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, Jonathan Strickling. I'm an executive producer with
Speaker 1: how Stuff Works in love all Things Tech, and I
Speaker 1: have received lots of requests over the years to cover
Speaker 1: the company in Video and the products they make, and
Speaker 1: in Video is chiefly known for their GPUs, or graphics
Speaker 1: processing units. So before we jump into the history of
Speaker 1: Nvidia and how it helped define the evolution of computers
Speaker 1: and how it created the term GPU, how about we
Speaker 1: explore the concept of graphics cards and GPUs in general.
Speaker 1: A and just a note for you guys, this gets
Speaker 1: super technical, super fast. So I am going to take
Speaker 1: a very high level on all of this because if
Speaker 1: you really want to know and have a but understanding
Speaker 1: of the history of GPUs and graphics cards, you also
Speaker 1: have to have an understanding of the evolution of how
Speaker 1: we program graphics, things like application programmer interfaces or a
Speaker 1: p I s um that kind of stuff. You need
Speaker 1: to know about that evolution in addition to the evolution
Speaker 1: of the technology itself. And it gets super technical. And
Speaker 1: while it might be interesting to a subset of tech
Speaker 1: stuff listeners. I feel like for a lot of people,
Speaker 1: I would lose them very quickly. I have a feeling
Speaker 1: this These episodes are going to lose some folks anyway,
Speaker 1: and that's okay. But for those who are interested in
Speaker 1: in video and graphics cards, stick around. We're gonna learn
Speaker 1: some interesting stuff. So to understand in video's role, we
Speaker 1: actually have to dial way back before the founding of Nvidio,
Speaker 1: which was We're gonna go all the way back to
Speaker 1: nine teen fifty one, just briefly, because that's when the U. S.
Speaker 1: Navy awarded a contract to M I T to design
Speaker 1: a flight simulator, and M I T created a simulator
Speaker 1: called Whirlwind. That system had an early three D graphics system,
Speaker 1: but the architecture of Whirlwind wouldn't become the basis for
Speaker 1: the graphics card of the future. However, it's important to
Speaker 1: note that people were thinking about trying to create graphics
Speaker 1: that would represent three dimensional objects using computer systems as
Speaker 1: early as the nineteen fifties. But to look at the
Speaker 1: kind of technology that eventually evolved into the realm where
Speaker 1: in video got involved, we have to look really more
Speaker 1: at the birth of Arcades home video game consoles and
Speaker 1: the personal computer, so this would be the mid nineteen seventies.
Speaker 1: Arcade machines and consoles had specialized chips in them, and
Speaker 1: we typically would refer to them as things like video
Speaker 1: address generators or video shifters, and the chips or circuits
Speaker 1: in some cases would take information from a processor and
Speaker 1: relay that in a meaningful way to a display in
Speaker 1: order to create the images you would see on a
Speaker 1: computer monitor or a television. So remember that a processor
Speaker 1: like a CPU central processing unit, will take in data
Speaker 1: from a source. You get input that goes into the CPU.
Speaker 1: The CPU will perform various operations on that data according
Speaker 1: to a program running on the machine, and then produce
Speaker 1: output that is meaningful based upon the combination of the
Speaker 1: program and the input. And then that output will go somewhere.
Speaker 1: It might feed into a new process, it might go
Speaker 1: to an output device, and this is in good old
Speaker 1: machine code. So the graphics chips or circuits their purpose
Speaker 1: was to receive output data from the CPU that was
Speaker 1: specially scifically intended to go toward a display and then
Speaker 1: to take it from there. So graphics card act as
Speaker 1: sort of a translator. They take the data from the CPU,
Speaker 1: and they turn it into something that's meaningful for a
Speaker 1: display to show a bunch of points of light on
Speaker 1: a screen. Remember, the images we see on screens are
Speaker 1: made up of pixels, and pixels are points of light.
Speaker 1: And the smaller the pixels, the more you can fit
Speaker 1: on a screen, the greater the resolution, just generally speaking.
