For those of you who dont know, here's the history of two great graphics card industry giants:
HISTORY OF ATi
ATI's story begins with the personal tale of Kwok Yuen Ho, ATI's founder and CEO. Born in 1950 to a once-wealthy family dispossessed by the Communists on mainland China, K.Y. Ho lived a childhood of poverty.
As the youngest in his family, he spent his youth peddling vegetables from the family garden. Ho's father, once a teacher, was forced to leave the family behind and become a laborer in Hong Kong's factories, sending whatever money back to his family whenever he could. In 1962, his family was reunited in Hong Kong where life meant a crammed one-room flat.
Ho's big break would come after earning a spot at a top Taiwanese college, National Cheng Kung University. He found his calling and graduated in 1974 with a bachelor's in Electrical Engineering. Ho worked at Control Data Systems, Philips Electronics, and National Semiconductor before finally taking his position of General Manager at Wong's Electronics Co. Ltd., a turnkey PC manufacturing and assembly house.
Ho immigrated to Canada in 1984. Unfortunately, despite a decade of work experience and an EE degree, he found it difficult to find a position comparable to ones he had in Hong Kong.
K.Y. Ho was not alone in his frustration with the job market. In 1985, Ho with two other Hong Kong emigrants, Benny Lau (VP of product development, retired) and Lee Lau (VP of Strategic Planning), started their own company: Array Technology Industry.
The decision to make ATI a graphics company was very simple. The entire life savings for all three men totaled $300,000. According to Ho, starting a computer company required big capital - they could only afford to be a graphics company.
ATI started with an initial staff of six, with the secretary, receptionist and shipping department being the same person. As a small, unproven Canadian company, computer manufacturers were reluctant to deal with ATI and in four months, their $300,000 had run out. The Overseas Union Bank of Singapore rescued ATI with a $300,000 business loan that was later increased to $1.5 million.
Despite ATI's initial troubles, the high-volume nature of graphics chip sales meant that ATI only needed one design win to save the company. The first sale would come in the second half of the year when Commodore signed on, ordering 7,000 chips a week. By the end of the first year, ATI had $10 million in revenue.And today ATi cards are sold in almost all parts of the world.ATi has a parmanent place in the graphics industry.Comparing with nVIDIA ATi cards are much cheaper and trustworthy graphic solutions.Today's most powerful GPU is made by ATi.ATi R520 chips run at an unbelievable speed of 1.16GHz!From one days 32MB cards ATi has reached 512MB cards and it's still working on much more powerful cards.We are looking forward to seeing more magics from this giant.
THE STORY OF nVIDIA
NVIDIA needs no introduction at FiringSquad or anywhere else in the hardware industry. The company has become the poster child for consumer 3D graphics. Ever since the release of its RIVA 128 graphics card, NVIDIA has never let its momentum slow down.
When the PC multimedia revolution was just starting, three industry veterans formed NVIDIA in January 1993. Jen-Hsun Huang, NVIDIA President and CEO, had been the Director of Coreware at LSI Logic's "system-on-a-chip" division. Curtis Priem, NVIDIA Chief Technical Officer, had been the architect for the first graphics processor for the PC, the IBM Professional Graphics Adapter, and more recently had developed the GX graphics chips at Sun Microsystems. Chris Malachowsky, VP of Hardware Engineering, was a Senior Staff Engineer for Sun Microsystems, Inc., and was co-inventor of the GX graphics architecture.
Launched in 1995, the NV1 and STG2000 were the first "complete" multimedia accelerators. The accelerators were otherwise identical except that the NV1 used high-performance VRAM while the STG2000 used DRAM. Although the NV1 was NVIDIA's first product, the chip was very advanced for its time. It featured a complete 2D/3D graphics core, a 350-MIPS audio playback engine, and an I/O processor. The most famous board that used this chip was the Diamond EDGE 3D.NVIDIA's first product wasn't only about graphics. The NV1 also integrated a playback-only sound card, something quite popular at the time. With 32 concurrent audio channels of 16-bit CD-quality audio and hardware phase shifting for simplistic 3D sound, the NV1 was actually more impressive than many first generation PCI sound cards. The MIDI playback used a 6MB patch set stored in system RAM and was even Fat Labs certified.With Direct3D, Microsoft nearly killed NVIDIA. PC OEMs refused to produce boards with a non-Direct3D compliant chip, and NVIDIA's engineers knew they could not come up with a completely new polygonal 3D accelerator and bring it to market in time. The company retreated from the public interest and was forced to lay off several employees.
