Speaker 1: Get in touch with technology with tech Stuff from how
Speaker 1: stuff works dot com. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff.
Speaker 1: I'm your host job in Strickland. I'm an executive producer
Speaker 1: with how Stuff Works, and I love all things tech.
Speaker 1: And we left off in our last episode at a
Speaker 1: point when in Video, a brand new company at that point,
Speaker 1: was in bad shape at a shaky start. So if
Speaker 1: you have not listened to the last episode where I
Speaker 1: introduced the concept of graphics chips and cards and in video,
Speaker 1: go listen to that one first. Anyway, In Video's first product,
Speaker 1: the n V one, had not really sold super well
Speaker 1: in the market. It hadn't really captured a whole lot
Speaker 1: of market share, and the company had to cancel the
Speaker 1: in V two chip after it's big partners, Sega, announced
Speaker 1: it was going with a different chip designer for the
Speaker 1: graphics for the upcoming dream Cast console. But the engineers
Speaker 1: at Nvidia rolled with the punches and they went back
Speaker 1: to the drawing board and designed a new graphics chip
Speaker 1: that would rely upon the humble triangular polygon rather than
Speaker 1: the quadrilateralals that the Envy one employed for texture mapping.
Speaker 1: This would make their new card compatible with Windows based
Speaker 1: machines that were running the direct three D a p I,
Speaker 1: and the new card would include polygone texture mapping, which
Speaker 1: reduced the amount of time it took for the graphics
Speaker 1: card to render frames, but it had a negative impact
Speaker 1: on image quality. So what the heck is texture mapping?
Speaker 1: Does that even mean? It might sound like gobbledygook, Well
Speaker 1: it pretty much is what it sounds like. It involves
Speaker 1: taking a two dimensional surface called a texture map. Think
Speaker 1: of it like wallpaper or wrapping paper. Think of a
Speaker 1: pattern on that, and then virtually wrapping a three dimensional
Speaker 1: object with that texture. So it's it's a virtual three
Speaker 1: dimensional object. So it's kind of like taking wrapping paper
Speaker 1: and wrapping it around a box. Let's say you've got
Speaker 1: a box, You've got a gift you're gonna give somebody,
Speaker 1: You have some wrapping paper. You have to take this
Speaker 1: wrapping paper that's in a two dimensional format, that being
Speaker 1: a flat sheet of paper, and wrap it around a
Speaker 1: three dimensional object, that being a rectangular cubicle type box.
Speaker 1: And you have to fold the pattern around the contours
Speaker 1: of the box in order to wrap it, which is
Speaker 1: easier to do with simple geometric shapes, but as you
Speaker 1: introduce more complicated shapes, it gets harder to do very well.
Speaker 1: And it doesn't take very much to do to make
Speaker 1: this really hard. I mean you can if you wanted
Speaker 1: to map a simple two D shape like a pattern
Speaker 1: of squares on a three D object like a sphere,
Speaker 1: you're gonna run into problems because if you took an
Speaker 1: actual sphere, like a physical sphere, and you had a
Speaker 1: wrapping paper that had boxes on it, like let's say
Speaker 1: it's just black and white boxes on it, a checked
Speaker 1: pattern almost, and you wrap that sphere with that wrapping paper,
Speaker 1: you you're gonna find that it's going to require you
Speaker 1: to cut the paper in such a way that some
Speaker 1: point on the surface of the sphere the pattern would
Speaker 1: no longer be continuous. There'd be a break in the pattern.
Speaker 1: The same thing can happen with texture mapping, and it
Speaker 1: means that your graphic quality can suffer as a result.
Speaker 1: It can become noticeable. The political texture mapping strategy did
Speaker 1: require less processing power to cover three D objects with textures, however,
Speaker 1: so you have a trade off. The quality of the
Speaker 1: graphics might not be quite as high, but you can
Speaker 1: render them much more quickly, which could improve things like
Speaker 1: the refresh rate. While in Video was working on this,
Speaker 1: another company came out with a product that had a
Speaker 1: big impact on the graphics card industry, and it also
Speaker 1: led to conditions that convinced me to get out of
Speaker 1: PC gaming for quite some time. Not putting blame here,
Speaker 1: just that it created an environment that I got increasingly
Speaker 1: disenchanted with the company, and their product was not a
Speaker 1: bad one, by the way. The company was three d
Speaker 1: f X Interactive. It launched a year after Video had incorporated,
Speaker 1: so he launched in and they introduced a three D
Speaker 1: accelerated graphics card called the Voodoo. And this card was
Speaker 1: different from other graphics cards that had come before it
Speaker 1: because up to that point, graphics cards would typically integrate
Speaker 1: two D and three D graphics processing on a single motherboard.
