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Fall of Voodoo

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Re: Fall of Voodoo

#81

Post by Nition »

mortenjorck wrote: post #72
blue11 wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From what I remember, the term GPU was invented by NVIDIA's marketing team for the GeForce campaign. It sounded a bit weird in the beginning. In hindsight, it was a strike of genius.

If I recall correctly, "GPU" was attached to the GeForce 3, which introduced programmable pixel and vertex shaders (planting the seeds for later, general-purpose processing developments like CUDA and eventually cryptocurrency mining).

No, blue11 is right. They made a big deal of the "GPU" in the original GeForce 256.

Re: Fall of Voodoo

#82

Post by khedoros1 »

mulmen wrote: post #62
rfrey wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure what you mean, but the root of graphics is graphikos, Greek for writing or drawing. Mathematical graphs are called that by analogy to their graphical forebears.

You have confused root and origin. The root of graphics is graph. The comment I replied to said GPUs are more useful in cryptocoin mining and AI rather than graphics. Cryptocoin mining and AI are graph workloads. This is why GPUs are well suited to these tasks.

The root word of graphics is graphic.

The root word of graph is graphic; "graph" is a shortening of the phrase "graphic formula", apparently.

Re: Fall of Voodoo

#83

Post by theandrewbailey »

laumars wrote: post #53
rayiner wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

TNT was the first viable Voodoo 2 competitor, though it didn't quite catch up. The year after, NVIDIA released GeForce, which was indisputably better. 3dfx never recovered after that.

The year after the TNT was the TNT2 (which was a great chipset). Geforce didn't come out until Oct 1999 and even then it was only one chipset. The rest of the product range came the following quarter (2000). I skipped that generation and jumped to the Geforce 2 (this time first party rather than a 3rd party card with nvidia GPU), which was also an awesome card. As for the fall of 3dfx, I dont think the rise in popula…

> I skipped that generation and jumped to the Geforce 2 (this time first party rather than a 3rd party card with nvidia GPU)

Wait, nVidia made their own cards? I can't ever recall seeing one that wasn't made by a partner.

Re: Fall of Voodoo

#84

Post by georgemcbay »

theandrewbailey wrote: post #83
laumars wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The year after the TNT was the TNT2 (which was a great chipset). Geforce didn't come out until Oct 1999 and even then it was only one chipset. The rest of the product range came the following quarter (2000). I skipped that generation and jumped to the Geforce 2 (this time first party rather than a 3rd party card with nvidia GPU), which was also an awesome card. As for the fall of 3dfx, I dont think the rise in popula…

> I skipped that generation and jumped to the Geforce 2 (this time first party rather than a 3rd party card with nvidia GPU) Wait, nVidia made their own cards? I can't ever recall seeing one that wasn't made by a partner.

AFAIK, Nvidia have never fabricated their own cards, but they do design the reference boards that most OEMs use as a basis for their own cards, and they did at one point release cards directly under the Nvidia brand (the cards were fabricated by Foxconn using Nvidia's designs).

Re: Fall of Voodoo

#85

Post by georgemcbay »

oblio wrote: post #30
rayiner wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

TNT was the first viable Voodoo 2 competitor, though it didn't quite catch up. The year after, NVIDIA released GeForce, which was indisputably better. 3dfx never recovered after that.

3dfx also misread the trends. I remember something about them staying on 16 bit graphics for way too long.

Yeah, I was a pretty serious PC gamer (Quake/Q2/Q3) back during the rise and fall of 3dfx. Pretty much everyone I knew went from software rendering to 3dfx-chipset cards but then jumped ship when the Riva TNT2 cards came out, primarily because they just produced much better visuals due to support for 32-bit color while the 3dfx offerings were all limited to 16-bit.

There was still a bit of a split in the market back then between those who went TNT2 (amazing, at the time, image quality) and those who went to the Voodoo3 (good raw speed, but limited to 16-bit color and thus noticeable banding artifacts)... 3dfx still held on to a bit of a niche there for a while longer, but then once the GeForce and GeForce 2 came out 3dfx was just dead in the water with nothing that could compete anywhere on the performance versus image quality axes.

Re: Fall of Voodoo

#86

Post by digi_owl »

mattnewport wrote: post #75
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…

I'm not sure what rumors you've heard but what's not a rumor is that Intel is releasing CPUs with integrated AMD GPUs: https://www.anandtech.com/show/12207/intel-with-radeon-rx-ve... That suggests Intel isn't going to be competitive in the graphics space in the near future

Not on-die integrated though.

Intel seems to have made or licensed a high speed, short distance, data bus that sits between the Intel CPU and the AMD GPU that are mounted side by side on a small board.

Would be hilarious btw if this showed up on desktops as a dual socket motherboard, with one socket for the CPU and another for the GPU. Likely with one massive cooler covering them both.

Re: Fall of Voodoo

#87

Post by digi_owl »

cromwellian wrote: post #36
TorKlingberg wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Funny thing is that my first 3D accelerator was a PowerVR, and unlike the 3Dfx solution it used the PCI bus to shuffle the finished frame to the video card for output.

Re: Fall of Voodoo

#88

Post by digi_owl »

oblio wrote: post #23
airstrike wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's pretty much standard in every industry, though. Competition will kick underperformers out of the market and some amount of consolidation is inevitable. It's not Nvidia doesn't have any competition nowadays.

Not entirely true. Software has natural monopoly characteristics. The only real solution around it has been alternative markets. Apple couldn't budge Microsoft in the desktop market and they went "around" them by going into the mobile market.

And even then they may have been a bit player if Microsoft had not flinched and thrown out their existing PocketPC platform to ship Phone 7.

Keep in mind that PocketPC was not just used for "consumer" phones, but also all kinds of hand held terminals in warehouses and such.

This was a market that Microsoft basically abandoned when they announced that Phone 7 and onwards would not be compatible with PocketPC software, even though they tried to extend a fig leaf by rebranding PocketPC 6.5 as Phone 6.5 (i think HP tried to sell a couple of PDAs with that).

Didn't take long before we saw alternatives out there, though these days i think they are mostly Android based.

Re: Fall of Voodoo

#89

Post by taneq »

rayiner wrote: post #4

The 3dfx timeline gives you an idea of how much the computer field has slowed down and consolidated. Voodoo was released in 1996, into a market with half a dozen competitors. Voodoo 2 in 1998, the same year as the first viable NVIDIA card (Riva TNT). NVIDIA released the GeForce 256 in 1999, cementing its dominance. 3dfx released its last card in 2000, just four years after its first. NVIDIA is now still dominant, 18…

Oh man, the Riva TNT was the 3D card I ever had, back when popular opinion said that hybrid 2D/3D cards would never be as good as a dedicated 3D card.

So amazing to get 30fps with fullscreen trilinear filtering. It really felt like the future... and then you jump back to the present and your graphics card is basically a renderfarm that you send geometry and shaders off to and it does the rest.

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