Shortly after GeForce 2 GTS boards were beginning to reach store shelves, NVIDIA launched another new chip, the GeForce 2 MX. Based on the GTS but designed for the corporate/mainstream market, the MX cut costs by dropping 2 pixel pipelines and reducing the clock speed putting the GeForce2 MX's fill rates at 350Mpixels/sec and 700Mtexel/sec.The GeForce2 MX, however, was not a simple cost-reduced version of the GTS. Two important features were added to the chip. The GeForce 2 MX incorporated TwinView, which allows a single video card to drive two separate displays, a similar feature to Matrox's DualHead technology. Second, the GeForce 2 MX added the necessary silicon revisions required to support the Macintosh platform
After four long, hard years, the battle between NVIDIA and 3dfx finally came to an end. Unable to recover from the delay of the Voodoo5, 3dfx followed the recommendation of its Board of Directors and started the process of dissolving the company. 3dfx's first move was to sell all of its intellectual property and other assets to NVIDIA. This included 3dfx's research on anti-aliasing, Gigapixel's tile-based rendering technologies, and technology still being developed. In addition, approximately 100 former 3dfx employees joined NVIDIA bringing even more talent to the company.
And their fight continued.Still ATi and nVIDIA are struggling to get to the top.Their fight gave us some amazing graphics cards.nVIDIA ruled the industry 2 yrs ago and still their GeFORCE cards are famous and reliable graphics solutions.But they made some mistakes with the FX series and that took them down.From nVIDIAs fx5200--->fx5800 all the cards were defeated by their competitor radeon cards in price and performance.Comparing to the price these cards frustrated the users.Though new comer 6600 and 6800cards are unbelievable in performance,they are really expensive compared to the cheaper but amazing radeon X800 and X850 cards.If nVIDIA doesn't decrease the price,they may have to accept another defeat.
But still nVIDIA is a reliable name for gamers.Gamers will agree to spend a lot for nVIDIA cards if they can show that performance.From old GF2 series nVIDIA reached 6800ultra card today which runs at 1.1GHz and offers 35.6GB/s data bandwidth.nVIDIA made a huge contribution to the graphics technology.They introduced dual monitor support for the first time.And now they invented SLI(scalable link interface) technology which allowed to use two graphics cards at the same time for more performance.This striking technique once again brought nVIDIA to the top.They have the world record of best performance .
SOURCE:*www.firingsquad.com/features/atihistory/
HISTORY OF ATi
ATI's story begins with the personal tale of Kwok Yuen Ho, ATI's founder and CEO. Born in 1950 to a once-wealthy family dispossessed by the Communists on mainland China, K.Y. Ho lived a childhood of poverty.
As the youngest in his family, he spent his youth peddling vegetables from the family garden. Ho's father, once a teacher, was forced to leave the family behind and become a laborer in Hong Kong's factories, sending whatever money back to his family whenever he could. In 1962, his family was reunited in Hong Kong where life meant a crammed one-room flat.
Ho's big break would come after earning a spot at a top Taiwanese college, National Cheng Kung University. He found his calling and graduated in 1974 with a bachelor's in Electrical Engineering. Ho worked at Control Data Systems, Philips Electronics, and National Semiconductor before finally taking his position of General Manager at Wong's Electronics Co. Ltd., a turnkey PC manufacturing and assembly house.
Ho immigrated to Canada in 1984. Unfortunately, despite a decade of work experience and an EE degree, he found it difficult to find a position comparable to ones he had in Hong Kong.
K.Y. Ho was not alone in his frustration with the job market. In 1985, Ho with two other Hong Kong emigrants, Benny Lau (VP of product development, retired) and Lee Lau (VP of Strategic Planning), started their own company: Array Technology Industry.
The decision to make ATI a graphics company was very simple. The entire life savings for all three men totaled $300,000. According to Ho, starting a computer company required big capital - they could only afford to be a graphics company.
ATI started with an initial staff of six, with the secretary, receptionist and shipping department being the same person. As a small, unproven Canadian company, computer manufacturers were reluctant to deal with ATI and in four months, their $300,000 had run out. The Overseas Union Bank of Singapore rescued ATI with a $300,000 business loan that was later increased to $1.5 million.
Despite ATI's initial troubles, the high-volume nature of graphics chip sales meant that ATI only needed one design win to save the company. The first sale would come in the second half of the year when Commodore signed on, ordering 7,000 chips a week. By the end of the first year, ATI had $10 million in revenue.And today ATi cards are sold in almost all parts of the world.ATi has a parmanent place in the graphics industry.Comparing with nVIDIA ATi cards are much cheaper and trustworthy graphic solutions.Today's most powerful GPU is made by ATi.ATi R520 chips run at an unbelievable speed of 1.16GHz!From one days 32MB cards ATi has reached 512MB cards and it's still working on much more powerful cards.We are looking forward to seeing more magics from this giant.
