Nvidia paid the right amount for 3dfx, court affirms Here's a blast from the past: graphics card maker 3dfx. The long defunct brandname - once the acme of computer graphics - briefly rose from the dead this month when erstwhile shareholders' failed to get $100m out of Nvidia. Nvidia, long-term Register readers may recall, acquired its one-time arch-rival seven years ago after a …
May I be the first 3DFX fanboy to say that we still miss 3DFX - If it's woeful mismanagement hadn't driven it into the ground, I think it would have saved us from the woes of an nVidia monopoly of the PC gaming market.
Yes ATI is still around - But for how long - It's parent company AMD is having trouble selling chips to the big boys, and I feel it's only a matter of time before nVidia throws some more cash in their direction for a little more IP.
I'm not saying that nVidia products are bad (Apart from their latest 700 series chipsets which are a buggy pile of ****), but monopolies always tend to provide rubbish support, and development slows without competition........
</end rant>
I still clearly remember opening my voodoo1 that christmas, sticking it in the slot [har har har] and spending the rest of the day marvelling at the turok demo and how SMOOTH all the textures in tomb raider looked now, those were the days, I hate to think what it'd look like to me now, but im my memory it looked GREAT!!!
Ahh the Voodoo 3 3000 (with TV out). What a card. My rig was an AMD K6-2 400 OC'd (I had table fans trying to keep it cool), 32Mb RAM and an external modem (internal modems wouldn't work with K6-2, no MMX!).
It was entirely possible to play quake on-line with a ~36k connection and still get decent pings.
What the hell has happened to the internet this last 10 years?
Ah, my mom's older PC still has a 3dfx Voodoo3 installed. It also may be the only one capable of running glquake, as the gl versions insist on searching Glide libs which I sadly no longer have. :(
Back in those days, I distinctly remember playing online with my dialup connection, I suppose I would've been an LPB by those standards had I had my current 1Mbps connection...
Aar, I remember a mate with a PII 200 [or something similar] playing Carmageddon without 3DFX acceleration, and with, and thinking that man had truly become god!
Looking back, I still preferred 320x200x256 Doom II though.
Sam - how much of that is poetic license and how much is real? How much did these cards suck in terms of power? I wasn't into hardware back in those days, not *seriously* anyway...
Steven R
As the guy (as my friend Jeremy (Samba) Allison would point out -- was slagged off in Slashdot) who pulled the trigger on the 3dfx v. Nvidia lawsuit, my opinion is that when the damages approached the purchase price for 3dfx's corpse, Jen-Hsun, master of making money, bought the whole mess, leaving the investors festering for some extra cash due to a holding company for the disputed patents and performance criteria that could not be met, given the poor negotiating skills of the selling party.
My opinion (having negotiated with someone who seriously fudged SGI for their Odyssey graphics tech and personnel) was that the price was spot on. If you want a company like Micro$haft to do well, replace Ballmer with Jen-Hsun and stand back. The guy's an awesome businessman.
Adverse though I was (that's a legal term, boys & girls), I really respect this guy's reptilian focus on making money not just for him but his shareholders.
N.B.: I hold no shares in Nvidia or any graphocs competitor, including but not limited to AMD and Intel.
Hi, didn't you guys here 3DFX designed this video card series for nVidia. I imagine that there are still some 3DFX engineers at nVidia, just as there are former Intel engineers at AMD. ATI is owned by AMD and they mainly wanted it for integrated graphics chipsets and integated graphic cpus. The 780G is hybrid crossfire and its hot! Alot of graphics for a little money when you add a HD3450 on the motherboard. Also the AMD Phenom is the fastest graphics with the Unreal 3 Engine, which was licensed by all the major game writers. See the benchmarks at www.lostcircuits.com Phenom with 780G graphics and added HD3000 series rocks.
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