Speaker 1: But three d FX created a card solely dedicated to
Speaker 1: three D graphics. So you could not just have a
Speaker 1: Voodoo graphics card and a computer and have that be
Speaker 1: your only graphics card and have that work. You actually
Speaker 1: had to make it work with in parallel with a
Speaker 1: two D graphics card or really in series, because what
Speaker 1: you would do is you would take a v g
Speaker 1: A cable from your video controller card, your your basic
Speaker 1: graphics card in your computer. You would feed that cable
Speaker 1: into your Voodoo card, you know, plug it in on
Speaker 1: the back of where the expansion card is, and then
Speaker 1: you'd take another cable and you'd hook the Voodoo card
Speaker 1: to your monitor, so you effectively had two different graphics
Speaker 1: cards doing work inside your computer. The Voodoo handling all
Speaker 1: the three D stuff, and it gave gamers a new
Speaker 1: option when building out computers to play games like Doom
Speaker 1: and Quake, which were progressively putting more emphasis on three
Speaker 1: D models, and they were pushing the boundaries of what
Speaker 1: PCs could do. At that time. Before the Voodoo, the
Speaker 1: most common way to keep up with gaming developments would
Speaker 1: be you'd go and get an upgrade to your CPU,
Speaker 1: which get it really expensive. So I remember when my
Speaker 1: family went from having a two eight six IBM compatible
Speaker 1: to a four a D six, and then later on
Speaker 1: we got a Pentium. But these graphics accelerator cards meant
Speaker 1: you could just buy a graphics accelerated card for for
Speaker 1: much less money than it would cost to upgrade the
Speaker 1: whole CPU, and you could insert it into an expansion
Speaker 1: slot inside your computer, plug up a few cables, and
Speaker 1: provide the processing of you would need to have really
Speaker 1: great graphics. But it also helped usher in an era
Speaker 1: in which new graphics cards would debut at an alarmingly
Speaker 1: frequent rate and make the previous cards obsolete very very
Speaker 1: shortly after they had debuted. Some were two D cards
Speaker 1: that also had three D accelerators on them, some of
Speaker 1: them were dedicated three D accelerators, like the Voodoo, and
Speaker 1: more games were coming out that would push the limits
Speaker 1: on the fastest processors on the market. So it became
Speaker 1: this vicious cycle where you would have brand new cards
Speaker 1: coming out that were much more capable than the ones,
Speaker 1: so everyone wanted one because you thought, who faster means better,
Speaker 1: more features means better. Developers would start developing games that
Speaker 1: would take advantage of those greater capabilities. So while it
Speaker 1: would seem in the very short term that you were
Speaker 1: getting a head start by getting one of these powerful cards,
Speaker 1: pretty soon developers would end up creating applications that would
Speaker 1: push those cards to their limits, and it just became
Speaker 1: this kind of seesaw approach. And that's when I decided
Speaker 1: I don't want to deal with this, and I stopped
Speaker 1: being a PC gamer for a while, and I switched
Speaker 1: to consoles for for quite some time. I did eventually
Speaker 1: go back to PC gamer, but it was in this
Speaker 1: era of numerous graphics cards, and it weren't they weren't
Speaker 1: just graphics cards too, that you also had sound cards
Speaker 1: that were doing a very similar thing at the same time,
Speaker 1: and it was causing all sorts of issues, things like
Speaker 1: questions about compatibility and affordability. I just too frustrating for me.
Speaker 1: But it was a boom time for PC gamers who were,
Speaker 1: you know, eager to pursue that hobby, and they weren't
Speaker 1: weren't put off by the idea that there was suddenly
Speaker 1: a ton of different products out there now. It did
Speaker 1: not help that by were looking at around seventy companies
Speaker 1: that were marketing graphics cards of some sort. Some of
Speaker 1: them were working with technology that was compatible with the
Speaker 1: open g L standard, many more were developing cards that
Speaker 1: were specifically geared to support Microsoft's Direct three D Application
Speaker 1: Programming Interface, and more than a few had their own
Speaker 1: proprietary application programmer interface that that developers could use to
Speaker 1: create software that would look fantastic if it ran on
Speaker 1: those cards. There was a ton of market confusion, not
Speaker 1: just for end consumers, but also for programmers who were
Speaker 1: making software in the first place. Well a Voodoo from
Speaker 1: three D f X. Actually it would officially debut in
Speaker 1: nine and the following year in Video would come out
Speaker 1: with their second commercial product. This was their follow up
Speaker 1: to the n V one. This was the n V
Speaker 1: three because the n V two was canceled. This one
Speaker 1: was better known as the RIVA on. RIVA or r
Speaker 1: i v A stood for real Time Interactive Video and
Speaker 1: Animation Accelerator and this was a hundred twenty eight bit
Speaker 1: three D processor. That's why the one was in the name,
Speaker 1: and that means the processor and busses could operate on
Speaker 1: one eight bit integers or data units that were sixteen
Speaker 1: octets wide. This gave the RIVA a bandwidth of one
Speaker 1: point six gigabytes per second, which is the same thing
Speaker 1: as twelve point eight gigabits per second. Incredible bandwidth. The
Speaker 1: processor was a big hit with O E M or
Speaker 1: original equipment manufacturer customers. So these were companies that either
Speaker 1: made computers or they may graphics cards and they would
Speaker 1: incorporate the REVA in them. It had four megabytes of
Speaker 1: RAM and a two hundred six mega Hurts processor. Um.
