What went so wrong with 3dfx?

What went so wrong with 3dfx?

I guess most anons currently on Sup Forums were little children while 3dfx still existed, so .

What went so wrong with ATi that they were bought out by AMD ten years ago? What went so wrong with AMD that if Zen fails, they will be kill?

>Invested really heavily in programmable shaders when nobody really knew how to make them yet
>Because of this released some not-so-great products based on unproven tech
>Fucked over OEMs by suddenly deciding that they're going to make and sell all of their GPUs themselves even thou they didn't really any experience in making and selling their own hardware products
The thing that got Nvidia to where they are today is that they were able to buy up 3Dfx's assets and get all of their tech and knowledge for a pittance compared to what it cost to create the tech and amass the knowledge

>What went so wrong with ATi that they were bought out by AMD ten years ago?
Nothing, AMD just bidded a massive amount of money for them, ATi was doing great when they were bought
>What went so wrong with AMD that if Zen fails, they will be kill?
Then you prove that you literally know nothing, protip, even Matrox and S3 are still around

They got too big too soon, Kinda like Myspace.com

Stupid marketing decisions.
Literally the only reason Nvidia is market lead nowadays.

They tried to control means of production of the entire card. Nvidia on the other hand only makes the gpu and then lets other companies handle the rest basically having 4-5 card manufacturers competing all marketing your product. 3dfx threatened the current status quo and were unable to stay competitive with their expensive fabrication of their own cards.

voodoo 5500 that is what went wrong
also glide
and also nvidia bought them

i used to have a Voodoo 3 video card a long time ago (late 1990s) using it with win98se and it was a really cool card, it could do all sorts of odd resolutions

you shut your faggot mouth, glide was amazing

and this is why both companies will eventually fail..

they became more like a software company that happens to sell cards instead of a hardware company that sells additional software..

using 3dfx's tech nearly bankrupted nvidia with that shit fx 5000 series, and a year later they were in talks with AMD to be bought out

So wait the fx5000 series was right behind the 6000 right? I have a 5500 and a 6800

>3dfx
Good times. It was a combination of multiple things.

>1. 3DFX decided to manufacture the entire card, without any third parties. As much as this looked good on paper, this drove away computer manufacturers, who could no longer choose distributors, nor manufacture their own 3dfx card for their hardware. Because of this, Nvidia and ATI were both cheaper for PC manufacturers.
>2. Voodoo 4 and 5 series were bad. On launch, they were already overpriced and under-powered compared to Nvidia.
>3. When 3DFX finally built a Voodoo 5 worth buying, they didn't release it, because it had a fatal error which didn't let it work on Pentium 4 systems
>4. 3DFX signed a contract to work on a new Sega console. The mistake was that they signed with Sega USA, instead of Sega Japan, as Sega was notorious for having conflict between the US and JP branch. Sega Japan was building a completely separate console, and went with NEC as the chip producer. It wasn't as strong as the American console, but it was closer to the specs of Sega's new arcade cabinets. Nobody told 3DFX about this shit until the deal was already done, and 3DFX had spent a bunch of money on a console that never even came out.

>3dfx is gone
>soon AMD will be gone
>nvidia monopoly wont have any incentive to make new cards or tune down the prices ever again
why live

>ATi was doing great when they were bought
Maybe they had been better off today if they hadn't been bought.

They thought they could do no wrong, and then proceeded to make every mistake possible.

I wish they could've gotten Rampage out. It was supposedly a real monster of a chip. Would've been interesting.

Nvidia did not do fuck all with 3dfx's assets. They just bought them so no competitor could get them.

The reason Nvidia is where they are today is because they grasp the market very well. It's how they got big - buy launching powerful OEM cards that sold orders of magnitude more than what 3dfx's high-end gamer cards did.

>The mistake was that they signed with Sega USA, instead of Sega Japan

No, they signed up with SOJ. The problem was that they also revealed in their initial public offering that they are working on a console chip for Sega, which made Sega furious. Knowing that the Saturn 2 was coming, it further destroyed the weak Saturn sales. So Sega quietly told 3dfx to fuck off.

How would someone even make a GPU these days that can compete with nvidia and doesn't consume 1000+ watts?

I personally think power consumption is what's limiting AMD right now.

>tune down the prices ever again
implying that isn't what the current market has to suffer
neither of the two companies are competing anymore, they're fucking releasing rebrands and shitty tech which isn't even worth their price for a stupid ammount of money
just look at the fucking price of high end gpus now adays.

The NV30 line was quite sad but I don't believe Nvidia had incorporated much of 3dfx's tech in it. If I recall correctly, maybe the anti aliasing methods might had been from 3dfx. ATi had purchased ArtX around that time and the R300 which was mostly an ArtX product. It was a killer GPU, I had a 9700 Pro All-in-Wonder and I loved it.

If anybody would bother to read up on it, poor management killed 3dfx. Instead of staying ahead of the game by focusing on their next-generation chipsets, they just stuck an extra gpu on their cards (or four on the top end).

I loved my 5500 when I had it but it simply couldn't compete against ATI and nVidia's offering at the time. The Rampage, by all indications, could have competed but they didn't seem to be focused on it.