How Nvidia Won Graphics Cards

I worked at one of those 3rd party board companies in the mid nineties and so far this is the only presentation that gets it right. Great job.
I was even offered a job at Nvidia who directly recruited me in their drive to vertically integrate graphics drivers. I am sad I said no.
But I could tell that Nvidia was going to win it all, on my visits, they shared with me their secret inner sanctum where there computers were situated running that vaunted design simulation. Their record of getting chips out on first turn was unmatched. It's almost like your observation about TSMC - they would win with cycle times.

Intel 740 with the small heatsink overheated. It ran GLQuake well but not much more.

Nvidia won stealing technology from 3dfx

Your retrospective of the eighties and nineties is so limited and restricted. I mostly like your content, but this video... omg... 👎

Amd is still better than

The Cromemco "Dazzler" was the first graphics card in 1976. (and you're about 10 years too late for the graphics revolution - the Amiga was doing all of this in 1985 as well as the GUI. The screenshot of GLQuake you show is actually the software renderer - it doesn't use bilinear filtering. If you go to the place you sourced the image you'll see you took the wrong screenshot - this is a software shot next to the GL shot for comparison)

Waiting for the sequel. “How nvidia lost the graphic card market”.

I remember when I first had a go with Linux, it was Debian.
I couldn't figure out how to install drivers.
Right up until the point you realise they just get detected and loaded as kernel modules at boot or, at most, pulled in with an apt-get command.
Certainly was an eye opening moment in my journey as a software engineer and architect.

Intel: "We ain't done yet."

I still remembered when the Voodoo cards ruled the market.

Yea sure... They won... Riiigghhttt...

you should make a video, from 0 -> the worlds most valuable company

General Processing Unit or Graphics Processing Unit?

after the release of the abysmally priced 40-series, this video is starting to age like milk rather than wine

No mention of 3DLabs?
They went belly-up after hiring me.
Wait, lemme re-phrase that...
They were having tough competition around the time I worked for them, around 2000/2001, but did have a few big customers. Eventually clobbered by (mostly) nvidia in the marketplace. I have yet to see a well-researched documentary cover their place in the graphics card marketplace.

Time to do a new video, how nvidia ripped off customers with over priced rebrands, gimicks nobody uses and how they are now only able to beat AMD in the little used RTX version of ray tracing.

Back in the early 2000s you were either an nVidiot or fanATIcs

Always using OpenGL from here onward, thank you for this knowledge! Go Nvidia

With an ugly logo made in MS Paint

Source: Flickr

No mention of Tegra and their adventure in mobile buying Icera ?!

JOHN CARMACK IS SO RIGHT THO 😂😂😂😂

TSMC were making 3dfx's chips at the same time as those early Nvidia chips which is pretty interesting, late Voodoo chips and technically superior, generationally distinct chips those that would kill 3dfx (TNT, TNT2 and the first Geforce) were coming out of the same factory.

Hey john, thanks for your work watch always! No cabbage right now, sorry

Well pointed reasons why Nvidia risen to its current state. M$ was definitely a deciding factor and for example Xbox GeForce3 GPU was crucial as well. However drivers were one of the main reason they surpassed almost everybody. ATI in that time always struggled with crappy drivers and Nvidia was a completely different experience!

que envidia 😊😊😊😊😊😊😊😊😊😊😊😊😵‍💫😵‍💫😵‍💫😵‍💫😵‍💫😵‍💫😵‍💫😵‍💫😵‍💫😵‍💫😵‍💫

The Nvidia HQ building doesn't look like a nice place to work

Well this didn't age well for Nvidia

Jesus Christ. I cannot get away from money begging.

sounds like the

Great show thanks Asianometry,
My whole gaming world improved when I installed the Voodoo card, it was as different as night and day.

I love this video, it's like what I lived through in the 90s trying to build and constantly improve my fankenstein machines. All the churn with the video cards brings me down memory lane (3Dfx, Intel 740i, D3D, OpenGL AGP vs PCI, Real3D, Voodoo 1, 2, Banshee, etc). Thanks!

Funny, I used to do a lot of homebuilding back in the 90s and I actually had an NV1 video card, mostly because I was a big SEGA fan. I should have kept that thing...who knew at the time that Nvidia would become so so big. I was more into the 3Dfx hardware at the time and didn't use that card much.

- Excellent.
- Thx for all your effort, and talent.
- I got into computer graphics in the early 90s, so, I experienced all the history you covered, but did not know any of the back story... until now. Thx, again.

A little disappointing to see the Commodore Amiga not mentioned here

Great document about GPU history! I'm old enough to have actually bought a Voodoo graphics card with my own money as a new.

I feel that the drivers of NVIDIA cards are still the most important part of the technology. It appears that AMD (ex ATI) hardware may actually have more computing power but drivers fail to surface it to the applications.

In addition, OpenCL took too many years to create and NVIDIA proprietary CUDA took the market and many apps (including open source Blender 3D) have proper hardware support for CUDA only, even today. AMD is supposed to have something cooking for Blender 3D version 3.5 but the actual performance remains to be seen.

My old Acer laptop is equipped with Nvidia GeForce 6GB GPU

AMD fan: Literally shaking and crying.

My 1070 still worked well in 2022, all that weight of the 40 series to maybe do ultra with rtx on 1440p isn’t worth upgrading. Maybe with a 7 thousand dollar screen with 4K gsync and HDR 1000 whatever

"While the card performed well in speed tests, real world performance lagged the market." Wow, history really repeats itself, the Arc A770 beats the 3060 in synthetics but falls behind in games!

call it my be==the name, matix solvers

Your videos are all very well researched and very interesting. Thanks to you and your team.

Aged like milk

Nvidia is a bit like Mercedes' journey in F1. (Re)entered in the 90s quite behind everyone. Dominated in the mid 2010s. Not just by performance but also reliability. Also both are green.

Very informative. In 1986 I joined a company in British Columbia, Gemini Technology, that had great ambitions to dominate the graphics card market. We designed an EGA chipset using Daisy workstations. I taped out the design at LSI Logic in Sept., 1987, a few months after IBM introduced the VGA. Earlier that year we had spent a month in Japan, at Seiko Epson's design center. I don't know why that effort failed, since their was little transparency there. After completing the design at LSI, I moved to Video-7, an up and coming graphics card company that had just completed a VGA chipset, and was selling graphics boards. My LSI Logic EGA chip, surprisingly, found some customers. At V-7 we examined the IBM PGA, trying to reverse engineer the chipset and I also helped integrate my previous design with a V-7 product. Gemini eventually failed and was absorbed by Seiko Epson. Video 7 merged with an LSI Logic division, but had some legal problems that required the CEO to wear an ankle bracelet. I continued designing custom chips and even ran into my former Gemini Tech. co-workers at a Silicon Valley design center. Most of all I enjoyed the time I spent in Japan.

i had 2 voodoo 2s running in SLI in 98

Me and my 2 kids have and had about 20 PC and laptops in all, every one have been NVIDIA graphics and Intel Processor’s, very nice products I think. 💪 mostly ASUS and some Acer. Taiwan makes good PC,s and laptops, to a reasonable price.