Nvidia had a supercomputer and great hardware design software tools that were a trade secret and basically behind an off limits curtain in the center of their office and it helped them get chips out rapidly and on first turn. First turn means the first silicon coming back is good without requiring fixes and another costly turn.
I'd say 3dfx weren't poised to industrialize as well as Nvidia and they just couldn't keep up in the evolutionary race.
I'm not sure I understand where your worse is better idiom fits because 3dfx was better and Nvidia was worse but iterated to get better than 3dfx and won the day. Truly if worse was better in this case 3Dfx would still be around?
On the other hand triangle based rendering is a case of worse is better and Nvidia learned that and switched course from their early attempts with nurb based primitives.
"Voodoo2 Graphics uses a programmable color lookup table to allow for programmable gamma correction. The 16-bit dithered color data from the frame buffer is used an an index into the gamma-correction color table -- the 24-bit output of the gamma-correction color table is then fed to the monitor or Television."
I tried to find the information and the best I could find is this better than average discussion/podcast on the history of Nvidia.
They briefly touch on the chip emulation software that they felt they desperately needed to get back into the game after the NV1 was relegated.
The NV3 (Riva 128) was designed rapidly (six months) with the use of their what I called their super computer - a cluster of PCs or workstations most likely - running the proprietary chip emulation software. This advantage continued on further evolution of Nvidia hardware generations.
IIRC the chip emulation startup was started by a university friend of Jensen. The podcast says they failed later which is unfortunate.
https://www.acquired.fm/episodes/nvidia-the-gpu-company-1993...