[Gllug] TV out

[Adam Bower]

Stephen Harker wrote:

> <blah>
> In the old days (4 years ago) 3Dfx was King of accelerated video and 
> everyone thought they were omnipotent. And we know what happened to 
> them. NVIDIA were the upstarts taking on the giant and now they are in 
> the postition 3Dfx were, if not a better one. But things change. ATI are 
> certainly producing cards that are at least as good if not better but 
> NVIDIA has gamer mind-share...

There is only 1 ATI card better (at least in the hardware sense) than 
the current crop of Nvidia cards which is the new Radeon 9700 but Nvidia 
have been shouting about the new NV30 for some time now although it 
still isn't here and most likely won't be until next year now.

> AFAICR, it all changed when 3Dfx pissed everyone off for some reason and 
> there was a bit of a consumer revolt towards NVIDIA and the rest is 
> history. Can't even remember why now. Didn't 3Dfx decide they weren't 
> going to licence there chips anymore and make all the cards themselves? 
> Or something like that. And they had Glide which some games only worked 
> with which meant that if you didn't have 3Dfx you had to use crappo 
> software mode.

What 3dfx did was to rely on their Voodoo II chipset for too long which 
was a big PCI card, and you needed 2 of them for the best performance 
which was expensive and used 2 PCI slots and I think a single one only 
could do 800x600 and only did 16 bit colour. Around this time Nvidia 
released the TNT card which was a 2d and 3d card and you could stick 
them in AGP slots etc. etc. so instead of needed 3 cards you could have 
1 which saved you lots of money. 3dfx then came out with the new 
chipsets which were just a rehash of the old Voodoo II chipset but they 
had problems and weren't as good as the new Nvidia cards although they 
were at least 2d and 3d at this point. Nvidia kept raising the bar too 
quickly and innovating far faster than 3dfx who didn't have any tricks 
up their sleeves. Nvidia also had excellent (windows) drivers at the 
time and with each release they were adding huge amounts of 
functionality and massive performance increases.

Eventually 3dfx got bought by Nvidia who were the real innovators in the 
market at the time. I am very interested to see what the new NV30 card 
is like compared to the Radeon 9700 but of course maybe its time for the 
tables to turn again...

Adam


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