So what went wrong? Unfortunately, riches begat the want for more riches. As is today, with nVidia and ATi, 3DFX only licensed the chips - they didn't manufacture them. When the Voodoo 3 arrived 3DFX had other plans - in 1998 they bought up STB Technologies, a large card builder of the time. The plan was to directly sell the highly anticipated (but, it turned out, disappointing) Voodoo 3 and rake in the cash. Unfortunately, this decision annoyed many third party manufacturers, who decided they would no longer buy future Voodoo chips. The combination of this, 3DFX's retail inexperience and the superior feature set of nVidia's RIVA TNT2 card caused major damage to the firm's value. nVidia added insult to injury with the GeForce 256, whose performance literally demolished the Voodoo 3. 3DFX's answers to the first GeForce, the Voodoo 4 and 5, came too late. The enhanced GeForce 2 and its new arch rival, the ATi Radeon, had already arrived and Microsoft's Direct3D API was proving to be more developer friendly than Glide. Faced with bankruptcy, in 2001, 3DFX agreed to be bought out by nVidia.
One secret of nVidia's and ATi's success was hardware transform and lighting. Before T and L, a 3D card would dramatically speed up the rendering of textured polygons - however this really didn't do anything to the resulting 3D scene. Light and controlling the polygons was still left to the processor, which to be honest already had enough on its plate, with AI and physics etc. The first GeForces and Radeons took this effort off the processor meaning there was one less restraint on a game's performance. The expensive GeForce 256 was seen as a performance revelation but it took quite a long time for hardware T and L enabled games to make it onto the market. When they did, the superior GeForce 2 series was in swing - most noticeably the very affordable MX "flavour". This itself was a turning point. It was the real beginning of today's dreadfully confusing 3D card line ups to hit every possible girth of wallet. All told, eight different models of GeForce 2 stuck out of nVidia's doors. Meanwhile, ATi was offering similar variants of its new Radeon range.
Both the early GeForces and Radeons made faltering footsteps into pixel and vertex shaders, which were probably the last real concept shift in 3D cards before they solidified into the current trend of refinements upon a theme. It was, however, the GeForce3 - and later the Radeon 8500 - programmable pixel and vertex shaders that definitely made the difference - partially, because the were the first cards to be fully compliant with Microsoft's DirectX 8, which by that point almost entirely ruled the API roost.
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