1998 3dfx merges with Videologic

Tyes77

Tyes77

Tyes77

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Been reading an alternative history fiction and has Videologic merging with 3dfx with McLaren remaining ceo. Ignoring all political considerations and nec kept their stake with a small increase in the company, how would the merger would have worked out for 3dfx and have it avoid its demise 2 years later?

Or would this have been a match made in heaven or would it still have been bankrupt come year 2000? Would McLaren have prevented the worst and guide it into today's Nvidia? Just wondering for those of you who might have a closer idea. Thanks for reading.
 
It may have postponed the inevitable, but 3dfx was making far too many leveraged acquisitions and releasing hardware that, whilst impressive, was absurdly expensive for consumers. Then they went down the route of cutting out AIB partners and by extension a large part of their revenue stream.

Poor management can't be overcome.
 
Theophany said:
It may have postponed the inevitable, but 3dfx was making far too many leveraged acquisitions and releasing hardware that, whilst impressive, was absurdly expensive for consumers. Then they went down the route of cutting out AIB partners and by extension a large part of their revenue stream.

Poor management can't be overcome.
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That's sad to hear. I was hoping Maclaren (PowerVR ceo and then Videologic ceo) would have prevented the bad management decisions if he were at the helm before they made any bad acquisitions.
 
Tyes77 said:
That's sad to hear. I was hoping Maclaren (PowerVR ceo and then Videologic ceo) would have prevented the bad management decisions if he were at the helm before they made any bad acquisitions.
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It's possible, but it was probably too late by that point.

If you haven't already seen it, LGR did a very good retrospective of the company which highlights not only how innovative they were, but how badly managed they were.

 
PiKe said:
3dfx put all their money on the glide app,, their d3d performance compared to nvidia at the time was terrible.
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A lot of their money went into stopgap products and odd advertising. Lots of their products existed because the rampage project kept getting pushed back to incorporate newer features and they needed to put something out to market. They bought gigapixel, and then they bought STB to make their own boards to sell "made by 3dfx cards" and alienated their partners which lead to their demise in the long run. The final blow iirc was them owing money for memory for the voodoo 4/5 cards.

Had they been able to get rampage out they could well have been around today as it was looking to be something very different with a dedicated t&l chip and a few different core count configurations.

This site has quite a bit of info one it http://www.thedodgegarage.com/3dfx/ , after voodoo 5 daytona was to appear then rampage, daytona was going to be a die shrunk vsa 100 chip running faster with ddr support.
 
SLI remains one of those technologies where, in theory, you really want it to work but outside of a few edge cases it's just disappointing as hell. I remember persisting with it for a few nVidia builds during the mid 2000s and it was always just absolutely terrible because more often than not you'd be in microstutter hell which meant your 100+ framerate was pointless. Especially when you were forking out not only that much for the graphics cards, but also for a 100Hz flat screen CRT just to take advantage of the supposed performance gains!
 
Theophany said:
SLI remains one of those technologies where, in theory, you really want it to work but outside of a few edge cases it's just disappointing as hell. I remember persisting with it for a few nVidia builds during the mid 2000s and it was always just absolutely terrible because more often than not you'd be in microstutter hell which meant your 100+ framerate was pointless. Especially when you were forking out not only that much for the graphics cards, but also for a 100Hz flat screen CRT just to take advantage of the supposed performance gains!
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Nobody wanted it to work.

It's like buying a car with 2 petrol engines in it. Why not just have a bigger engine in the first place?
 
Psycho Sonny said:
Nobody wanted it to work.

It's like buying a car with 2 petrol engines in it. Why not just have a bigger engine in the first place?
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It's absolutely nothing like that.

If you'd said two electric motors driving two axles or four motors driving four corners then maybe you'd be on to something, but then again you'd also be wrong because it works and is in production.
 
Gerard said:
Because there might not be a bigger engine and combining 2 lesser engines was the next best alternative?
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Not now but in 12-18 months time there is and it will cost less than 2 small engines currently.

Just buy 1 card lower settings if need be and then upgrade when the bigger and better card is available.