Speaker 1: There was a faster model that came out shortly thereafter,
Speaker 1: called the Revo z X. That one had an additional
Speaker 1: four megabytes of RAM, bringing up to eight and had
Speaker 1: a clock speed of two hundred fifty mega hurts. This
Speaker 1: chip was sold to those original equipment manufacturers, and one
Speaker 1: of them was Diamond, which had also been one of
Speaker 1: the O E M s for the original n V
Speaker 1: one chip. They introduced the Diamond of Viper three thirty
Speaker 1: which had a Reva one chip as its three D
Speaker 1: graphics accelerator, and I read some reviews of the revoight
Speaker 1: from that era. I actually found you can find reviews
Speaker 1: online the date back to when this chip came out,
Speaker 1: because the web was a thing in and the reviews
Speaker 1: were pretty positive. Critics were impressed with the three D performance.
Speaker 1: The review is also said that, you know, obviously the
Speaker 1: quality of the performance didn't come just from in video,
Speaker 1: but also from the manufacturers that produced the other equipment,
Speaker 1: the the graphics cards themselves, like the motherboard for the
Speaker 1: the that the chip was sitting on, so it was
Speaker 1: more than justin video, but in video overall came out
Speaker 1: looking pretty good. From the Reva however, it did create
Speaker 1: a brand new problem for in Video but this one
Speaker 1: was a welcome problem, not a bad one. It turned
Speaker 1: out the company was not able to keep up with
Speaker 1: demand because the Reva was a huge economic and critical
Speaker 1: success for the company, and so in Video would sign
Speaker 1: a manufacturing deal with T s MC to supplement manufacturing
Speaker 1: that was already going on with their established partner. They
Speaker 1: had been manufacturing chips through a company called st Micro
Speaker 1: or Microsystems, and they decided to supplement that and use
Speaker 1: a second second partner to provide even more of these.
Speaker 1: By the end, in Video had gone from a struggling
Speaker 1: company on the virginal collapse to owning twenty fo of
Speaker 1: the market share in three D graphics processors. Not a
Speaker 1: bad turnaround, and as it turns out, they had higher
Speaker 1: heights to climb. I'll say more in just a moment,
Speaker 1: but first let's take a quick break to thank our sponsor.
Speaker 1: At this stage, the market was starting to clear out
Speaker 1: a little bit. Some of the companies that had entered
Speaker 1: the graphics cards space we're starting to go out of business.
Speaker 1: But there were three companies that were essentially dominating the
Speaker 1: high performance graphics cards space. Those three companies were a
Speaker 1: T I, three D f X and Nvidia. Some companies,
Speaker 1: in an effort to survive in this increase singly narrow market,
Speaker 1: began to focus on creating budget graphics cards that had
Speaker 1: fewer features, They had a slightly lower performance level, and
Speaker 1: they were generally of a lower cost, so that would
Speaker 1: put them in the range of a different market for gamers.
Speaker 1: But in video was on pretty solid ground now. They
Speaker 1: wanted to follow up on the success of the Reva
Speaker 1: with their next card, which was the Riva TNT also
Speaker 1: known as the n V four T n T stood
Speaker 1: for twin Texel because this card actually added a parallel
Speaker 1: pixel pipeline. It's a lot of ps there to get
Speaker 1: the pop filter going, but this would double the rendering
Speaker 1: speed for the card, and it was a two D
Speaker 1: and three D graphics card. It had support for thirty
Speaker 1: two bit true color graphics. They had expanded the RAM
Speaker 1: up to sixteen megabytes, and it was available both in
Speaker 1: PC I and A g P formats. Those would be
Speaker 1: the buses that you could use with personal computers, and
Speaker 1: there was two different formats for buses. The A g
Speaker 1: P was the newer one of the two and the
Speaker 1: superior one. As far as performance goes of the two,
Speaker 1: but they in video. This time we're mostly focused on
Speaker 1: PC I simply because a g P had not rolled
Speaker 1: out to a very wide user base yet it was
Speaker 1: still new enough where it was not widely adopted as
Speaker 1: the news standard yet. The one downside to in Video's
Speaker 1: design was that the complexity of the chip they had
Speaker 1: made with the tn T meant they weren't able to
Speaker 1: run it at what they had originally planned with their
Speaker 1: memory core speed. They originally wanted to have a memory
Speaker 1: core speed of a hundred twenty five Mega hurts, but
Speaker 1: they found out that because they had made the chips
Speaker 1: soaked or the card so complex, they had packed it
Speaker 1: with so much stuff that if they tried to run
Speaker 1: it at a Mega hurts, the card would over heat,
Speaker 1: so they were forced to throttle the speed down to
Speaker 1: nine d Mega hurts to avoid those overheating issues. The
Speaker 1: big competitor to the t n T was three D
Speaker 1: f x IS Voodoo Too card, which in benchmark tests
Speaker 1: pretty much dominated the three D acceleration world. But the
Speaker 1: Voodoo Too still required a second two D graphics card
Speaker 1: to work. It was not a standalone all in one card,
Speaker 1: so if you were to add up costs. If you
Speaker 1: were building a brand new PC from the ground up,
Speaker 1: you're buying all the different components. If you went with
Speaker 1: a Voodoo too, the costs actually would go up a
Speaker 1: bit because you had to have a secondary graphics card
Speaker 1: in order to run the Voodoo two, whereas in videos
Speaker 1: T and T wasn't all in one you could just
Speaker 1: buy one card and get all of that, So it
Speaker 1: all depended on what your needs were and what you
