Looking Back at 2000 Part 2: The Graphics Industry

After 10 months, the Voodoo4 is released

As if the year 2000 wasn't already disappointing enough for 3dfx, a full 10 months after it was first announced, the Voodoo4 4500 finally made its way onto store shelves in September without a chance of outperforming NVIDIA's GeForce2 MX.

Just one month later 3dfx would make what would become their last product release, so much for going out with a bang as 3dfx released the VoodooTV. The VoodooTV was the only "good" to come out of 3dfx's acquisition of STB in 1999. If you haven't guessed already, this officially made 3dfx's decision to acquire STB worthless which they confirmed by later announcing that they would allow third party board manufacturers to make Voodoo cards.

Giving the Voodoo4 4500 an even harder time was ATI's release of the Radeon SDR, which like the GeForce2 MX, was without a doubt faster than the Voodoo4.

A king is lost

After announcing that the Voodoo5 6000 was essentially a dead project that would be licensed out to Quantum3D and never see the retail market, 3dfx dropped the bomb on us in December of 2000. 3dfx, one of the fathers of the 3D graphics revolution, was to sell its core assets to its biggest competitor, NVIDIA. And, pending shareholder approval, 3dfx would shut its doors completely - no technical support, no driver updates, just completely shut down.

I once told one of AnandTech's Senior Editors that I would hate to be in 3dfx's shoes. NVIDIA is a very aggressive competitor and has definitely gone to some very great lengths to succeed. Their success does not come without hard work though, as no other manufacturer in the graphics industry has been able to meet release after release on such a tight product cycle. However in the end, it was NVIDIA's ability to meet such incredible product release deadlines that contributed to the death of 3dfx.

This, combined with S3's pulling out of the high-performance graphics market and Matrox's focus on a purely corporate agenda for now, leaves NVIDIA virtually alone in this market. Their next prey? ATI.

But unlike 3dfx, ATI may have what it takes to put up quite a fight. You can expect this New Year to be a very intense battle between ATI and NVIDIA, and as much as it pains us to say this, you shouldn't expect to see any real competition from any of the remaining manufacturers mentioned in this article.

Right now, it's a race to see which company will slip up first. As we have seen in the past, just missing a single product cycle can lead to a downward spiral that is borderline impossible to recover from.

The heat is on.