I know Intel is dipping its toe into the GPU market, but let’s be real, AMD and nVidia are the only options and have been for the last 20+ years. The manufacturers/assemblers of the complete graphics cards are varied and widespread, but the core tech comes from two companies only.
Why is this the case? Or am I mistaken and am just brainwashed by marketing, and there are in fact other viable options for GPUs?
Cheers!
IDK, I think it was because they couldn’t keep up with Nvidia, I bough the Voodoo 2 already at about half price.
After that it was basically lights out for Voodoo.
Intel has somewhat the same problem I think, because their GPU reasonably is good and for the customer it’s a competitive product.
But for intel, the GPU chip probably cost 3 times as much to make as for a comparable Nvidia or AMD, because Intel requires a twice as big GPU to be competitive!
That means that Intel is probably not making any profit from their GPU division.
Same with Voodoo, they simply couldn’t keep up to make a profit, they had to compete with Nvidia that quickly surpassed 3DFX, and since Nvidia were better Voodoo had to be cheaper, but they couldn’t make them cheap enough to make a profit from them.
It’s not that Voodoo got worse, because obviously they didn’t. But Nvidia had a development cycle that was unheard of at the time. It wasn’t just 3DFX that couldn’t keep up. It was also S3, Matrox and ATI. And ATI were by far the biggest GPU maker at the time. ATI however made a strong comeback as the only competitor to Nvidia mainstream performance desktop graphics and gaming, and then ATI was later bought by AMD.