zlacker

>>BirAda+(OP)
3dfx is another example of "worse is better" or "slope vs intercept". This article doesn't quite spell it out, but as far as I can tell, 3dfx had one GPU architecture that was tweaked from 1995 till their end. It was much better for a few years than what the competitors put out, but the competitors kept iterating. nVidia created several generations of GPUs in the same time frame. 3dfx started higher but had no slope. Everyone else started much lower, but had a lot of slope (nVidia and ATI in particular). Two of these went ahead and started creating a new "fastest ever GPU" every other year for a quarter century, the other tried putting more of the same GPU on bigger boards and folded.

>>former+DX
One of my favorite facts is about Nvidia release cycle speed. At the peak of nvidia 3dfx war new chips were coming out every 6-9 months:

Riva 128 (April 1997) to TNT (June 15, 1998) took 14 months, TNT2 (March 15, 1999) 8 month, GF256 (October 11, 1999) 7 months, GF2 (April 26, 2000) 6 months, | 3dfx dies here |, GF3 (February 27, 2001) 9 months, GF4 (February 6, 2002) 12 months, FX (March 2003) 13 months, etc ...

Nvidia had an army of hardware engineers always working on 2 future products in parallel, 3dfx had few people in a room.