Hope you enjoyed the video. Like and subscribe, etc. etc. For other company profiles, check out the playlist: ukposts.info/slow/PLKtxx9TnH76Qod2z94xcDNV95_ItzIM-S

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.

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.

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...

Nvidia should sponsor a NASCAR to confuse the fans every time there's a new driver.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

Insanely interesting, having grown up using computers in the whole period covered by this video, it's super cool to now understand all these brands, technologies, terminologies, strategies and decision making by the companies. Thank you so much for the information - I thoroughly enjoyed it. Please keep up the good work.

Your videos are all very well researched and very interesting. Thanks to you and your team.

I love this video, it's like what I lived through in the 90s trying to build and constantly improve my fankenstein machines. All the churn with the video cards brings me down memory lane (3Dfx, Intel 740i, D3D, OpenGL AGP vs PCI, Real3D, Voodoo 1, 2, Banshee, etc). Thanks!

Superb video with great explanations! Keep these videos coming!

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

3:31 SGI was so far ahead of everyone at this point they could have easily been the size of Nvidia today. SGI created the graphical hardware for the N64, and the N64 dev kits where SGI work stations. What a incredible blunder they made not getting into the consumer space.

- Excellent. - Thx for all your effort, and talent. - I got into computer graphics in the early 90s, so, I experienced all the history you covered, but did not know any of the back story... until now. Thx, again.

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.

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.

this took a lot of effort and it turned out great! well done

This was one of those videos that I've really enjoyed watching and learned something new... Good job SIR!

Didnt some of the top engineers at Nvidia come from Silicon Graphics Inc? I think its fascinating how people moved around from various companies. From the 70's-90's I think fewer than 100 people really shaped the whole home computer market. Probably less than 50 in the chip and motherboard design space.

Cheers for the vid. Concise and accurate. Good work

I love your channel! I'm a mechanical engineer who switched from heavy machinery to semiconductor fab equipment engineering (CMP). Your videos have been so helpful to me learning how all this crazy wafer stuff works.

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

Excellent overview and history! Thanks, well researched.

Great video. I wish you'd do one on Matrox as well.

Thank you for covering Nivea. Love their lavender infused moisturizing cream.

3Dfx, I haven't heard that that company name in a long long time. The first graphics card I ever bought was a 3Dfx. I remember buying it like it was yesterday. I hadn't played games on a computer since the Commodore days in the 80s, but I had very fond memories of playing games all weekend and summer with the other boys from neighborhood so when I was finally on my own I went and bought a PC and a game. I took it home and tried to play it. After getting practically zero framerate I read the box and realized I needed a GPU. I knew what they were, but had no clue how to shop for one so I started researching and over 20 years later I still haven't stopped. That 3Dfx card was what got me interested into how PCs work and ultimately had me going back to school to take as many classes as I could on the subject

Oh dude! I remember those old Vodoos they had a cable in the back of the pc that went from the video card into the 3d card. My first was the Banshee, 16mb of power! It was awesome at the time.

This is an excellent channel. I’m definitely becoming a Patreon supporter this content is so well curated. it’s just technically excellent

Great video as always! Keep in mind that without ASML nothing would be possible. Thanks!

Man, I just love your voice and calm explanation style.

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

The Cromemco "Dazzler" was the first graphics card in 1976. (and you're about 10 years too late for the graphics revolution - the Amiga was doing all of this in 1985 as well as the GUI. The screenshot of GLQuake you show is actually the software renderer - it doesn't use bilinear filtering. If you go to the place you sourced the image you'll see you took the wrong screenshot - this is a software shot next to the GL shot for comparison)

Great show thanks Asianometry, My whole gaming world improved when I installed the Voodoo card, it was as different as night and day.

Great video and I loved knowing the history behind the giant. If I've read correctly, a GPU is a Graphics Processing Unit and not a General Processing Unit as you mention it towards the end of the video - en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphics_processing_unit. The rise of AI and ML sciences made these chips popular because it is faster in orders of magnitude than a regular CPU with more or less the same power consumption. Nvidia is leveraging its know-how in developing graphics chips to now capture this market.

