this post was submitted on 01 Sep 2025
151 points (100.0% liked)

No Stupid Questions

43283 readers
824 users here now

No such thing. Ask away!

!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.

The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:

Rules (interactive)


Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.

All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.



Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.

Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.



Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.

Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.



Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.

That's it.



Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.

Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.



Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.

Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.

On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.

If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.



Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.

If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.

Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.



Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.



Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.

Let everyone have their own content.



Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here. This includes using AI responses and summaries.



Credits

Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!

The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

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!

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] Buffalox@lemmy.world 21 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (2 children)

3dfx had market dominance in 90s but then basically committed suicide.

As I remember it, it was Nvidia that killed 3DFX, Nvidia had an absolutely cutthroat development pace, and 3DFX simply couldn't keep up, and they ended up being bought by Nvivia.
But oh boy Voodoo graphics were cool when they came out! An absolute revolution to PC gaming.

[–] mereo@piefed.ca 8 points 4 days ago (1 children)

We cannot forget that 3dfx went under when they bought STB to manufacture their own video cards instead of letting their board partners do it.

[–] Buffalox@lemmy.world 2 points 4 days ago

Maybe you are right, but I think they did that because they thought that would help them remain competitive, keeping the profit share that would normally go to board vendors, allowing them to sell cheaper while still making money, and compete better against Nvidia.

Maybe I remember it wrong, but I think Voodoo was already dying with Voodoo 2.

[–] False@lemmy.world 7 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Nvidia helped but 3DFX released a couple of bad products in a row.

[–] Buffalox@lemmy.world 4 points 4 days ago

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.