Stb, a major German graphics card manufacturer, is a board manufacturer with a large market share in the oE market. Before the popular 3dfx launched Voodoo3, it incorporated the Stb brand into its own pocket and became the original manufacturer of 3dfx. Card manufacturer.
Voodoo3 is the first product launched after Stb was merged into 3dfx.
Voodoo3's chips are still produced by pGcA. After hearing Lin Chang's report, Sun Jian believed at that time that 3dfx would not continue to cooperate with major graphics card manufacturers such as Diamond, Gigabyte, Innovation, and Elsa, and it was understandable to produce its own graphics cards, but selling alone would inevitably increase the company's As for operating costs, when the products are not sold, the expense is not a big problem. Once the products are unsalable, these sales online stores will become a burden for the enterprise.
In addition to entrusting sales to 368 five-star customer service centers and 241 Peng Software stores in Taobao electrical appliance malls in China, Kunpeng Software also licenses sales to other merchants; in Asia, Europe and the United States, Kunpeng software is entrusted to 20 five-star customer service centers and other companies for sales.
Sun Jian did not expect that Scott and Greg's wrong decision would lead to the gradual decline of the Voodoo dynasty.
The ambitious 3dfx believed that it owned a graphics card production factory. Even though DirectX occupied half of the dedicated application programming interface (ApI) market share, it still insisted on not opening up the source code of Glide and producing and selling its own products. This caused former allies to switch to NVIDIA. Under the sect, coupled with the insufficient production capacity of Stb, 3dfx's market share shrank sharply.
In early 1999, 3dfx released Voodoo3 in the eyes of players around the world. But 3dfx disappointed Voodoo fans all over the world, because it was not until June that people saw the true face of Voodoo3. At this time, NVIDIA began to move forward at a rate of launching a new product every six months.
In April 1999, NVIDIA launched the cornerstone product of the "NVIDIA graphics card dynasty"-RIVAtNt2.
In the second half of 1999, Voodoo3 worked hard to maintain the 3dfx dynasty under the fierce offensive of tNt2, Seavge4, Rage128, etc. However, just when the market was in smoke, a product that changed history appeared and was launched globally in August. The first display chip to support hardware geometry and light and shadow (t&L) conversion, GeForce256.
GeForce256 has 4 rendering pipelines, 128-bit memory bus, 3.5 million transistors, 15 million triangles per second, and 48 million pixels per second performance.
GeForce256 was later called the world's first true GPU (graphics processor) in the industry. All performance indicators were better than Voodoo3, which caught 3dfx off guard and experienced the despair of being completely crushed by competitors.
At this time, 3dfx did not have any competing product releases. For a time, almost all media and manufacturers followed NVIDIA. To make matters worse, 3dfxcEo Greg Ballard suddenly resigned at this time. The 3dfx dynasty building was about to die, just waiting for the opponent to deliver a fatal blow.
When the partnership between 3dfx and Sega broke down, Greg once said that the update iteration cycle of a graphics card is only 14 months. If no new product is launched within 14 months, competitors will catch up. Now 3dfx has caught up, but it will take them a few months to catch up again.
Greg broke his promise and must be held accountable.
Voodoo fans all over the world are silently praying for 3dfx. This time 3dfx has not disappointed the world again.
In November 1999, 3dfx announced the birth of the VSA-100 symmetric graphics processor and Voodoo4 and Voodoo5 graphics cards, and appointed semiconductor industry veteran Alex Lepp as the new cEo. In December of the same year, 3dfx announced the opening of GlideApI source code.
3dfx strives to rebuild the country and restore its former glory.
Faced with NVIDIA's constant pressure, 3dfx finally launched the fourth
The first-generation product, Voodoo44500, introduces its original VSA-100 architecture for the first time, supporting up to 32 cores for co-processing at the same time.
The VSA-100 chip uses a 250n manufacturing process, inherits 1.4 million transistors, has a built-in 350hz RAdAc, operates at a frequency of 166hz, and supports up to 64b of video memory.
Since the market positioning of Voodoo44500 is for the mid-to-low-end graphics card market, it uses a more cost-effective single VSA-100 chip solution, so it does not support the t-buffer function and has a low fill rate. It is not a match for tNt2 at all. After a short-lived appearance, Voodoo44500 Just disappeared from the market.
By 2000, NVIDIA's wings were full, and 3dfx was unable to stop NVIDIA's progress.
The last chance for 3dfx has arrived. Microsoft will choose a graphics chip manufacturer for its own Xbox game console. Gigapixel company is favored by Microsoft because of its unique 3D technology.
3dfx seems to have spotted this, and took the risk to acquire Gigapixel for US$180 million, hoping to obtain graphics chip orders for Microsoft's upcoming Xbox.
However, the bad news came that Microsoft signed a contract with 3dfx's largest competitor NVIDIA. This fatal blow finally hit 3dfx firmly.
House seemingly endless rain!
NVIDIA won the lawsuit against 3dfx in the Silicon Valley District Court for patent infringement of graphics chips. In addition to requiring 3df to stop the development, production and sales of all products that currently use these technologies, these products include Voodoo3, Voodoo4 and VSA-100 series. He was also ordered to pay US$45 million in economic losses.
3dfx has no other choice but to be acquired by NVIDIA!
Great summer is about to fall!
"Mr. Scott, how much does NVIDIA plan to pay to acquire 3dfx?"
"Mr. Sun, NVIDIA is exempt from compensation and will purchase another US$100 million and 2 million NVIDIA shares."
NVIDIA publicly issued 3.5 million shares at $12 on January 7 last year, raising $42 million and bringing the total share capital to 29.3 million shares.
NVIDIA does not have the Chinese name NVIDIA yet!
Sun Jian believes that 3dfx is in today's predicament. The market strategy of self-purchasing and selling is one aspect. The most important thing is that there is a problem with the speed of research and development. There is also a truth that cannot be ignored. Microsoft took the opportunity to suppress 3dfx and eliminate an opponent.
Today, there is fierce competition among the three major freely licensed dedicated APIs: directx (d3d), Glide and openGL.
openGL is an open 3D graphics software development kit that is independent of the operating system. Applications developed on its basis can be easily and conveniently transplanted to various platforms.
The main members include SGI, pENG, Microsoft, Sun, Intel, Ib, 3dlabs, Apple, dell, AtI, 3dfx, SiS, S3, atrox, trident, NVIDIA and other high-tech companies.
direct3d is a 3D application programming interface specification developed by Microsoft in 1996 for personal computers. Microsoft owns the copyright of this library and is included in the help files and source code of the program development components provided by Microsoft. It is suitable for multimedia, entertainment, real-time 3D animation, etc. Extensive and practical 3D graphics calculations.
Since its release in 1996, direct3d has been quickly recognized for its good hardware compatibility and friendly programming methods. Nowadays, almost all 3D graphics cards provide good support for direct3d, but it also has flaws because it is provided in the form of an interface. , which is more complex and has poor stability. It is currently only available on the indos platform.
Glide is a dedicated 3D application programming interface for the Voodoo series developed independently by 3dfx.
Interface specification, based on Flash, does not imitate pENG, indos or other similar desktop environments. It provides a unique interface and is the first widely used program interface in the field of PC games. Its biggest feature is ease of use and stability.