Just one small addition: When Intel pushed onboard graphics, where the graphics memory was part of the main memory of the CPU, it was thought that the video solution would actually be faster, since the CPU would have direct access to the frame buffer, as well as having all of the resources there to access it (cache, DMA, memory management, etc). The reason they lost that advantage in the long run was the dual advantages of VRAM or dual ported video ram, a ram that could both be read and written by the CPU at the same time as being serially read out to scan the video raster device, as well as the rise of the GPU, meaning that most of the low level video memory access was handled by a GPU on the video card that did the grunt work of drawing bits to the video ram. Thus Intel ran instead down the onboard video rabbit hole. Not only didn't they win the speed race with external video cards, but people began to notice that the onboard video solutions were sucking considerable CPU resources away from compute tasks. Thus the writing was on the wall. Later, gamers only knew the onboard video as that thing they had to flip a motherboard switch to disable when putting a graphics card in, and nowadays not even that. Its automatic.

Don't forget that Nvidia never stopped selling their GPUs to third party companies, so today there's a myriad of brands using Nvidia chips from where to chose.

18:37 I remember STB. They made a good Tseng Labs ET4000/W32 board that ran well with OS/2.

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.

Now this is the video I was looking for! Good stuff dude 😎

great video! 👍🏻 could you please make a video about matrox, 3dfx, number9 , thank you

Very well done overview.

I was young during the days of games like doom2, quake 1,2, Red Alert etc and I remember being able to run these games perfectly on our 486 machine without any discrete graphics installed. I know my dad and he hated the idea of paying extra for discrete cards so I'm sure there wasn't one in our system. We did have sound blaster tho and the games looked and sounded awesome!!

20:42 that Unreal Tournament screen shot is some good nostalgia :D

The greatest move NVIDIA did was acquiring the marketing genius Brandon “Atrioc” "glizzy hands" Ewing. He pitched and developed the iconic Greenout campaign. He also pitched "Frames Win Games" Esports campaign, which is currently the flagship Esports campaign for NVIDIA and its hardware partners. Truly the GOAT of marketing

Very informative. In 1986 I joined a company in British Columbia, Gemini Technology, that had great ambitions to dominate the graphics card market. We designed an EGA chipset using Daisy workstations. I taped out the design at LSI Logic in Sept., 1987, a few months after IBM introduced the VGA. Earlier that year we had spent a month in Japan, at Seiko Epson's design center. I don't know why that effort failed, since their was little transparency there. After completing the design at LSI, I moved to Video-7, an up and coming graphics card company that had just completed a VGA chipset, and was selling graphics boards. My LSI Logic EGA chip, surprisingly, found some customers. At V-7 we examined the IBM PGA, trying to reverse engineer the chipset and I also helped integrate my previous design with a V-7 product. Gemini eventually failed and was absorbed by Seiko Epson. Video 7 merged with an LSI Logic division, but had some legal problems that required the CEO to wear an ankle bracelet. I continued designing custom chips and even ran into my former Gemini Tech. co-workers at a Silicon Valley design center. Most of all I enjoyed the time I spent in Japan.

Jeez - I remember all these graphic cards revolutions in the 90s. ATI, RIVA TNT, VOODOO 3Dfx. It was the time when the AGP standard was introduced before being replaced by PCI Express.

Great video! There's also the issue where 3dfx kept suing nVidia who just patiently bore the brunt of the lawsuits until when they finally bought them. Its a good business lesson.. don't worry about doing things that your competitor might sue you for if you can plan to just eventually buy them out.

So nostalgic! All these brand names take me back to my childhood and asking Santa for Voodoo cards MMX processors and AGP slots...

What an awesome channel! Liked, commented, subbed! Thank you!

A followup with a GPU wars will be awesome.

I remember when I first had a go with Linux, it was Debian. I couldn't figure out how to install drivers. Right up until the point you realise they just get detected and loaded as kernel modules at boot or, at most, pulled in with an apt-get command. Certainly was an eye opening moment in my journey as a software engineer and architect.

3Dfx was a typical cash burning startup in the Dotcom era of the late 90s. The captured the PC gaming market in the right time with simple and working solution, but they always had struggled with evolving forward, with unusually long R&D cycles, while relying too much on recycling their old and proven tech. But the alienating of the OEM partners would be their biggest undoing from a long string of missteps... and they had no chance to compete with Nvidia's 6-month release cadence.

Love these videos! Thanks!

More info on the detailed architecture of these systems would be interesting.

Nice video and It was incredible to see that little graphic card that Intel made in the '90s that went nowhere....same with Arc now. I don't understand why the N1 CPU maker in the world can't just make some competitive good-performing GPUs. They have experience designing chips and financial resources.

I owned every one of these early graphics cards and monitored Carmack’s .plan file eagerly in these years. The timeline is not entirely clear and some events and declarations end up seeming intermingled, albeit not intentionally.

Nvidia did a lot of dirty work to win the market domination~ the CEO is cunning. That's what makes a successful company.

