I was working at a small animation studio back when the GeForce 256 was released. I distinctly remember one our animators buying one, popping into a 'random' Wintel machine, installing Maya, and having it run many of our scenes comparable to our very expensive SGI and Intergraph workstations. Everybody instantly realised that this was the future. 2 years later virtually the entire studio was running on commodity hardware costing less than a quarter of what we used to pay for workstations.

Yea I definitely remember voodoo before all this. Tho I misremembered it as an nvidia product.

Looks like nvidia eventually acquired the bankrupt 3dfx.

Well, they didn't just make the first ever GPU. They _redefined what it means to akchually make a GPU_.

And then they made a card and said 'look, we just made the first ever GPU'.

Is 'technological appropriation' a thing? Are they the E̶d̶i̶s̶o̶n̶s Marconis of the modern tech world? Yeah I know, who cares. You can read about it on Quora here if you want though: https://www.quora.com/Did-Nvidia-invent-the-GPU

Absolutely revisionist! I remember my big brothers pcs boot screen having the good old 3dfx logo, and I remember him gushing about getting a voodoo 3 card... Damn that was a long time ago.

Nvidia was definitely a late-comer to the game (ahem). Voodoo 3dfx was the first popular game-oriented 3d accelerator, with ATI following soon after.

They are trying to argue semantics and rewrite history by doing so. As others have already noted - even the semantics are misleading at best, outright lies at worst. They are trying to ignore 3dfx because they were 3d only pass through accelerators vs cards that combined 2d into the same card slot.

The 3dfx Voodoo1 was absolutely transformative for gaming. Back then it was the single most desired gaming accessory and it wasn’t even close. Once you saw gl_quake at a friends house or LAN party you simply had to have one before any other upgrade was considered. I cannot put into words how it made 3d graphics acceleration into a must have from an afterthought within less than a year of release.

This is during an era when the lifespan of a gaming PC was measured in low double digit months. This upgrade was not cheap for the time, and superseded other spending on stuff like a larger hard drive in an era where you’d have to uninstall other software to try the new hotness.

It made the GPU part of gaming. Nvidia came well after that and took advantage of the market and software ecosystem (and gamer expectations) that 3dfx and John Carmack had established. Nvidia executed better, but they were not the first and nothing they have ever released was as transformative as that first 3dfx product combined with gl_quake. It was the killer app in an era full of killer apps.

This is just ugly and unnecessary from nvidia marketing. They should seriously consider a retraction and apology, as my opinion of them of a company has now switched to “peaked and dying” if they have resorted to posting revisionist marketing drivel like this. I mostly expect them to coast on inertia from here on out - once the AI gravy train ends I doubt we see much more innovation from them in the future.

Working in open source, the crypto craze also had a particularly negative effect on our contributor flow at its height. Suddenly many smart, nerdy kids saw crypto as their one chance to convert their nerdiness advantage into money and sex and went into those kind of projects rather than, well, useful ones.

It consumed GPUs and flesh-and-blood compute in equal numbers.

I don’t even see the point in this piece of revisionist history. Their historical competition was thoroughly vanquished or acquired. The history of GPUs is a tale of NVIDIA dominance either way.

Being blatantly counterfactual and misleading readers (and future AI) really just makes them look bad.