Speaker 1: So computers need a graphics card or some sort of
Speaker 1: graphics processing unit or interface on the computer's motherboard itself
Speaker 1: or in an expansion card in order to do this. Now,
Speaker 1: those early chips in the nineteen seventies had names like
Speaker 1: the c d P eighteen sixty one from our c
Speaker 1: A or the T I A one A which was
Speaker 1: used in the ATAR in Motorola debut. The MC six
Speaker 1: eight four or five video address generator. That chip give
Speaker 1: instructions to a display that would include information such as
Speaker 1: luminants or how bright the image should be, that pixel
Speaker 1: should be, color, and position. And so the pixels new
Speaker 1: quote unquote knew how bright they need to be, what
Speaker 1: color they needed to be, and the display new which
Speaker 1: pixels needed to be shown it or be activated at
Speaker 1: any given time. More importantly for our story, the MC
Speaker 1: six eight four or five chip for Motorola served as
Speaker 1: the foundation for the first video card for a personal computer,
Speaker 1: which was IBMS Monochrome Display Adapter, which was introduced in
Speaker 1: Now that could not really generate graphics the same way
Speaker 1: we would talk about today, but it could display text
Speaker 1: and characters in monochrome initially. Eventually you also had a
Speaker 1: color one. Intel built a graphics chip called the eight
Speaker 1: two seven twenty which could display up to eight colors. Wow,
Speaker 1: can also support a resolution of two hundred fifty six
Speaker 1: by two fifty six pixels. Now, if you swopped over
Speaker 1: to monochrome, you could actually have a better resolution of
Speaker 1: five twelve by five twelve pixels. And for several years,
Speaker 1: video game consoles and arcade machines were miles ahead of
Speaker 1: personal computers when it came to graphic quality. The circuits
Speaker 1: in the gaming machines were dedicated to that task, and
Speaker 1: early arcade games had systems that were essentially hard coded
Speaker 1: onto circuits, which meant if you wanted to change a
Speaker 1: game out in an arcade cabinet. Let's say that you've
Speaker 1: got an arcade cabinet, and inside that cabinet you have
Speaker 1: I don't know, let's say it's Galica and you want
Speaker 1: to swap out Galaga for pac Man, Well, you can't
Speaker 1: just take a chip out and replace it with another chip.
Speaker 1: You would actually have to essentially gut the whole cabinet
Speaker 1: and replace the INNERDS with the new ones from pac Man.
Speaker 1: There was no swapping a flash drive or anything like that.
Speaker 1: The advantage of the dedicated systems was that a could
Speaker 1: really create pretty good graphics, especially compared to the stuff
Speaker 1: you would see on computers. You get really good results.
Speaker 1: But the downside was it was not a viable approach
Speaker 1: if you wanted to create a general purpose machine like
Speaker 1: a personal computer, and so PCs for the most part,
Speaker 1: lagged behind these specialty machines, at least in the graphics department.
Speaker 1: In the mid nineteen eighties, a company called A t
Speaker 1: I began to manufacture graphics cards. They would end up
Speaker 1: becoming incredibly important in that realm. Their early products were
Speaker 1: o e M, or original equipment manufacturer cards, which meant
Speaker 1: they were producing chips that were meant to be included
Speaker 1: in finished products that other companies were making. So they
Speaker 1: were they were making a component that would be included
Speaker 1: in a larger product that some other manufacturer was producing.
Speaker 1: Um they were not selling directly to the end customers,
Speaker 1: So you wouldn't go into a store and buy an
Speaker 1: a TI chip back in the mid nineteen eighties. Instead
Speaker 1: you would go and buy a computer that had an
Speaker 1: a TI chip in it, or maybe a card that
Speaker 1: had an a TI chip incorporated in it. That would
Speaker 1: change in the late nineteen eighties. You would start seeing
Speaker 1: a t I producing its own cards supporting stuff like
Speaker 1: e G A and v G A graphics and I'm
Speaker 1: not going to go into those. It would be ridiculously
Speaker 1: long winded to go into all those different graphics and
Speaker 1: they largely are unimportant by the time we get around
Speaker 1: to talking about in video anyway. So this, however, was
Speaker 1: one of the big moves that led to the birth
Speaker 1: of the graphics card industry as a consumer facing business.
Speaker 1: By the early nineteen nineties, when Nvidio would debut, more
Speaker 1: companies started making two D graphics cards for computers and
Speaker 1: three D accelerators typically paired with those two D graphics cards,
Speaker 1: and then a t I came out with the Mack
Speaker 1: sixty four that was the the graphics card that also
Speaker 1: included support for a TV tuner and full motion video playback. Acceleration,
Speaker 1: and things were really starting to pick up in those
Speaker 1: early nineties. Now let's take a step back and consider
Speaker 1: why this is a big deal. When you're looking at
Speaker 1: a three D image on a computer screen, meaning one
Speaker 1: that uses various techniques to simulate depths, a lot has
Speaker 1: to happen to produce those results. Because what you're looking
Speaker 1: at is a two dimensional representation of a three dimensional object.
