I worked for an elevator manufacture that killed somebody, they fucked up the whole apologize in Japan thing too. Even if it wasn't actually their fault.