nVIDIA, the rise and fall

[Darius Greywind]

Anyone else here notice how nVIDIA seems to be fumbling the ball lately in the graphics card arena? As cutthroat as it is, they certainly have an established customer base and had a good reputation. One has to wonder if the curse of 3dfx lives on in nVIDIA now. It's a disturbing paralell to say the least.

[WhiteShepherd]

Nvidia's goal was to wipe 3DFX off the map like they never existed.  3DFX was top dog and doing so must of seemed to them like a way of monopolizing the market.  The original plan (thankfully dropped) was to even ban public access of 3DFX drivers with the idea being losers er users would be forced to buy Nvidia.  

Enter ATI known by most games as a graphic company who wrote their name as the early top graphic card maker.  They sold mid performing cards at 5-20x everybody else’s bloated cost.  But hey they were ATI right?  ATI's sales sucked and Nvidia sales was soaring.  So they make a huge investment with the last of their "old money" and totally changed their company policy.  They would try and regain "top" performance while cutting competively on price.  Their first product under this new era was the Rage 128.  It was not quite as fast as Nvidia, and was known for driver issues.  But it's design where Nvidia used brute force ATI used coding ingenuity.  ATI now rules the roost with video for now.  But it’s the things like that which force companies to improve.  It will be a sorry day if there ever becomes just one video card company.  Development will stagnate and prices will soar.

Nvidia also makes a good motherboard chipset.  It has faster performance and better stability than SIS or VIA.  My personal system motherboard is a ASUS VIA.  I paid $65 extra for a Asus Nvidia motherboard (instead of going for the nice cheaper VIA) for Furtopia in this last upgrade.  With so many fursons depending on it where even a little bit extra of stability counts I’ll pay the difference for the users.

  WhiteShepherd

[Darius Greywind]

Yeah, unfortunately nVIDIA seems to be dropping the ball on the chipset issue as well now. The nFORCE 3 chipset (Athlon 64) is mediocre in performance. And oddly enough, the nFORCE works best with an ATI graphics card installed. Go figure that one out. At least ALi is dead and gone from the chipset market.

[WhiteShepherd]

I have a couple ALi motherboards I've collected over the years.  They seemed OK except they had terrible AGP support.

[Darius Greywind]

I've used an ALi Magik 1 board before, and it's slower than a VIA KT133, even though it's using DDR ram.

[Darius Greywind]

I should point out that part of why I find it amazing that nVIDIA is messed up now, is that they pretty much came out of nowhere to steal 3dfx's spotlight with the GeForce card. It was really amazing performance for it's time. And it was a lot smaller, cheaper, and sucked less power than the top of the line Voodoo 5 5500. Now the Radeon series has almost the same advantages over nVIDIA's FX lineup. Talk about role reversal.

[Firebreath]

My "old" athlon 1.4Ghz system has an ALi magik chip on it's board, and the reviews did make it one of the fastest boards out there, only if you could get a properly working one (and I do...).

But yeah, ATi is really a card to have lots of respect for. I'm a former NVidia afficionado, and I switched to their canadian competitor when I saw what they did with the 45.XX+ drivers, before forceware. I mean, illegal driver optimizations for benchmarking is NOT something I look keenly on.
Sure, ATi use driver optimizations as well. BUT they do bring a difference in real games as well, not just benchmarking.
Hence, why I didn't bother with a GeForce FX and went with my Radeon 9600PRO instead. Even if they have not-as-good OpenGL support than NVidia, this is something I'm willing to live with if I'm going to have a stable, performant system.c

Now, if they can bring those new radeons out... I'll get myself a 9800PRO XT for cheap! XD

[Cesarin]

*hugs his hercules 3d prophet radeon 9800 pro*

gotta overclock it a few someday '>