Speaker 1: already had at your disposal. Also, behind the scenes, three
Speaker 1: d FX was trying to head off competitors like in
Speaker 1: Vidio and A T I by marketing and selling their
Speaker 1: graphics card boards themselves directly. So three d f X,
Speaker 1: in order to do this, purchased a company called STB
Speaker 1: Systems for a hundred forty one million dollars in the
Speaker 1: stock deal. But it turned out the cost of manufacturing
Speaker 1: ended up being higher with STB Systems foundry than the
Speaker 1: foundries that A T and nine and Video were using,
Speaker 1: So the the actual expenses of producing the boards was
Speaker 1: higher than competitors costs, and so that would eat into
Speaker 1: your profit margin. If you're still trying to price your
Speaker 1: your cards competitively against A T I and Nvidia. So
Speaker 1: three d f x is misstep became in Video's opportunity
Speaker 1: because some of three d f x's former partners began
Speaker 1: to drift over to work within Video instead. But while
Speaker 1: in Video was doing well against his competitors, specifically through
Speaker 1: the t n T card, it was dealing with other
Speaker 1: issues that were not so great. Silicon Graphics Incorporated now
Speaker 1: s g I filed a lawsuit against Nvidia. The company
Speaker 1: alleged that in Vidia had infringed on a patent related
Speaker 1: to texture mapping. That dispute would stretch from the spring
Speaker 1: of n all the way into nine but eventually the
Speaker 1: two companies would reach a settlement, and as part of
Speaker 1: that settlement, in Video would actually get s g i
Speaker 1: s professional graphics portfolio, and they hired on several of
Speaker 1: s g i s low level graphics team members, and
Speaker 1: SGI sort of transitioned out of the graphics business at
Speaker 1: that point and started to focus on other areas of business.
Speaker 1: It never really worked out for that company. The company
Speaker 1: s g I was already reeling from other problems, and
Speaker 1: it would ultimately go into bankruptcy in two thousand nine.
Speaker 1: And Video released the t n T two and the
Speaker 1: t n T to Ultra the following year, which effectively
Speaker 1: rested the title of most powerful three D accelerator away
Speaker 1: from three D f X and the Voodoo three card.
Speaker 1: At least in most bitchmark tests. Graphics cards are weird
Speaker 1: by the way you typically test these by running various
Speaker 1: tests that that check the different settings and different features
Speaker 1: of these graphics cards, and it's not always a one
Speaker 1: to one match. You don't always have features that measure
Speaker 1: up where there's an equivalent on a competing card. So
Speaker 1: depending on the test, you might have one card come
Speaker 1: out on top, and then you change tests and you
Speaker 1: run those same two cards through it, and the other
Speaker 1: card comes out on top. So it's a little complicated
Speaker 1: to talk about, but this was a point where in
Speaker 1: Videous performance was look looked at as best in class,
Speaker 1: at least at that moment. Uh. And also keep in mind,
Speaker 1: we're still talking about a world that had different A
Speaker 1: p I s out there that developers were using to
Speaker 1: build software that had three D graphics in it, and
Speaker 1: so sometimes you would find a program that would run
Speaker 1: really well on a computer that had a three D
Speaker 1: f X card, but not as well on a computer
Speaker 1: that had in video card, and then meanwhile you might
Speaker 1: get a different program made by a different developer that
Speaker 1: the opposite is true. So it's very complicated. On October one,
Speaker 1: and Video would define a new era because it announced
Speaker 1: a new graphics card called the g Force two. It
Speaker 1: previously had the code name in V ten. This was
Speaker 1: the first chip to get the designation of GPU, or
Speaker 1: graphics processing unit. The very first GPU was an Nvidia
Speaker 1: product called the g Force two. So what was different
Speaker 1: about this card? What was it that merited the creation
Speaker 1: of a new term. Well, it had a transformation and
Speaker 1: lighting engine which tackled floating point calculations to figure out
Speaker 1: how to render transforming virtual three dimensional objects and display
Speaker 1: them in a two dimensional representation of the image. Wait
Speaker 1: what all right? This is actually not as complicated as
Speaker 1: I just made it sound. In fact, a lot of
Speaker 1: you probably are way ahead of me. But just in case,
Speaker 1: here's what I actually mean by that. Let's imagine for
Speaker 1: a second that you can pop into the virtual world
Speaker 1: of a computer, kind of like Entron. So you are
Speaker 1: in a virtual world, and in this virtual world you
Speaker 1: can see three dimensional objects. Right, there are three dimensional
Speaker 1: objects all around you. They truly have those three dimensions now,
Speaker 1: and in the computer world, that's all represented by math.
Speaker 1: They are just virtual objects. But let's pretend that we
Speaker 1: are in that virtual world. We can see them, and
Speaker 1: we can see how those objects transform as they move
Speaker 1: through a space and environment. Maybe they change shape. Maybe
Speaker 1: it represents a character in a video game, and as
Speaker 1: the character moves, we see how this shape changes. We
Speaker 1: can see how light from fixed sources can play over
Speaker 1: the surfaces of these three dimensional images. We can see
Speaker 1: where shadows form, where highlights are. Now, let's say that
Speaker 1: we we have these three dimensional images that exist in
Speaker 1: this virtual world, and now it's time for us to
Speaker 1: display those images to the real world. And our our
Speaker 1: method of doing that. Our medium is a computer display.
