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原帖由 qcmadness 於 2010-10-6 21:13 發表
由佢啦...

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Decline

In early 1998, 3dfx embarked on a new development project. The Rampage development project was new technology for use in a new graphics card that would take approximately two years to develop, and would supposedly be several years ahead of the competition once it debuted. The company hired hardware and software teams in Austin, Texas to develop 2D and 3D Windows device drivers for Rampage in the summer of 1998. The hardware team in Austin initially focused on Rampage, but then worked on transform and lighting (T&L) engines and on MPEG decoder technology. (Later, these technologies were part of the Nvidia asset purchase in December 2000.)
[edit] Voodoo3 and strategy shift
Main article: Voodoo3
Voodoo3 3000 AGP box art.

3dfx executed a major strategy change just prior to the launch of Voodoo3 by purchasing STB Technologies, which was one of the larger graphics card manufacturers at the time; the intent was for 3dfx to start manufacturing, marketing, and selling its own graphics cards, rather than functioning only as an OEM supplier. STB was obviously intended to give 3dfx access to that company's considerable OEM resources and sales channels, but the intended benefits of the acquisition never materialized. The two corporations were vastly different entities, with different cultures and structures, and they never integrated smoothly.[10]

STB prior to the 3dfx acquisition also approached Nvidia as a potential partner to acquire the company. At the time, STB was Nvidia's largest customer and was only minimally engaged with 3dfx. 3dfx management mistakenly believed that acquiring STB would ensure OEM design wins with their products and that product limitations would be overcome with STB's knowledge in supporting the OEM sales/design win cycles. Nvidia decided not to acquire STB and to continue to support many brands of graphics board manufacturers. After STB was acquired by 3dfx, Nvidia focused on being a virtual graphics card manufacturer for the OEMs and strengthened its position in selling finished reference designs ready for market to the OEMs. STB's manufacturing facility in Juarez, Mexico was not able to compete from either a cost or quality point of view when compared to the burgeoning Original design manufacturers (ODMs) and Contract electronic manufacturers (CEMs) that were delivering solutions in Asia for Nvidia. Prior to the STB merger finalizing, some of 3dfx's OEMs warned the company that any product from Juarez will not be deemed fit to ship with their systems, however 3dfx management believed these problems could be addressed over time. Those customers generally moved to Nvidia solutions and no longer chose to ship 3dfx products.

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Voodoo 4 and 5
Main article: Voodoo 5
Voodoo5 5500.

The company's next (and as it would turn out, final) product was code-named Napalm. Originally, this was just a Voodoo3 modified to support newer technologies and higher clock speeds, with performance estimated to be around the level of the RIVA TNT2. However, Napalm was delayed, and in the meantime Nvidia brought out their landmark GeForce 256 chip, which shifted even more of the computational work from the CPU to the graphics chip. Napalm would have been unable to compete with the GeForce, so it was redesigned to support multiple chip configurations, like the Voodoo2 had. The end-product was named VSA-100, with VSA standing for Voodoo Scalable Architecture. 3dfx was finally able to have a product that could defeat the GeForce.

However, by the time the VSA-100 based cards made it to the market, the GeForce 2 and ATI Radeon cards had arrived and were offering higher performance at that price point. The only real advantage the Voodoo 5 5500 had over the GeForce 2 GTS or Radeon was its superior anti-aliasing implementation, and the fact that it didn't take such a large performance hit (relative to its peers) when anti-aliasing was enabled. 3dfx was fully aware of the Voodoo 5's speed deficiency, so they touted it as quality over speed, which was a reversal of the Voodoo 3 marketing which emphasized raw performance over features. 5500 sales were respectable but volumes were not at a level to keep 3dfx afloat.

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the company prioritized its next-generation designs and resulting high-end products, frequently ignoring the mid and low end sectors. Nvidia chose comparatively short development cycles, typically releasing a new product line each cycle and a high-end refresh midway through, and generally had a product priced to suit each market segment as older products and technologies moved progressively down-market.

3dfx however pursued lengthy, ambitious development cycles on higher end products and then attempted to fill in the down-market sectors with detuned versions of the newest release.

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A majority of the engineering and design team working on "Rampage" (the successor to the VSA-100 line) that remained with the transition, were requested and remained in house to work on what became the GeForce FX series

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原帖由 dom 於 2010-10-8 00:17 發表
係 Wiki 睇翻 3dfx 最後一代卡
當年比人笑佢食電王要插外置火牛

點知到左十年後既 2010 ........

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原帖由 qcmadness 於 2010-10-8 00:36 發表

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原帖由 ccw 於 2010-10-8 02:50 發表
衰退
面對NVIDIA的競爭，3dfx節節敗退。由於NVIDIA將顯示卡的生產，交給其他廠商製造，自己只負責設計顯示核心，顯示卡的製造成本得以下降。相反，3dfx拒絕公開顯示卡的生產工序，成本不能下降，而且產品效能比nVIDIA同級別產品差，市場佔有率漸漸下降，最後被昔日的對手—NVIDIA收購。