Speaker 1: The graphics processing unit has to construct a wire frame
Speaker 1: for the shape you're looking at, to build out sort
Speaker 1: of a an exoskeleton, if you will, for the entire scene,
Speaker 1: everything from characters in it to backgrounds, et cetera. If
Speaker 1: it's doing a full three dimensional h field of view,
Speaker 1: that frame ultimately consists of a bunch of straight lines typically,
Speaker 1: but the lines can be really short and at angles,
Speaker 1: and if you have the lines small enough and at
Speaker 1: slight enough angles from each other, you can simulate curved shapes.
Speaker 1: And once the wire frame is there, the graphics card
Speaker 1: raster rises the image, which means it fills in the
Speaker 1: pixels kind of like a coloring book. You're filling in
Speaker 1: the spaces for that wire frame. Next, it adds elements
Speaker 1: like color and texture and lighting effects. And that's just
Speaker 1: for one moment, one instance of that image. So if
Speaker 1: you're playing a game, typically you're having stuff change on
Speaker 1: screen pretty regularly and sometimes quickly, so the image needs
Speaker 1: to be updated frequently, and a fast paced shooter, for example,
Speaker 1: will not be a fun experience. If your computer can
Speaker 1: only display a couple of new images every second, you'd
Speaker 1: be toast. If it were a competitive game, thirty frames
Speaker 1: per second is considered slow or at least subpar, But
Speaker 1: if you can get thirty frames per second regularly, tend
Speaker 1: things tend to be playable. You really want something that's
Speaker 1: sixty frames per second at least for a smooth experience.
Speaker 1: And the more graphically rich the image, the more work
Speaker 1: that entails. Right, the more detail you have in your
Speaker 1: in your individual images, the more work your your graphics
Speaker 1: processor is going to have to do in order to
Speaker 1: refresh that sixty times a second. So the graphics processing
Speaker 1: unit has to be able to relay the appropriate information
Speaker 1: at a bandwidth large enough and a speed fast enough
Speaker 1: to produce those results, and it's a big job. Graphics
Speaker 1: cards typically have four main components. They have a motherboard,
Speaker 1: which is a circuit board upon which all the other
Speaker 1: components are on top of UH. The graphics processor and
Speaker 1: other connections are all sitting on this circuit board, and
Speaker 1: the motherboard also has a connector to plug into a computer,
Speaker 1: and that connector allows the motherboard to accept data and
Speaker 1: power from the computer and send data back to the computer.
Speaker 1: Then you've got the processor. It's the processor's job to
Speaker 1: interpret information from the computer and send data to the
Speaker 1: display so that the right pixels show up at the
Speaker 1: right time at the right part of the screen. And
Speaker 1: the processor specializes in performing geometric calculations and can include
Speaker 1: features like anti aliasing that's a smoothing technology to take
Speaker 1: some of those pointy edges off the graphics, since ultimately
Speaker 1: all the shapes you're looking at are made up of
Speaker 1: straight lines. Or there's also an isotropic filtering, which creates
Speaker 1: a more crisp image. Then there's another component on these
Speaker 1: cards that's memory. Graphics cards have memory to store information
Speaker 1: about each of the pixels and temporarily store completed images. UH.
Speaker 1: Then there's some sort of connector that allows you to
Speaker 1: plug the display into the graphics card so that way
Speaker 1: you can actually see the wonderful graphics this card is creating.
Speaker 1: If you don't have a connector, then there's the display
Speaker 1: has no way of receiving that information, right. So also
Speaker 1: these days you might end up using a connector on
Speaker 1: the back to plug one graphics card into a second
Speaker 1: graphics card and run them in series so that you
Speaker 1: can boost the performance. That is becoming more and more
Speaker 1: common where you start seeing big gaming rigs that have
Speaker 1: multiple high performing graphics cards inside of them. Now, these
Speaker 1: cards tend to produce a lot of heat because they're
Speaker 1: working very, very hard, and they've got a lot of
Speaker 1: components on them, and so they tend to also have
Speaker 1: multiple cores. That means the processors can work on parallel problems.
Speaker 1: Most graphics rendering falls into that category, but as it
Speaker 1: turns out, so do other computational problems, which is why
Speaker 1: you will hear about large groups using GPUs to tackle
Speaker 1: certain types of challenges like mining bitcoins. I'll talk more
Speaker 1: about that in our second episode, but that's a good
Speaker 1: basic grounding of graphics cards. When we come back, I'm
Speaker 1: going to talk about the founding of Nvidia and the
Speaker 1: environment it found itself in those early days. In nine three,
Speaker 1: Jensen Huang, Chris Malachowski, and Curtis priam founded in Vidia.