Speaker 1: But computer displays are not three dimensional. They are two dimensional.
Speaker 1: They have width and length, but they don't have depth.
Speaker 1: And so you have to figure out how do I
Speaker 1: portray this virtual three dimensional image that has stuff like
Speaker 1: lighting effects going on with it in a way that
Speaker 1: makes sense within a two dimensional medium, so that you
Speaker 1: get the idea of what that object, how that object
Speaker 1: is shaped. Before the g fource two six, the CPU
Speaker 1: handled that sort of work, this transformation and lighting work.
Speaker 1: But the CPU was also doing all the other work too,
Speaker 1: besides the other graphics processing, and that meant that if
Speaker 1: you added in too much detail in your game, everything
Speaker 1: would bog down and run super slowly or maybe even
Speaker 1: crash because the CPU would be so busy trying to
Speaker 1: calculate all the information required to display that kind of
Speaker 1: stuff that it couldn't do anything else. But by moving
Speaker 1: that requirement over to the graphics card, the GPU could
Speaker 1: free the CPU up to do other calculations, and the
Speaker 1: bandwidth the GPU was super high, high enough to handle
Speaker 1: a massive amount of data, so as long as the
Speaker 1: processor was fast, it could go through this information very quickly.
Speaker 1: In fact, that g Force two six had a throughput
Speaker 1: that was about five times greater than that of a
Speaker 1: five fifty Mega Hurts Pentium three processor, So for certain
Speaker 1: types of applications, a GPU is going to be much
Speaker 1: better than a CPU. Plus, the GPU had on board memory,
Speaker 1: it included a second set of parallel pixel pipelines that
Speaker 1: meant you had four total that was double the TNT
Speaker 1: design and game design developers now could create games with
Speaker 1: much more detail without fear of causing a total slow
Speaker 1: down on a system. It was a literal game changer.
Speaker 1: The clock speed for the g Force two fifty six
Speaker 1: was technically slower than that of the Riva T and
Speaker 1: T two, so they actually took a step down in
Speaker 1: their clock speed. They didn't make it faster than the
Speaker 1: previous graphics card. However, the improvements they made in the
Speaker 1: architecture meant that the g Force two fifty six still
Speaker 1: performed at at faster speed than the t n T two,
Speaker 1: even though the clock speed was slower. Now, up to
Speaker 1: this point, I've gone through the Nvidia cards more or
Speaker 1: less one by one because they were really important for
Speaker 1: the foundation and success of the company and its rise
Speaker 1: from startup to industry giant. But from this point forward,
Speaker 1: I'm going to be jumping around a bit. Otherwise, all
Speaker 1: I'm gonna be doing is giving you a long list
Speaker 1: of graphics cards and their specifications, and that is not
Speaker 1: terribly interesting. It's like reading a catalog. However, around this time,
Speaker 1: things were still in that pretty chaotic stage in the
Speaker 1: gaming rig world. You had a small number of companies
Speaker 1: that were dominating the graphics cards scene at the very top,
Speaker 1: but there were lots of different budget companies out there.
Speaker 1: There were other companies that would occasionally create a high
Speaker 1: performing graphics card to try and compete with a t
Speaker 1: I three D f X and Nvidia, And there were
Speaker 1: also the companies that were specializing in sound cards. There
Speaker 1: were the different application programming interfaces, there were the different
Speaker 1: drivers that were meant to try and make more compatibility
Speaker 1: between different hardware and software. It was still a huge,
Speaker 1: confusing mess for a lot of people, including myself. I
Speaker 1: remember the days of looking at a game and wondering
Speaker 1: if I could even play it because it might not
Speaker 1: be compatible with one or more of the components inside
Speaker 1: my PC. It was a real mess. And not all
Speaker 1: the companies that were around at that point would serve five,
Speaker 1: but in Video would. Now, when we come back, i'll
Speaker 1: give you a little last look at what in Video
Speaker 1: has been up to, and we'll kind of rush through
Speaker 1: the rest of its of its history to kind of
Speaker 1: give you the highlights. But first let's take a quick
Speaker 1: break to thank our sponsor. In late nine and Video
Speaker 1: announced a new line of products called Quadripe cards. These
Speaker 1: were meant not for gaming rigs, but for professional workstations,
Speaker 1: so in videos branching out. At this point, the GPU
Speaker 1: was showing that it had some interesting uses outside of
Speaker 1: rendering graphics for gamers, although at this point it was
Speaker 1: really still about high end graphically intensive workstations. But speaking
Speaker 1: of games, and video also landed a pretty sweet contract
Speaker 1: with Microsoft. Microsoft was developing its own game console, which
Speaker 1: at that point was still a super secret project and
Speaker 1: it wouldn't come out until November two thousand one. Obviously,
Speaker 1: that was the original Xbox, and Microsoft went in Video
Speaker 1: to build the graphics chip that would be inside the system.
Speaker 1: So the initial payment for that chip, which was called
Speaker 1: the n V two A internally at Nvidia, was two
Speaker 1: hundred million dollars, healthy chunk of change, one might even say,
Speaker 1: a princely some. By the end of the fiscal year,
Speaker 1: in Video had made a profit of forty one million dollars,
Speaker 1: which was ten times more than the previous year's profit.
