Fall of Voodoo • Hacker News Board

Re: Fall of Voodoo

#31

Post by throwawayjava » Wed, Feb 14, 2018, 5:04 PM UTC

chrisan wrote: post #29

TorKlingberg wrote: post #26

The article blames management failure, but I'm not convinced. There's a general bias to blame management any time a company fails. Of course management is always responsible, but I don’t think anyone could have saved say, Kodak. In this case, Nvidia and ATI were already making 3D accelerators for the professional 3D rendering market. All they had to do was to make stripped down cards that wouldn't cannibalize their h…

> but I don’t think anyone could have saved say, Kodak Why not? What if Kodak management had went hard on digital initially instead of clinging to film for so long?

Then they would've softened their blow and perhaps delayed their relative demise until the rise of smartphones. But I do think it's fair to say that the transition was going to be a bloodbath of layoffs and declining revenue in any case.

Re: Fall of Voodoo

#32

Post by jugg1es » Wed, Feb 14, 2018, 5:04 PM UTC

This making me reminisce so hard. I remember fondly the days where I convinced my mom that the Voodoo card was for some school thing and was so excited to slap that baby into the ISA slot of my Pentium 2.

Re: Fall of Voodoo

#33

Post by nwah1 » Wed, Feb 14, 2018, 5:05 PM UTC

throwawayjava wrote: post #31

chrisan wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but I don’t think anyone could have saved say, Kodak Why not? What if Kodak management had went hard on digital initially instead of clinging to film for so long?

Then they would've softened their blow and perhaps delayed their relative demise until the rise of smartphones. But I do think it's fair to say that the transition was going to be a bloodbath of layoffs and declining revenue in any case.

Someone has to make the cameras in the phones. That plausibly could've been Kodak, in an alternate reality.

Re: Fall of Voodoo

#34

Post by adamroderick » Wed, Feb 14, 2018, 5:07 PM UTC

TorKlingberg wrote: post #26

The article blames management failure, but I'm not convinced. There's a general bias to blame management any time a company fails. Of course management is always responsible, but I don’t think anyone could have saved say, Kodak. In this case, Nvidia and ATI were already making 3D accelerators for the professional 3D rendering market. All they had to do was to make stripped down cards that wouldn't cannibalize their h…

Good leaders take responsibility

Re: Fall of Voodoo

#35

Post by pvg » Wed, Feb 14, 2018, 5:08 PM UTC

TorKlingberg wrote: post #26

The article blames management failure, but I'm not convinced. There's a general bias to blame management any time a company fails. Of course management is always responsible, but I don’t think anyone could have saved say, Kodak. In this case, Nvidia and ATI were already making 3D accelerators for the professional 3D rendering market. All they had to do was to make stripped down cards that wouldn't cannibalize their h…

Nvidia and ATI were already making 3D accelerators for the professional 3D rendering market.

Were they? I don’t see any professional cards in Nvidia’s early line-up, at least not the one shown on Wikipedia. The first Quadro doesn’t show up till 1999 and the verbiage suggests the pro cards were an offshoot of the gaming cards, not the other way round.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nvidia_graphics_proc...

Re: Fall of Voodoo

#36

Post by cromwellian » Wed, Feb 14, 2018, 5:22 PM UTC

TorKlingberg wrote: post #27

djsumdog wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of the other companies are still there though. PowerVR still makes 3D chips, but only for the embedded market (e.g. Android phones). Matrox gave up on 3D and now only makes specialized cards for 8 and 16+ monitor displays (airports, kiosks). IIRC, even Trident switched to embedded graphics. The thing that bothers me is that if you want a PCI-E card on a consumer system, you only have nVidia/AMD. Intel only does…

iPhones also had a PowerVR GPU as part of A-series SoC. In iPhone 8/X (A11) it was replaced with Apple's own GPU design.

That design isn’t custom but appears to be using PowerVR licenses IP given the way some press releases were worded. I find it highly unlikely Apple could design a market leading GPU compatible with their existing products in such a short time. Their CPU took a lot longer. My guess is the A11 is a tweak of the PVR and subsequent versions later will introduce a ground up redesign.

PVR owns a lot of TBDR patent IP since they mostly went it alone on tiled based deferred renderers when most of their competitors were IMRs. It looked like a smart decision as desktop GPUs were hitting a memory bandwidth constrAint until GDDR and ultra wide buses started being used and GPUs got better at early-z rejection.

But on mobile, TBDR works great since mobile has different power and heat constraints than desktop.

Re: Fall of Voodoo

#37

Post by Tloewald » Wed, Feb 14, 2018, 5:28 PM UTC

Off-topic: the PS4's PSVR box is a bit reminiscent of the old Voodoo cards with their passthrough video.

Re: Fall of Voodoo

#38

Post by TorKlingberg » Wed, Feb 14, 2018, 5:35 PM UTC

chrisan wrote: post #29

TorKlingberg wrote: post #26

The article blames management failure, but I'm not convinced. There's a general bias to blame management any time a company fails. Of course management is always responsible, but I don’t think anyone could have saved say, Kodak. In this case, Nvidia and ATI were already making 3D accelerators for the professional 3D rendering market. All they had to do was to make stripped down cards that wouldn't cannibalize their h…

> but I don’t think anyone could have saved say, Kodak Why not? What if Kodak management had went hard on digital initially instead of clinging to film for so long?

Kodak was never an electronics company, or even a camera company. Nikon and Canon would have eaten their lunch.

Re: Fall of Voodoo

#39

Post by Narishma » Wed, Feb 14, 2018, 5:37 PM UTC

alberth wrote: post #25

Access to information (e.g. the Internet) has been a game changer for buying "3D acceleration" as it was called back then. I remember fondly in the late 90s just walking into a Best Buy (maybe Circuit City) and buying a GPU off the shelf. I had no benchmark data like today. I bought based on whether or not I liked the packaging and how much video RAM did it have. Because I really didn't have much more data to go off…

There were plenty of magazines doing those benchmarks back then, you certainly didn't need the Internet to make good buying decisions.

Re: Fall of Voodoo

#40

Post by MarkMc » Wed, Feb 14, 2018, 5:39 PM UTC

chrisan wrote: post #29

TorKlingberg wrote: post #26

The article blames management failure, but I'm not convinced. There's a general bias to blame management any time a company fails. Of course management is always responsible, but I don’t think anyone could have saved say, Kodak. In this case, Nvidia and ATI were already making 3D accelerators for the professional 3D rendering market. All they had to do was to make stripped down cards that wouldn't cannibalize their h…

> but I don’t think anyone could have saved say, Kodak Why not? What if Kodak management had went hard on digital initially instead of clinging to film for so long?

I see it the other way. What if Kodak hadn't wasted money trying to enter businesses like digital cameras and printers - ie. low-margin products where Kodak had no competitive advantage. Sure, Kodak would have still gone out of business but it wouldn't have wasted so much shareholder capital in the process.