[Styxx]

BTW, I'm downloading the Cg toolkit, will try it out this weekend if all goes well.

[wEvil]

Well lets' just wait and see what happens, shall we?

I bet you sooner or later it'll go Nvidia-exclusive (just like they tried with the directX programmable shaders) and everyone else will get hung out to dry.

[Blitz_Lightning]

Well, that may or may not happen. Although major companies do get quite a bit of tax concessions... All you have to do is take a look at Rupert Murdoch's companies... some of em only pay ~2c in the dollar for tax

[Shrike]

Originally posted by wEvil
So...3Dlabs and Matrox release better DX9 parts and then Nvidia tries to knobble them by bringing out a proprietry language.

Goddamn that company really piss me off, I hope they drown in red tape!!

Uh.  Proprietary?  Since when?

[q]More important, Cg is open and lets programmers tell the chip to draw exactly the way they want it, rather than within the limits of a graphics library like OpenGL or Microsoft's Direct3D.

Cg was developed by both Nvidia and Microsoft and will work on non-Nvidia chipsets, including arch-rival ATI's cards. Any chipset that supports OpenGL or Microsoft's upcoming DirectX 9.0 will be able to use Cg. [/q]I think you're letting your feelings get in the way of rationality.

[Reppyboyo]

Originally posted by venom2506
if nvidia had a monopoly status, they'd release a new version of the same card every year, and increase the prices. Just like what 3dfx did. period.

3dfx did not do that though
if you compair each Voodoo card to the other you can see the differances is technology over the years...
3dfx were the main innovators of GFX card tech.....
just too bad T-Buffer went down the drain when nVidia bought em out....then the nVidiot ere began

[Fineus]

I think you've got it the wrong way round - the Voodoo series (at least in the early years) couldn't help but be innovative because nobody had ever done anything like it before but it was nVidia (in particular the TNT2 IIRC) that started doing new things. Remember that to get their extra speed 3DFX relied on hooking two of their cards together - nVidia did all that on one board from the start. Alright, so the V3 (or was it 5?) range bought along some interesting features like blurring and so on... but who cares? both nVidia and 3DFX had FSAA (although 3DFX people used to claim otherwise I think...) and nVidia bought along hardware T&L which changed the playing field somewhat.

All in all both sides were innovative but nVidia - at least at an early stage - did more. Now things may be different - but they still make great cards. I've come to realise that theres a little saying - it goes "just because something is popular, it won't necessarily be bad - some people hate the mainstream purely because it's mainstream". It's human nature

[wEvil]

3Dlabs had Glint out on the PC platform as the first 3D chip to make any decent cash and/or penetrate that market to any degree.

This was openGL based which, to be quite frank, always had a far superior feature set to whatever 3dfx put out.  Since glide was really only a perverted form of openGL anyway....


Evans & Sunderland were first with hardware T&L, Nvidia creeping on the scene with a specification that performed about 2% good as they claimed it would (the origional GeForce was supposed to be a 50Gflop unit that performed WORSE than a 3Gflop 3dlabs Glint T&L chip..wtf went on there?) and about 5 years later than everyone else.


To call either of these companies innovative is a gross insult to all the engineers who pioneered these technologies.

The only thing 3dfx and Nvidia have done is stripped down pre-existing specifications and sell them at a bargan basement price - and for some reason everybody loves them for it.

We'll see when the whole industry falls flat on its' face (well...things aren't looking too rosy atm, are they?)

[Fineus]

Alright then, they made the hardware commercially available to the new-comer. I for one knew didly squat about 3D Cards language or specs for some amount of time and therefore relied on large companies to present me with the best possible solution at the time (back then it was 3DFXs Voodoo2). If magasines, websites and everyone else with a say in the matter and an influence on the user would mention that there are alternatives or the names of the engineers that made the technology in the first place then I for one would probably have a different opinion. But they don't, and we can only go on the facts we know...