Speaker 1: That's a heck of a lot of growth. It's really
Speaker 1: nice to be able to point to a number and
Speaker 1: say we made ten times as much money this year,
Speaker 1: not not ten times the revenue, ten times the profit.
Speaker 1: The following year saw in Video sweep up a former competitor,
Speaker 1: or begin to anyway, three d f X, which had
Speaker 1: transformed the PC gaming industry in the mid nineties when
Speaker 1: they launched the Voodoo three D accelerator car had essentially
Speaker 1: started to burn itself out. It had made some bad acquisitions, uh,
Speaker 1: some of the cards that had created just weren't performing
Speaker 1: well in the marketplace, and in Video made a move
Speaker 1: to acquire three D effects, mostly for the intellectual property
Speaker 1: and for some of their engineers, and it began the
Speaker 1: acquisition process starting at the tail end of two thousand.
Speaker 1: But this acquisition process was incredibly painful and troublesome. There
Speaker 1: were a ton of different court cases that came out
Speaker 1: from creditors who said that, you know, three D f
Speaker 1: X had owed them a lot of money and therefore
Speaker 1: they deserved a larger slice of cash from the acquisition.
Speaker 1: So that process did not officially conclude until two thousand eight,
Speaker 1: So it's like an eight year acquisition process that's pretty painful.
Speaker 1: At this point, A t I was still the dominant
Speaker 1: name in graphics cards in Video was in second place,
Speaker 1: but that would quickly switch where in Video was finally
Speaker 1: able to kind of overtake A t I. The follow
Speaker 1: up of the G Force two fifty six was the
Speaker 1: g Force two just seems like a prequel to me,
Speaker 1: but anyway, g Force two line of cards were the
Speaker 1: first from Nvidia to support multiple monitor configurations, which is
Speaker 1: something we take for granted these days. Then after that
Speaker 1: came the g Force three that debuted in February two
Speaker 1: one and in video introduced some new technologies with these cards,
Speaker 1: implementing processors saving features, like one called light Speed Memory
Speaker 1: Architecture or l m A. Essentially, what lm A did
Speaker 1: two pixels is the same thing that MP three files
Speaker 1: due to sound. It's a it's sort of a compression strategy.
Speaker 1: So what I mean by that is MP three compression.
Speaker 1: One of the strategy is MP three uses is it
Speaker 1: analyzes the sound within a file and it says, anything
Speaker 1: that appears to be outside the range of human hearing,
Speaker 1: we're just gonna get rid of that data. We don't
Speaker 1: need it because no one could hear it anyway. If
Speaker 1: you can't hear it, we don't need to save it.
Speaker 1: And that save space, right, We aren't saving all that
Speaker 1: extraneous information. L m A does the same thing, except
Speaker 1: with pixels. It would indicate like, well, these pixels are
Speaker 1: being blocked on the screen by some other component, so
Speaker 1: there's no need to save this information because those pixels
Speaker 1: are not going to be displayed. Let's say it's pixels
Speaker 1: that represent a character and the character passes behind something
Speaker 1: that is uh blocking your view of the character. Well,
Speaker 1: there's no reason to keep the information of the pixels
Speaker 1: that relate to the character at that point because you
Speaker 1: can't see it anyway. So uh. It was called a
Speaker 1: process called z occlusion culling, and it would help save
Speaker 1: save bandwidth because you don't need as much You're not
Speaker 1: sending as much data through, so you can, uh you
Speaker 1: don't have to worry about taking up so much bandwidth space.
Speaker 1: This marked a turning point for in video. This was
Speaker 1: the point wherein Video overtook a TI as the industry leader. Actually,
Speaker 1: there was a couple of shifts here. At this point,
Speaker 1: in Vidia commanded of the graphics market. Intel was in
Speaker 1: second place with and a t I had fallen to
Speaker 1: third place. Now that would not remain steady over the
Speaker 1: next few years. Companies would swap places a couple of times,
Speaker 1: but it did show that in Vidia had now become
Speaker 1: a truly dominant player in this space. Then we get
Speaker 1: the g Force four that came out in February two.
Speaker 1: There were several budget models that came out along with
Speaker 1: that series, and they were in a line called m X.
Speaker 1: They were actually focused or built largely upon the architecture
Speaker 1: from g Force two, not g Force four. So even
Speaker 1: though they were part of the g Force four series,
Speaker 1: they were based on an on an earlier and some
Speaker 1: would say outdated architecture, and they had limited features, but
Speaker 1: they also had a lower price point. So here in
Speaker 1: Video was saying, I'm seeing all these other companies coming
Speaker 1: out with budget graphics cards aimed at a different target audience.