Double voodoo2 with viper550 was my cannon game system, later got the 770 and so on, the early days of gaming where one of the best rides during my life.

I can only speak to my experience as a PC builder sine the late 90's. It was the Drivers. At least in my experience, Nvidia drivers were generally more stable than their peers.

Excellent historical summary!

What a great video, I’ve just arrived in Taipei and hopefully after government quarantine I’ll get out to do some tech related sight seeing. If any one has any recommendations please let me know.

Great reference on Computer aided design. That must have been cool to have a dad that did that. I do Logic design and when I was a kid I used to play around with a software called Powedertoy. when I got alittlebit older I was referred a $1 software called Digital Logic Sim. It let you build simple processors and logic gates even memory. This is not an ad as I don't really know who the people who made it. but its a fun pastime. Fun fact Jensen and Dr Lisa from AMD are relatives.

Thanks for you analysis.

Very good video explanation

Recall getting these graphic boards as hand me downs from our stock trade floor. Traders were upgrading their desktops in the 1990s at will so why let last years model go to E-waste. PS - are you going to do a part 2 on impact of digital currency on the graphics market?

For those interested: The IBM Professional Graphics Controller is called 'PGA' because the A can stand for either Array or Adapter. In modern English the letters 'A' and 'C' are commonly used interchangeably, much like the letters 'ß' and '§'. This can often be confusing for those who speak British English because IBM chose to use the uncommon 'Controller', instead of the classic spelling 'Aontroller'.

GPU always stood for Graphics Processing Unit; GPGPU is the term for General Purpose Graphics Processing Unit

A very interesting comparison there at the end between the different vertical integration paths. People have a hard time understanding what things you should bring in house which will materially add to product quality, verses materially adding to complexity and being a burden on quality. Reminds me of the people who seem to think Apple buying TSMC is a good idea. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Great document about GPU history! I'm old enough to have actually bought a Voodoo graphics card with my own money as a new. I feel that the drivers of NVIDIA cards are still the most important part of the technology. It appears that AMD (ex ATI) hardware may actually have more computing power but drivers fail to surface it to the applications. In addition, OpenCL took too many years to create and NVIDIA proprietary CUDA took the market and many apps (including open source Blender 3D) have proper hardware support for CUDA only, even today. AMD is supposed to have something cooking for Blender 3D version 3.5 but the actual performance remains to be seen.

7:25 A video on Malta and the fabs it has managed to lure in might be interesting.

1:15 - in 1991 triangle-database graphics engines where $M machines that needed a $M computer to run their databases and were used to provide displays for simulation flight trainers. I worked for a company that provided the simulation computer that requested a set of displays at 15/20/30/60Hz. Five years later those graphics machines were obsolete...

I would love to hear you talk more about tech crypto and visual effects.

one feedback i would like to add to an otherwise great content is to increase the microphone volume output

Interesting video but I am confused by your request we sign up to your channel for videos about Asia. What exactly do graphics cards have to do with Asia?

I still remember their Voodoo Graphics Card

viewing on my titan x (maxwell) on VGA output on CRT maxwell is the last gpu that actually supported analog signal

I worked as Director of Development at an SGI major integrator and we later added Sun Microsystems and I become CTO of a Telecom Manufacturer who pattered with one that hand licensed equipment manufactured in Taiwan.

The picture of the motherboard at 20:24, does it actually have on board graphics, or is it what I find to appear as, an 'APU' as AMD referred to them...?

I worked at one of those 3rd party board companies in the mid nineties and so far this is the only presentation that gets it right. Great job. I was even offered a job at Nvidia who directly recruited me in their drive to vertically integrate graphics drivers. I am sad I said no. But I could tell that Nvidia was going to win it all, on my visits, they shared with me their secret inner sanctum where there computers were situated running that vaunted design simulation. Their record of getting chips out on first turn was unmatched. It's almost like your observation about TSMC - they would win with cycle times.

Excellent video. One thing you missed out was Matrox. I believe they were the 4th market player back in the early 2000s. Though Nvidia GPUs usually cost more than it's rival, stability is something I always look out for which both Nvidia and Intel provides it. The red team has time and time again disappointed me in its quality. The introduction of Radeon Vega APU though change the whole gameplay for budget PCs again. I hope Intel's newest foray into the GPU space will bring a new level of benefits for consumers. Here are some of the Nvidia GPUs that I have ever owned and used includes: - Riva TNT - GeForce 2 MX - GeForce 6600 GT - GeForce GTX 660 Ti - GeForce GTX 770 - GeForce GTX 1060 Unfortunately bloody crypto miners are ruin the GPU prices for gamers now.

