Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Fall of Voodoo

tedium.co

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 108 posts

Re: Fall of Voodoo

#41

Post by TorKlingberg »

pvg wrote: post #35
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...

It looks like I was wrong. I was going off memory.

Re: Fall of Voodoo

#42

Post by zumu »

Narishma wrote: post #39
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.

There was also the internet. Consider this article from Tom's Hardware circa 1998 http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/nvidia,87-8.html

Re: Fall of Voodoo

#43

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

TorKlingberg wrote: post #38
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?

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

Kodak literally invented the digital camera, and were significant in both consumer and professional digital photography in the early 00s.

They missed by not innovating fast enough compared to the competition, not by ignoring the market.

Unimaginative management was very definitely a problem - although to be fair, it's easy with hindsight to say they should have started developing digital much earlier, when in reality consumer digital photography only started to make commercial sense when computers and public networking became powerful enough to support it.

That didn't happen until the later 90s. Until then, most computers lacked the photo quality displays we take for granted now.

Re: Fall of Voodoo

#44

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet »

jwilk wrote: post #3

It feels weird that the article uses the term "GPU". This term wasn't widely used back then. IIRC, the Voodoo cards were called "3D accelerators".

It kinda feels weird that we use the term "GPU" to describe modern cards. Seems to me that there is much more demand for these components in the AI and cryptocoin mining markets than anything utilizing graphics.

I wonder if we're about to witness the second death of PC gaming?

Re: Fall of Voodoo

#45

Post by jonny_eh »

Wait, so what went wrong? They took too long to release new product? That's not surprising to anyone watching at the time. But… why? What went wrong internally?

Re: Fall of Voodoo

#46

Post by djsumdog »

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…

I'm glad the article goes into STB. I really think this was what killed 3Dfx. It was a big move, but if you were following 3Dfx back the, you saw the issues.

I think they tried to lay off duplicate staff. With the Voodoo3, you saw drivers that just didn't work half the time. Textures were rendered totally wrong, people would downgrade drivers to get things working, etc. I have a felling they laid off or lost people critical in the hardware itself.

The website went to shit too. It got terrible. They either axed or lost a ton of web staff and focused more on the graphics used on all their box art.

Finally, the cards/chips just didn't scale well. I even remember a ton of articles at the time talking about how much efficiency was lost with the multi-chip design; how many things had to be duplicated in memory for the different GPUs. The Voodoo5 even required an external plugin power source.

nVidia to this day still sells its chips to everyone else. 3Dfx was trying to get into the ATi space, where you only had one ATi card and didn't have to worry about reference vs vendor drivers. It might have worked if they tried to keep both units separate for a while and not merge them into one entity.

Re: Fall of Voodoo

#47

Post by djsumdog »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #43
TorKlingberg wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Kodak literally invented the digital camera, and were significant in both consumer and professional digital photography in the early 00s. They missed by not innovating fast enough compared to the competition, not by ignoring the market. Unimaginative management was very definitely a problem - although to be fair, it's easy with hindsight to say they should have started developing digital much earlier, when in reality…

I can remember my oldest digital camera was a Kodak my parents bought me, with a CF card in it I believe.

Re: Fall of Voodoo

#48

Post by djsumdog »

jonny_eh wrote: post #45

Wait, so what went wrong? They took too long to release new product? That's not surprising to anyone watching at the time. But… why? What went wrong internally?

I think it was the failed merger with STB. They should have kept with the nVidia route of making chips for other companies instead of trying to integrate the entire pipeline like ATI.

Re: Fall of Voodoo

#49

Post by coldtea »

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #44
jwilk wrote: post #3

It feels weird that the article uses the term "GPU". This term wasn't widely used back then. IIRC, the Voodoo cards were called "3D accelerators".

It kinda feels weird that we use the term "GPU" to describe modern cards. Seems to me that there is much more demand for these components in the AI and cryptocoin mining markets than anything utilizing graphics. I wonder if we're about to witness the second death of PC gaming?

>Seems to me that there is much more demand for these components in the AI and cryptocoin mining markets than anything utilizing graphics.

Only outside home use.

Re: Fall of Voodoo

#50

Post by justin66 »

ivankolev wrote: post #2

Still fondly remember my passively-cooled! Voodoo 3, their rendering stack was top quality. Nvidia was the feeble newcomer. Times change fast...

> Nvidia was the feeble newcomer.

Nvidia was never really feeble. Even when 3Dfx was shocking everyone with their raw throughput and had a bit of a moat (until DirectX stopped sucking) with the Glide API, Nvidia got their foot in the door with 32-bit rendering and decent OpenGL. 3Dfx made sense for a lot of us - anyone using Quake would get it if they could, since raw performance mattered a lot and you don't suffer too much for only having 16-bit rendering of all those shades of brown - but with anything later than the original Voodoo, you felt like you were making a bit of a trade-off.

I've still got a Voodoo 3, I think. No telling if it actually works, but it was the only add-on card I've ever had that warped with time. Poor heat sink design and/or not enough layers on the PCB, I guess.

Post reply on HN