Speaker 1: What if we win after those people and we just
Speaker 1: start creating budget, lower feature graphics cards. And that's sort
Speaker 1: of what this this was. Fortune would name in Video
Speaker 1: the fastest growing company in the United States in two
Speaker 1: thousand two, and in two thousand three, in Video acquired
Speaker 1: a company called media Q that specialized in graphics and
Speaker 1: MultiMate technology for wireless devices. Is where we start seeing
Speaker 1: in Video getting into mobile technology as well. This is
Speaker 1: also the year when in Video co founder Curtis Prium retires,
Speaker 1: and it's also the year and Video would release the
Speaker 1: first cards in its g Force f X series, including
Speaker 1: one that became infamous. The g Force hundred, had a
Speaker 1: nickname in the industry, it was the dust Buster. Why well,
Speaker 1: the dust Buster or g Force fifty hundred had a
Speaker 1: dual slot cooling mechanism double and cooling takes up two slots,
Speaker 1: high powered, very loud. So people said, oh, it sounds
Speaker 1: like that you've got a vacuum cleaner inside your computer,
Speaker 1: because it's it's so distracting, so loud. This was a
Speaker 1: a piece of technology that was built in part by
Speaker 1: some of the engineers that in video had pulled over
Speaker 1: from three Dfx, and that it got a lot of
Speaker 1: ribbing in the industry for the fact that it was
Speaker 1: it was so loud, but others in the f X
Speaker 1: line would end up getting some acclaim. The company created
Speaker 1: a demo as well in this in two thousand three.
Speaker 1: The demo was called Dawn d A w N and
Speaker 1: it was all meant to show off the various features
Speaker 1: of what the the g Force Effex line of graphics
Speaker 1: cards was capable of doing. And the way it did
Speaker 1: this was it showed a female ferry, little wings, translucent wings,
Speaker 1: translucent outfit. Um. The the naughty bits were covered by
Speaker 1: opaque costuming, but the rest of it was see through
Speaker 1: and the ferry was very curvacious a lot of people
Speaker 1: called out a video saying it was the most blatant
Speaker 1: use of sex appeal to try and sell a graphics
Speaker 1: card up to that date. UH, So they got some
Speaker 1: criticism for their use of this particular visual effect in
Speaker 1: order to try and sell cards. In two thousand four,
Speaker 1: s l I technology would debut, and that would allow
Speaker 1: users to link together multiple GPUs to boost performance even further.
Speaker 1: That it's where you start seeing these crazy gaming rigs
Speaker 1: that have multiple GPUs in link together, plus typically some
Speaker 1: sort of crazy cooling system, because as you start adding
Speaker 1: more CPU and GPU power to a system, it's going
Speaker 1: to generate more heat, and heat and electronics don't go
Speaker 1: well together. If they get hot enough, things tend to
Speaker 1: break down. So there are a lot of innovative cooling
Speaker 1: systems that came out around this time as well to
Speaker 1: try and keep those temperatures at at nominal levels so
Speaker 1: things would still operate well. In two thousand five, in
Speaker 1: Video would UH get the contract to develop the graphics
Speaker 1: processor for Sony's PlayStation three console. So they had already
Speaker 1: developed the one for Xbox. Now they were developing the
Speaker 1: one from PlayStation three, and in two thousand six and
Speaker 1: Video introduced the seventy x two, which was the first
Speaker 1: of in videous cards to feature two GPU single boards
Speaker 1: packaged as a single product, so it was a dual
Speaker 1: GPU all in one package. On October two thousand six,
Speaker 1: a m D would acquire a t I, the competitor
Speaker 1: to in video. That acquisition was a huge deal. Is
Speaker 1: like five point four billion dollars, an enormous deal. And
Speaker 1: now it was no longer in video versus a t I.
Speaker 1: Now it was in video versus a m D. And
Speaker 1: remember that H. Jensen Huang, the president and CEO of Nvidia,
Speaker 1: the co founder of Nvidia, had you had worked for
Speaker 1: a m D for a while. In June two seven,
Speaker 1: and Video introduced a line of math coprocessors called Tesla.
Speaker 1: Now these initially used architecture that was originally built for
Speaker 1: the g Force and Quadrille products, and they are general
Speaker 1: purpose GPUs because now there was this emerging opportunity to
Speaker 1: use GPUs to tackle other problems besides rendering graphics. GPUs
Speaker 1: can power supercomputers, and they can perform calculations that have
Speaker 1: high floating operations per seconds or or flops. They can
Speaker 1: handle huge amounts of data and and and perform lots
Speaker 1: of operations in a short amount of time. The big
Speaker 1: difference between the Tesla GPUs and the ones that we're
Speaker 1: powering gaming rigs is that the Tesla versions didn't have
Speaker 1: any output to displays because that's not what they were for.
Speaker 1: They weren't meant to create graphics. They were meant to
Speaker 1: crunch numbers. And uh, I think this really does mark
Speaker 1: the beginning of using GPUs to do some pretty phenomenal stuff.
Speaker 1: And we see it and a lot of parallel processing
Speaker 1: applications where you have these problems that can be broken
Speaker 1: up into smaller parts. A lot of GPUs are really
Speaker 1: good at handling that kind of stuff. The g Force
Speaker 1: eight series would come out from Video and included chip
Speaker 1: sets that had high lead solder and inadequate cooling mechanisms.
Speaker 1: So there were a substantial number, not all of them,
Speaker 1: but a substantial number of cards that had g Force
Speaker 1: eight series chips in them that ended up suffering failures
Speaker 1: because of overheating issues. This led to in Vidia writing
Speaker 1: off about a couple of hundred million dollars worth of product.