Buying two was always dumb and it never worked apart from in like 5-10% of games. In the other 90% it was akin to having one card.

The only people who wanted it to work was Nvidia for profit.

Nobody wanted to be buying two cards they only ndid it thinking wow 2 engines more power. Fact was it sometimes even meant less power.

It was the worst invention within the GPU sector.
 
Psycho Sonny said:
Not now but in 12-18 months time there is and it will cost less than 2 small engines currently.

Just buy 1 card lower settings if need be and then upgrade when the bigger and better card is available.

Buying two was always dumb and it never worked apart from in like 5-10% of games. In the other 90% it was akin to having one card.

The only people who wanted it to work was Nvidia for profit.

Nobody wanted to be buying two cards they only ndid it thinking wow 2 engines more power. Fact was it sometimes even meant less power.

It was the worst invention within the GPU sector.
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Sli and crossfire worked in most games to varying degrees, it was down to the driver teams and devs, now with dx12 it's down to game devs so it's going the way of the dodo. Not sure where you get the idea it only worked in a small amount of games, if that was the case it wouldn't have been around as long as it was.

And saying wait 12-18 months in the gpu sector for a lot of people is like saying hold your breath for an hour, people don't want to wait and if they can get the performance now and have the funds they will likely go for it.
 
Gerard said:
Sli and crossfire worked in most games to varying degrees, it was down to the driver teams and devs, now with dx12 it's down to game devs so it's going the way of the dodo. Not sure where you get the idea it only worked in a small amount of games, if that was the case it wouldn't have been around as long as it was.

And saying wait 12-18 months in the gpu sector for a lot of people is like saying hold your breath for an hour, people don't want to wait and if they can get the performance now and have the funds they will likely go for it.
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It's the impression I was left with after my mate who has no clue about computers had an sli rig built for him.

He ended up having to turn it off for games and all sorts. It was actually more hassle than it was worth and he eventually caved in and just sold the second card on.
 
Psycho Sonny said:
It's the impression I was left with after my mate who has no clue about computers had an sli rig built for him.

He ended up having to turn it off for games and all sorts. It was actually more hassle than it was worth and he eventually caved in and just sold the second card on.
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It was iffy in some games but there were tools to help with that like nv inspector which let you apply different sli profiles if nvidia was late to getting a driver out with an sli profile to support the game. Similar options for amd crossfire, it was a good tech when it worked properly with a game, some games it could be a pain to work with. Just like anything pc YMMV depending on your setup.
 
Psycho Sonny said:
Such a successful venture.

They also cost £8 million to manufacture and sell for £800k.

A great example of it working flawlessly.
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but it worked, was the fastest "production" car available at the time and last i checked didn't blow up when someone drove it. That it cost a lot of money is not the point. Top end cards today cost mental ammounts of money but people still buy them to see that sweet 5% performance gain.

Your statement that I quoted was simply not correct. VW made a bigger engine by sticking 2 together.
 
Psycho Sonny said:
Nobody wanted it to work.

It's like buying a car with 2 petrol engines in it. Why not just have a bigger engine in the first place?
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To continue the analogy, the equivalent scenario would be one in which a bigger engine wasn't possible or was too expensive. Nobody wanted SLI with the same power and price as an available single GPU setup, but that's not what it was for. The idea of SLI was to have performance not otherwise available or not otherwise available at the same sort of price. A lot of people would have liked, for example, to have two low midrange cards giving the same performance as a high end card that would have cost more than both cards combined, especially people who already owned one of the cards.

Also, two-engined cars exist. They're very rare but it does happen because of the same constraints. In this case, engine bay space restrictions meaning that there isn't a more powerful engine that will fit in it rather than no more powerful engine existing, but the effect is the same - there isn't a more powerful engine available. You could also count the much more common example of a larger engine being developed by combining two smaller engines, which in this analogy would be like putting 2 GPUs on one card to do SLI that way (which was also sometimes done in the past).

SLI didn't work very well, but there were plenty of people who wanted it to work.
 
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