How Nvidia Won Graphics Cards

In 1995, there were over thirty different companies competing with one another to build the best graphics chips for the personal computer.

Six years later, there would be only three. With one clearly in the lead: Nvidia.

As of this writing, Nvidia Corporation is the 15th biggest company in the world, worth half a trillion dollars.

Their graphics cards sell out like gangbusters the second they come onto the market.

And the company is seeking to buy ARM for $40 billion.

In this video, we are going to look back into the past and see how a little startup came up from behind everyone else to dominate the graphics card industry on route to being the world-leading tech juggernaut it is today.

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[Asianometry]

Hope you enjoyed the video. Like and subscribe, etc. etc.

[excitedbox]

My dad worked at Zeng Labs starting in 1996 before it was bought by ATI. Stayed on until Ati was bought by AMD, and stayed on at AMD during the GPU wars. He left AMD in 2005 or 2006. His team built the first Radeon chip.

[tneper]

One correction:
NVIDIA did coin the term GPU in 1999.
GPU is short for Graphics Processing Unit (not General Processing Unit).
GPGPU is the term for General Purpose computing on GPUs. (as far as I know it was not coined by NVIDIA though)
General purpose computing on GPUs started to become more common after programmable shaders were introduced in 2001, with the NV20.

Great video. Loved hearing again about the early days of NVIDIA. There's a lot more to the story for sure, but this hit all the right notes, thank you!

I've worked for NVIDIA from 1999 through today. I lived through a good portion of this, it was (and is) exciting.

[joelcorley]

You mention the IBM PGA, but your presentation seems to ignore other 2D graphics adapters (with and without acceleration) that rose to prominence with Windows before 3D graphics. Also there were actually a number of graphics chip design houses that were already on the scene creating chips with 3D acceleration (or deceleration depending on who you ask) when nVidia and 3dfx arrived on the scene. Admittedly none were particularly good by comparison.

Also every last IHV on the market was writing device drivers for their graphics accelerator chips. The system OEMs didn't write squat. OEMs contracted out all the productization and customization to board manufacturers which hired their own device driver development teams for that purpose. At least that was true in the '90s.

Admittedly nVidia always had a substantial device driver development team practically from the get-go. But that was actually for self-serving reasons that probably weren't apparent to the public. The early nVidia designs had something unusual - it's own integrated command execution pipeline tied to it's own DMA channels. However all of the less common commands in the pipeline were actually virtualized and farmed back out to the host CPU for simulation. To accomplish this virtualization, nVidia needed a much larger driver team and that team needed to be more involved with the silicon design team. That's actually what initially drove their vertical integration - they just couldn't rely on board manufacturers to address issues in this chip virtualization system - though at first they tried.

Also about the demise of 3dfx: Before 3dfx approached it, STB Systems was probably the largest or second largest contract graphics board manufacturer in the world. All the major OEMs bought cards from STB Systems. But unlike companies like Diamond and Matrox, STB Systems did not sell self-branded retail products to the public pre-merger. Instead its business model was to take sample silicon from graphics chip makers, spin a board and customize the driver with it's own library of graphics optimizations. (The optimizations were the secret sauce it used to sell to OEMs because they impacted benchmark numbers.) It would then offer these sample boards up the OEMs and each OEM would order SKUs, usually from the two best performing chipsets. This model kept STB System's Mexico PCB factory line near 100% capacity for several years.

Before 3dfx made it's offer, STB Systems had seen huge success with both the nVidia Riva 128 and the TNT. At the time of the merger announcement about 90% of STB Systems' sales were nVidia TNT-based boards and every major system OEM was buying them. Post-merger announcement nVidia obviously refused to offer any new chip designs to STB Systems. What's worse 3dfx had never been forced to meet an OEM development cycle and even if it had, their new Banshee was at best competing with the nVidia TNT (and not even beating that) and not the current generation silicon.

When 3dfx and STB Systems merged they were flush with something like $100M in cash. However STB Systems had done a capital lease financing arrangement on it's Mexico production line and those multi-million dollar lease payments had to be made each month whether the production lines were producing products 3dfx/STB could sell or not. It didn't take very long before the fabs in Mexico were idle and the company was staring bankruptcy in the face, because the few wholly 3dfx-based boards they produced sold only a tiny fraction of what the Mexico fabs could spit out. Also STB Systems had just built a new headquarters that it had to pay for and all those engineers STB and 3dfx had on staff didn't work for free.