Speaker 1: Not to mention it led to lawsuits that alleged that
Speaker 1: the CEO Jensen Huang and the CFO Marvin Burkett were
Speaker 1: aware of these manufacturing problems, but they didn't say anything
Speaker 1: about it. They attempted to go forward despite these issues,
Speaker 1: and according to one source, the full amount that the the
Speaker 1: company incurred as a cost relating to this problem ended
Speaker 1: up being around four hundred seventies six million dollars, and
Speaker 1: one of the UH sources I was reading said, it's
Speaker 1: unfortunate that this happened. It ended up being such a
Speaker 1: black mark against in Video's reputation that a lot of
Speaker 1: people to this day hold it against the company. Um
Speaker 1: because it was it came across is so deceptive and
Speaker 1: um and see like it was exploiting the customer base,
Speaker 1: and Video would stumble again, at least according to a
Speaker 1: lot of critics. With the G Force nine series, a
Speaker 1: lot of people said that it didn't really have very
Speaker 1: much very many innovative factors, but in Video would introduce
Speaker 1: new micro architecture code named FIRMI in with a launch
Speaker 1: of a news series, the G Force four series, which
Speaker 1: did not It didn't equal the performance of a m
Speaker 1: d S flagship cards, but it was more affordable and
Speaker 1: it performed well enough. It just wasn't at the same
Speaker 1: level of metrics that a m d S flagships were
Speaker 1: performing at, and in Video had also throttled the clock
Speaker 1: speed of the cards on that on that series, largely
Speaker 1: in order to make sure that power consumption stayed at
Speaker 1: nominal levels. But it did mean that if you were
Speaker 1: a serious gamer and you didn't mind getting your your
Speaker 1: hands a little dirty, uh metaphorically speaking, you could over
Speaker 1: clock your GPU. You could make it run faster than
Speaker 1: what it was supposed to run. Because in Video had
Speaker 1: been very conservative and had throttled, the actual top speed
Speaker 1: of the processing units was much higher than what in
Speaker 1: Video put it out to be, So if you wanted to,
Speaker 1: you could overclock it get some better performance out of it.
Speaker 1: And Video followed up for me with other micro architecture
Speaker 1: designs you had Kepler had, Maxwell, Pascal and Turing and
Speaker 1: just in general, the way micro architecture tends to work.
Speaker 1: Intel does this as well, is that you get what
Speaker 1: Intel calls the TICK talk approach, where in TICK you
Speaker 1: create a new layout of your of your microprocessor that
Speaker 1: has smaller components. It's when you've shrunk things down so
Speaker 1: that you can fit more individual components on the same
Speaker 1: amount of chip space as the previous generation. So UH
Speaker 1: think of it as like cramming more employees into the
Speaker 1: same office space. And and so you can keep doing that,
Speaker 1: especially if you get smaller employees right they take up
Speaker 1: less space individually. Then the tox side is where you
Speaker 1: end up fine tuning the layout of the office space
Speaker 1: to accommodate the fact that you've crammed more employees in there.
Speaker 1: So when I talk about these different micro architecture designs,
Speaker 1: it's a combination of things. It's creating dye sets that
Speaker 1: have smaller components so you can cram more of them
Speaker 1: onto that chip, and it's rearranging the orientation of those
Speaker 1: components so that they operate at a greater efficiency. And
Speaker 1: so each of those changes in micro arch texture represent
Speaker 1: an attempt to produce more power more efficiently than the
Speaker 1: previous generation of chips. And that's generally how we see
Speaker 1: all microprocessors, whether they're CPUs or GPUs, how they how
Speaker 1: they continue and we're still seeing it today in video
Speaker 1: is still one of the top names in graphics cards
Speaker 1: and UH their CEO, Jensen Wong, is worth more than
Speaker 1: six billion dollars. He is the sixty one highest paid CEO.
Speaker 1: Not bad for somebody who back in said yeah, why
Speaker 1: don't we give us a shot? So a pretty amazing story.
Speaker 1: And like I said, I really skipped over quite a
Speaker 1: lot in this last section. You know, I didn't go
Speaker 1: card by card because frankly, to go through all those
Speaker 1: specifications and explain their relevance would mean having to do
Speaker 1: companion episode odes about the evolution of graphics in UH,
Speaker 1: in computers in general, UH, and programming and the whole
Speaker 1: thought process behind graphics cards as well, and it would
Speaker 1: require a lot more, a lot several more episodes. The
Speaker 1: important thing to remember now is that in videos not
Speaker 1: just making these graphics cards for for gamers, although they
Speaker 1: still do that obviously, but that they have branched out
Speaker 1: into other areas. GPUs these days are being used in
Speaker 1: all sorts of fields, including artificial intelligence and deep learning,
Speaker 1: machine learning, that kind of stuff. So we're seeing a
Speaker 1: lot more relevance of GPUs, also used in bitcoin mining,
Speaker 1: u in in UH cryptography, we're seeing tons of applications
Speaker 1: of GPUs far beyond making Laura Croft look amazing as
Speaker 1: she runs through the jungle. So prey the phenomenal story.
Speaker 1: I hope you enjoyed this episode or these episodes about Nvidia. Uh.
Speaker 1: In our next episodes, we're gonna cover totally different topics,
Speaker 1: so stick around. If you guys have suggestions for future topics.
Speaker 1: Maybe there's a company I should cover, a person in tech,
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