THE STORY OF nVIDIA
NVIDIA needs no introduction at FiringSquad or anywhere else in the hardware industry. The company has become the poster child for consumer 3D graphics. Ever since the release of its RIVA 128 graphics card, NVIDIA has never let its momentum slow down.
When the PC multimedia revolution was just starting, three industry veterans formed NVIDIA in January 1993. Jen-Hsun Huang, NVIDIA President and CEO, had been the Director of Coreware at LSI Logic's "system-on-a-chip" division. Curtis Priem, NVIDIA Chief Technical Officer, had been the architect for the first graphics processor for the PC, the IBM Professional Graphics Adapter, and more recently had developed the GX graphics chips at Sun Microsystems. Chris Malachowsky, VP of Hardware Engineering, was a Senior Staff Engineer for Sun Microsystems, Inc., and was co-inventor of the GX graphics architecture.
Launched in 1995, the NV1 and STG2000 were the first "complete" multimedia accelerators. The accelerators were otherwise identical except that the NV1 used high-performance VRAM while the STG2000 used DRAM. Although the NV1 was NVIDIA's first product, the chip was very advanced for its time. It featured a complete 2D/3D graphics core, a 350-MIPS audio playback engine, and an I/O processor. The most famous board that used this chip was the Diamond EDGE 3D.NVIDIA's first product wasn't only about graphics. The NV1 also integrated a playback-only sound card, something quite popular at the time. With 32 concurrent audio channels of 16-bit CD-quality audio and hardware phase shifting for simplistic 3D sound, the NV1 was actually more impressive than many first generation PCI sound cards. The MIDI playback used a 6MB patch set stored in system RAM and was even Fat Labs certified.With Direct3D, Microsoft nearly killed NVIDIA. PC OEMs refused to produce boards with a non-Direct3D compliant chip, and NVIDIA's engineers knew they could not come up with a completely new polygonal 3D accelerator and bring it to market in time. The company retreated from the public interest and was forced to lay off several employees.
Shortly after GeForce 2 GTS boards were beginning to reach store shelves, NVIDIA launched another new chip, the GeForce 2 MX. Based on the GTS but designed for the corporate/mainstream market, the MX cut costs by dropping 2 pixel pipelines and reducing the clock speed putting the GeForce2 MX's fill rates at 350Mpixels/sec and 700Mtexel/sec.The GeForce2 MX, however, was not a simple cost-reduced version of the GTS. Two important features were added to the chip. The GeForce 2 MX incorporated TwinView, which allows a single video card to drive two separate displays, a similar feature to Matrox's DualHead technology. Second, the GeForce 2 MX added the necessary silicon revisions required to support the Macintosh platform
After four long, hard years, the battle between NVIDIA and 3dfx finally came to an end. Unable to recover from the delay of the Voodoo5, 3dfx followed the recommendation of its Board of Directors and started the process of dissolving the company. 3dfx's first move was to sell all of its intellectual property and other assets to NVIDIA. This included 3dfx's research on anti-aliasing, Gigapixel's tile-based rendering technologies, and technology still being developed. In addition, approximately 100 former 3dfx employees joined NVIDIA bringing even more talent to the company.
And their fight continued.Still ATi and nVIDIA are struggling to get to the top.Their fight gave us some amazing graphics cards.nVIDIA ruled the industry 2 yrs ago and still their GeFORCE cards are famous and reliable graphics solutions.But they made some mistakes with the FX series and that took them down.From nVIDIAs fx5200--->fx5800 all the cards were defeated by their competitor radeon cards in price and performance.Comparing to the price these cards frustrated the users.Though new comer 6600 and 6800cards are unbelievable in performance,they are really expensive compared to the cheaper but amazing radeon X800 and X850 cards.If nVIDIA doesn't decrease the price,they may have to accept another defeat.
But still nVIDIA is a reliable name for gamers.Gamers will agree to spend a lot for nVIDIA cards if they can show that performance.From old GF2 series nVIDIA reached 6800ultra card today which runs at 1.1GHz and offers 35.6GB/s data bandwidth.nVIDIA made a huge contribution to the graphics technology.They introduced dual monitor support for the first time.And now they invented SLI(scalable link interface) technology which allowed to use two graphics cards at the same time for more performance.This striking technique once again brought nVIDIA to the top.They have the world record of best performance .
SOURCE:*www.firingsquad.com/features/atihistory/
