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| Video Card History (1996 to the present) |
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Page 3 of 4 In October of 1999, NVIDIA dealt the final blow to 3dfx with the introduction of the Geforce 256. As 3dfx didn't have anything to immediately combat the new card with, they took the blow right to the face. The revolutionary Geforce 256 brought much to the table, including four pixel pipelines at 120 MHz, DDR RAM support, and many other new features. 3dfx had two cards that were very highly anticipated, but delayed long past the original schedule - the Voodoo4 and Voodoo5. Once these cards were finally released they were well accepted by 3dfx die-hards, but they came far too late to do damage to NVIDIA. The long-term strategy behind the new cards was fairly weak, as the improvements were made mainly with the addition of more GPUs instead of real chipset improvements. This made the cards about twice as big as the previous models, with nearly the same increase in price. The Voodoo 5 outperformed the Geforce 256 card by a modest amount, but with that hefty price tag it didn't make it very far at all. Sadly, the last card 3dfx constructed was the Voodoo5 6000, which was rarely seen at all. This is rather hard to believe considering that it was one of the biggest graphics cards I have ever seen. The Voodoo5 6000 was equipped with 4 GPUs (that's right, 4) and 128 MB of memory. This card was mostly only seen in high-end workstations though, and never really made it to the consumer market. 
Needless to say, 3dfx was defeated and taken out of the race. At the time, they had one last product up their sleeve called Rampage. Rampage was an amazing new chipset that would have pushed 3dfx far ahead of the game, had they not been bought out by NVIDIA in December of 2000. This meant that NVIDIA had the Rampage project in their hands, and it was rumored that Rampage technology was put into use on their NV30 (Geforce FX) series of cards. 
ATI was still trying to be a player during this time, and released a card called the Rage Fury MAXX. Like the 3dfx cards of the time, this card made performance gains through the use of multiple GPUs. Using two Rage Pro processors in parallel, the card carried a fairly high price tag. Disappointingly, the Rage Fury MAXX just barely keep up with the TNT2, to say nothing of the GeForce. In the spring following their release of the Geforce 256, NVIDIA released its successor - the Geforce2 GTS. The GTS was more than just an overclocked version of the Geforce 256, and nearly doubled the pixel fill rate along with the addition of multi-texturing in each pipeline. Surprisingly, when the Geforce2 GTS started hitting the shelves, NVIDIA followed up with the Geforce2 MX. This chipset cut off two of the pixel pipelines, and took the fill rates down to 350 megapixels per second - a move that was questionable to many. However, two important features were added to the GeForce2 MX that made up for the performance losses. One of these was TwinView, which allowed for dual monitor setups. More importantly though, the GeForce2 MX added firmware support for the Apple Macintosh. Apple later named the GeForce2 MX the high end graphics card for the new Apple Power Macintosh G4 - a big win for NVIDIA's pocketbook. |
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