I was about to start production on a video essay about this exact topic...

i wish you had another 10 minutes on this video that explained to date graphics card market shifts.

Its good to have a reliable graphics card these days, that can make many designs, conceptualization of arts, while maintaining the ethical standards as tangible records are after output/outcome. The graphic cards are good specially when they are installed manually, computer making, or set up, and many things that a graphic card can do. It should also be as environment friendly as it is eversince particularly Nvidia/ATI, or any of those brands that preserves their quality and standards, the way SMEs are eversince in Many businesses Worldwide. Ptd, Trademarks, LLC, Registrations, Copyrights, Registered.SMEs.........respectively.

It’s a shame how hard it is presently to get a hold of the new 3000 series gpus from nvidia. Really hope this changes, for a long time I built my pcs with amd but with the new gpus they came out with it makes gaming more affordable

Very impressive summary of those early days of the graphics revolution. I remember back in the day, when EGA came out, everyone and his brother was designing his own EGA card that sold for $1000, about the same price as an IBM XT knock off.

Great historical video but You have missed the twenty first century. 2 interesting things happened. Intel GMA - besides 3d acceleration mpeg1,2,4 added, later AVC, HEVC, VC-1, VP-7, VP-8. The force behind that was the new media: streaming video such as UKposts. Novadays We have Netflix, Amazon, Apple etc. And the second player in this area is Apple, with their A14, A15 and M1 processors. The latter is the most interesting since besides vector processing - what every GPU can do it is capable of tensor processing. Note that the driving force behing graphic is AI for nvidia too, considering their most advanced Tesla product line.

I remember the Riva doing very well while I was in high school offering 32 bit color while 3dfx could only offer 16 bit color in games. It cost 3dfx a lot of sales.

It's important to make the difference between graphics card (or video cards) and GPUs. Almost all early personal computers had a video dedicated hardware - the Woz Ghip is an example. Starting with the ZX-Spectrum, very small computers used the CPU to generate the video. The late Sir Clive Sinclair wanted to make a computer that costed less than 100 Pounds and to achieve that he used the CPU (Zilog 80) to generate the video signals - he not only managed to make a computer that sold like beer during spring break but also made Europe the place where game studios are. The problem is how to generate a video signal that monitors and TV screens could receive - Sinclair let the Z80 do it and the CPU would only compute during the retrace time slots. The Woz Chip does the same thing but separate from the 6502 processors the Apple II line used. Even the EGA, CGA and other graphics cards did just one thing: convert information stored in memory into a signal displays could interpret. This "graphics card" (I prefer video card) exists on all GPUs: the GPU produces a frame and stores it into memory and the video "card" reads the memory and produces the video signal. Tearing, for instance, is cause by the out of sync update of the frame memory that causes the video signal generator to read part of one frame and part of the next frame and output it as a single video frame. During the 1990s, computers with 'accelerated cards' (that had circuits to allow for a whole window to be moved on the desktop or just a circuit to allow the mouse pointer to move around the screen smoothly) and GPUs (math intensive calculations to produce the 3D image) were found only on workstations (Sun, for instance), specialized graphics workstations(SGi) and graphics supercomputers(Sgi, again). These machines costed 10s of thousands of dollars. nVidia did manage to make the GPU a general purpose processor and it's the go to device for Digital Signal Processing. I heard (can't confirm) the our Brazilian oil company, Petrobrás, was, during the 2000s, the largest buyer of nVidia cards - all of them used in processing and reprocessing data from geological surveys mainly the ones captured by underwater geophones over the Pre-Salt oil reserve on the coast of Brazil. I think that's why nVidia GPUs are less efficient for games than the ATi - there's an added complexity to allow for the general purpose use of the boards and I also think that's why nVidia GPUs are more reliable. Thanks for the video! I used to play a game called Taipei on a Brazilian licensed version of the ZX82 - it was a text based game dealing with buying and selling goods (and sometimes having storms sink our ships). Best wishes for you and your family in Taiwan!

would be interesting to hear your thoughts about intel going back into graphics cards now

This is an exceptionally objective and accurate description of the circumstance at the time. I was there, man! 😂 Of course I loved 3dfx. Doom sold more hardware than anything!

The voodoo was my very first GPU. Paired with an Intel 333mhz single core cpu and if I remember correctly, 128mb of ram. ah, the memories :)

Hopefully this will also help with my interview with them soon...

I had first one Viper330, and then one Viper770! They were great, and I got a little lost when Diamond quit the market. I guess that worry, about buying Diamond cards and not "my brand GPU" was spot on.