So it wasn't too long after the merger that they went looking for suitors. nVidia cut them a deal to buy out their intellectual property and hire their device driver and firmware developers. The remains of 3dfx entered bankruptcy and the support staff were shown the door.

Regards,
Joel Corley,
Windows Device Driver Developer,
Recently Retired from Microsoft,
Formerly a Developer for STB Systems and 3dfx...

[curtswartz]

I used to work in the video card industry in the valley. I helped design video cards and all chip companies like Nvidia, Tseng labs, Rendition and 3D labs would come and show us their latest wares. We actually made a 3DFX Voodoo card that sold very well. At one point I put together a video card that was both PCI and AGP on a single card. You would just flip the card over and change the bracket to use the card with the other bus. Wow such memories.

[AirCrash]

From my experience in the industry it was how Nvidia released driver updates for their cards. Sometimes 5 years after they stopped selling them which was practically forever compared to the other players who released graphics cards with buggy drivers and then never fixed them and stopped releasing updates after 1 year. In the early days of windows a graphics driver problem would result in a BSD and loss of work and no real clue what the actual problem was with the PC. I saved the company I worked for thousands in warranty repairs by only using reliable and supported graphics cards and ditching all the other brands. Just about all the other PC components if there was a fault would clearly show themselves. Graphics card problems cost a fortune to sort out, customers bringing back machines that worked all day in the workshop but would BSD when the client was doing some unusual operation, I would return the cards to the OEM, they would test them and send them back. A nightmare of epic proportions.

[RenzoTravelsTheEarth]

My uncle used to work for SGI back in the early 90s and he said that at some stage he remembers some people pitching the idea of a consumer graphics card and they basically got laughed out of the room.

He was also telling me they basically invented video on demand but at the time the bandwidths available were too low to be practical and the project was eventually abandoned.

[TheNefastor]

Such a trip down memory lane ! I remember living through it all, but of course back then we didn't have all this information about how it all came to pass. Thanks, man, I enjoyed that.

[noutram]

There's clearly a follow up to this as NVidia GPUs begin to get used in things like neural networks, crypto mining and cutting edge supercomputers... You could argue that without video gaming we wouldn't have had 'the third wave' of AI we now see is so transformative.

[sweealamak]

This reminds me of another game changer back in the day: Sound Blaster. Would be nice to have a recap of the rise and fall of Creative.

[pdsnpsnldlqnop]

Also important was how Nvidia were able to recruit whole teams from SGI when Microsoft announced they were doing Fahrenheit with SGI - this was in the days when Microsoft also bought SoftImage and wanted to take over the workstation space with Win NT, causing SGI difficulties apparent to all their staff. It wasn't even seen as a big deal for SGI staff to defect. So they did, taking their knowledge of the fundamentals with them.

[LikaLaruku]

I remember the graphics card wars.
I remember when graphics cards cost less than a complete desktop PC set.

[crylittlebitch]

great video. Personally, I would've liked a section that goes more indepth into the recent years, as well as the ARM deal. Also, I'd love a video similar to this one for AMD, as well as one on the merger between AMD and Xilinx. Hopefully some of these topics will make it into future videos!

[toothofthewolf]

Odd Matrox didn't get a mention. The Matrox Millenium was a top selling card for a while. Intel's MMX extensions was also a resource Quake utilized that helped Nvidia piggyback. But otherwise this doco was very on point.

[fraktaalimuoto]

Nvidia going for General Purpose GPU computing with CUDA was a genius move. As a GPU computing expert doing physics simulations, I say it is now a significant performance and cost benefit in high performance computing sphere.

[snawsomes]

I hope this video makes you a lot of money over the years. Simply one of the best lectures about the history of graphics cards on the net.

[RalfStephan]

Actually, Castle Wolfenstein was the first 1st person shooter. Its wide distribution in the mailbox scene prepared for Doom's success.

[punditgi]

Superb video with great explanations! Keep these videos coming!

[THETHPHANTOM]

damn, i have never once made the connection between Nvidia and the Latin Invidia. this is the second time this has happened to me. first time being the connection between Asus and Pegasus. so much for the creativity part of my brain.

[tradito]

22:00 pretty sure they mean Graphics Processing Unit, not general processing unit.