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The Battle of Video CardsJun 07 '00 Write an essay on this topic.We all remember the good all days when we got our brand new 486 and were amazed by the performance. I mean, it even had 16 colors!!! A decade later, here we are. Now there is no standard. You have 2 main brands of processors, 10 motherboards, 50 hard drives, 200 moniters, and Dozens of High Performance Video cards. What is a buyer to Do? There are too many options. Unfortunately for you, buying a kickin' system packing a 1ghz processor and a 30 GB hard drive won't mean anything for gaming purposes unless you have a fantastic video card. It's basically come down to the 2 powers in the Graphics industry, 3dfx and Nvidia. About 5 years ago, the Voodoo was the only card. People thought any graphics card was 3dfx. Present day, you have Nvidia dominating the industry with it's fantastic 32-bit color performers. 3dfx wants to take back the market it lost. Let's analyze how they got to their present position. The Beginning You had Voodoo 2's, Voodoo Banshess, and the TNT. TNT stands for Twin Texel Engine. It was a minor hit, but games hadn't hit a performance point where they needed the picture quality of the TNT. So the Voodoo's dominated the industry still. The Middle Nvidia used the re-fashioning trick. If you take an ugly woman, and put make-up on her, you got a decent looking thing. This is a similar analogy to what Nvidia did. They took a good, but unpolished product, the TNT and made it faster, better drivers, and a better gaming bundle. Thus the TNT2 was invented. It had speed, 32-bit color, and great performance. 3dfx decided they could use the same trick, with the Voodoo3 series. It was basically a superfast Voodoo Banshee. While people considered it a failure, for being a speedy but inferior image quality card, the Voodoo3 series was the top selling Video card for its price. So 3dfx was still in the game for round 3. The Revolution Nvidia invented the Revolutionary Geforce which changed the industry and sent their stock from 23 to 123. 3dfx had no new card, all they could do was work on the next Voodoo series. Nvidia pumped out gefore DDR's and began to work on their next project, the Geforce GTS 2. The Future May 26th: Voodoo5 5500 supposed to be released. It is recalled. Geforce GTS is released shortly thereafter. In performance benchmarks there are a few things going for each. Nvidia has speed in the lower resolutions. Nvidia has better acknowledgement for their product, and is more consistent in quality. 3dfx has superior image quality, Full Screen Anti-Aliasing, and a new product we have been dying to try out. WHO WILL SUCCEED, WHO WILL FAIL??? Right now, if I had to place a position on one company, I'd say Nvidia, for they also have the Geforce GTS being produced for Microsoft's X-Box, and they haven't had a higher stock. I hope that 3dfx can stay in the game though. This means competition, and technology will advance faster, for their is a reason to make better products faster. Thanks for reading.  |
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