What follows is a recollection of events as I experienced them growing up. The graphics wars were brutal. 3DFX had risen from the early competition with the likes of Rendition's Verité chip, S3 had their Trio, and Matrox had made the transition from 2D to 3D. But lording over them all were 3DFX. As my tale begins 3DFX was running high on their success after the Voodoo 2, a card I had myself, and Glide was the defacto performance API. But soon terrible things would unfold. Horrible events that left AMD and nVidia as the only entrants left until the present day. A day in which Intel is vying to enter. This is based off of my recollection, so timing might not be entirely correct. But I believe the spirit is in keeping with what happened if nothing else.
The final battle that led to the duopoly of today began, for me, in the late 1990's. Gathered at the urinal was a small gang of companies. All of them growing into adulthood and vying for attention. But this day would be different. To me gauntlet began in earnest with the Riva TNT2 as nVidia unzipped its trousers to flaunt a well packed pair of briefs while locking eyes with 3DFX - which had been gleefully displaying a sizeable bulge under its pants for some time now to the envy of the rest. However as it turned out it was a piss boner which would disappear as quickly as it had grown to prominence.
3DFX took to the challenge in stride. The Voodoo 3000 had been beginning to look long in the tooth. So it had been tinkering on a new graphics core with 32-bit rendering and a view to implement hardware FSAA, which sounded promising. All eyes were on 3DFX. But in its haste to one-up the new competition it unzipped without looking and somehow managed to catch their dick in the zipper. In a moment of greed 3DFX had decided to take card production in-house. Suddenly chip development took a backseat as problems with angry vendors, retailers, and production difficulties reared its head. Bleeding and in pain 3DFX put on a brave face, but the blood-mixed urine that trickled out from its damaged downstairs region was not confidence inspiring.
Meanwhile nVidia had gracefully undressed and let loose an impressive stream of hits before the first blood infused droplets left 3DFX's now miserably disfigured undercarriage. GeForce was launched, and as a belated response 3DFX finally squirted out their Voodoo 4, huffing down the pain to splatter the Voodoo 5 out in a painful volley a while later. It held two GPU's in SLI mode and came with its own power brick in the tricked out 5500 version. Impressively it kept up with nVidia, almost, by brute forcing missing features like hardware TnL. nVidia's torrent just wouldn't cease however, and with a grunt 3DFX keeled over in pain. By this time doctors had been called who pronounce 3DFX dead at the scene from internal bleeding. Apparently it had been trying to pass something called the Voodoo 5 6000 or some such... beast of a card with 4 GPU's. Presumably with two power bricks and a fire extinguisher attached. Through its ruined urethra.
By this time Matrox, who never hadn't really developed after it hit puberty and content with releasing warmed over version of their G200, hurriedly unzipped, trickled out their Parhelia card, zipped up, and left. But it tripped on 3DFX's corpse and couldn't quite get up again. All the while no one had really noticed that the weird kid in the corner had hit puberty with impressive results while minding its own business. At the end of the trough was ATi, merrily trying to score in that little football into the cup game you find at certain urinals.
At this point nVidia was ready to stop, with the Geforce 4000 series the stream had started to peter out a bit, but it decided to give a last confident splash. Sadly it slipped in its own piss and launched the GeForce FX. Meanwhile ATi got the ball into the cup with the Radeon 8700 to cheers and high-fives, dabbed off, and was about to go home. So was nVidia, which got up, and was about to dabb off with the Geforce 6000 series when a strange boy entered the urinals.
Just as ATi and nVidia were leaving XGI Technology strode up, unzipped in a powerful motion, looked both of them in the eyes, and sharted just as the first drops started spraying wildly. The brown stain that came of this was called the Volari GPU. A pitiful thing that never got a proper driver to go with it. How capable the hardware was remains a mystery. Red faced the boy did up its pants and scurried out. Never to be seen again.
And so it was that AMD and nVidia were the only ones to leave the urinal in some semblance of dignity. But someone else had been saying at them from the window, Intel was seeing it's chance...
The final battle that led to the duopoly of today began, for me, in the late 1990's. Gathered at the urinal was a small gang of companies. All of them growing into adulthood and vying for attention. But this day would be different. To me gauntlet began in earnest with the Riva TNT2 as nVidia unzipped its trousers to flaunt a well packed pair of briefs while locking eyes with 3DFX - which had been gleefully displaying a sizeable bulge under its pants for some time now to the envy of the rest. However as it turned out it was a piss boner which would disappear as quickly as it had grown to prominence.
3DFX took to the challenge in stride. The Voodoo 3000 had been beginning to look long in the tooth. So it had been tinkering on a new graphics core with 32-bit rendering and a view to implement hardware FSAA, which sounded promising. All eyes were on 3DFX. But in its haste to one-up the new competition it unzipped without looking and somehow managed to catch their dick in the zipper. In a moment of greed 3DFX had decided to take card production in-house. Suddenly chip development took a backseat as problems with angry vendors, retailers, and production difficulties reared its head. Bleeding and in pain 3DFX put on a brave face, but the blood-mixed urine that trickled out from its damaged downstairs region was not confidence inspiring.
Meanwhile nVidia had gracefully undressed and let loose an impressive stream of hits before the first blood infused droplets left 3DFX's now miserably disfigured undercarriage. GeForce was launched, and as a belated response 3DFX finally squirted out their Voodoo 4, huffing down the pain to splatter the Voodoo 5 out in a painful volley a while later. It held two GPU's in SLI mode and came with its own power brick in the tricked out 5500 version. Impressively it kept up with nVidia, almost, by brute forcing missing features like hardware TnL. nVidia's torrent just wouldn't cease however, and with a grunt 3DFX keeled over in pain. By this time doctors had been called who pronounce 3DFX dead at the scene from internal bleeding. Apparently it had been trying to pass something called the Voodoo 5 6000 or some such... beast of a card with 4 GPU's. Presumably with two power bricks and a fire extinguisher attached. Through its ruined urethra.
By this time Matrox, who never hadn't really developed after it hit puberty and content with releasing warmed over version of their G200, hurriedly unzipped, trickled out their Parhelia card, zipped up, and left. But it tripped on 3DFX's corpse and couldn't quite get up again. All the while no one had really noticed that the weird kid in the corner had hit puberty with impressive results while minding its own business. At the end of the trough was ATi, merrily trying to score in that little football into the cup game you find at certain urinals.
At this point nVidia was ready to stop, with the Geforce 4000 series the stream had started to peter out a bit, but it decided to give a last confident splash. Sadly it slipped in its own piss and launched the GeForce FX. Meanwhile ATi got the ball into the cup with the Radeon 8700 to cheers and high-fives, dabbed off, and was about to go home. So was nVidia, which got up, and was about to dabb off with the Geforce 6000 series when a strange boy entered the urinals.
Just as ATi and nVidia were leaving XGI Technology strode up, unzipped in a powerful motion, looked both of them in the eyes, and sharted just as the first drops started spraying wildly. The brown stain that came of this was called the Volari GPU. A pitiful thing that never got a proper driver to go with it. How capable the hardware was remains a mystery. Red faced the boy did up its pants and scurried out. Never to be seen again.
And so it was that AMD and nVidia were the only ones to leave the urinal in some semblance of dignity. But someone else had been saying at them from the window, Intel was seeing it's chance...