Speaker 1: But where did they come from? Well, Huang, who is
Speaker 1: president and CEO of Nvidia to this day, was born
Speaker 1: in Taiwan, and then he lived in Thailand as a
Speaker 1: young boy until his family sent him and his brother
Speaker 1: to the United States because Thailand was becoming politically unstable,
Speaker 1: and they moved in with some family members over in
Speaker 1: the States. His aunt and uncle enrolled Huang in a
Speaker 1: boarding school in Kentucky. They thought it was a prep school.
Speaker 1: It turned out that it was actually a school for
Speaker 1: troubled youth. He and his brother were reunited with their
Speaker 1: family and moved to Oregon. Huang would attend Oregon State University.
Speaker 1: He studied electrical engineering there and graduated with an undergraduate degree.
Speaker 1: Then he went on to enroll in Stanford University to
Speaker 1: earn his master's degree in electrical engineering. After that, he
Speaker 1: went to work for Advanced micro Devices or a m D.
Speaker 1: Interesting because we'll hear more about a m D in
Speaker 1: the next episode, and he also then worked for l
Speaker 1: s I Logic before he would leave to co found
Speaker 1: in Video Chris Malachowski, who today is part of in
Speaker 1: Vidio's executive staff and serves as a senior technology executive.
Speaker 1: He attended the University of Florida and received his bachelor's
Speaker 1: degree there and then went to Santa Clara University for
Speaker 1: his masters. He went on to work as a manufacturing
Speaker 1: design engineer at Hewlett Packard in nineteen eighty and in
Speaker 1: nineteen seven he started working for Sun Microsystems and became
Speaker 1: a senior staff engineer, and while he was there, he
Speaker 1: co invented the g X graphics architecture and led design
Speaker 1: work on graphics interfaces. Curtis Priam attended rin Alert Polytechnic
Speaker 1: Institute and he earned a degree in electrical engineering in
Speaker 1: nineteen eighty two. He worked on the IBM Professional Graphics
Speaker 1: Adapter and like Malachowski, Prium would end up working at
Speaker 1: Sun Microsystems and was also one of the inventors of
Speaker 1: the g X graphics architecture and now the three founders
Speaker 1: for in Nvidia. He is the one who is no
Speaker 1: longer working with the company. He retired from in Vidia
Speaker 1: in two thousand three. So back in pri Um and
Speaker 1: Malachowski are steaming. They're incredibly frustrated because they had been
Speaker 1: encountering roadblocks at Sun micro Systems. They both felt the
Speaker 1: company was pushing R and D in the wrong direction
Speaker 1: for graphics, and Wong, who was working at l S
Speaker 1: I he wasn't really disenchanted by his work, but he
Speaker 1: was thinking about what the future of processing was going
Speaker 1: to be all about. And the three sat down to
Speaker 1: talk things over at dinner at a Denny's restaurant, which
Speaker 1: I think is great. The idea that a hugely successful
Speaker 1: company was born over a conversation at a Denny's is
Speaker 1: fantastic to me. I've had a lot of conversations at Denny's.
Speaker 1: None of them have led to a monumentally successful company,
Speaker 1: so I'm not doing it right. But anyway, the three
Speaker 1: of them, I started talking about the future of computing,
Speaker 1: and they agreed that graphics based accelerated computing was the future.
Speaker 1: And gosh, they were incredibly prescient about that. We'll we'll
Speaker 1: talk more about that, I mean, but I kind of
Speaker 1: alluded to it earlier, about how graphics processing units are
Speaker 1: now used in lots of different applications that have nothing
Speaker 1: to do with making pretty pictures on a display. Uh.
Speaker 1: They kind of saw that coming down the pipe. Maybe
Speaker 1: not quite in those terms, but they did think that
Speaker 1: was the future of computing. However, to pursue this belief.
Speaker 1: It would mean forming a new company and and leaving
Speaker 1: their current jobs, and then designing the technology from the
Speaker 1: ground up, designing graphics chips from the from the beginning,
Speaker 1: and so it would mean entering into a crowded marketplace
Speaker 1: because the early nineties already had a lot of different
Speaker 1: companies that were creating graphics cards, and there were probably
Speaker 1: around two dozen competitors already on the market. So it's
Speaker 1: becoming a huge headache already because software developers had to
Speaker 1: figure out which formats they were going to support, which
Speaker 1: a p I s should they use to develop their
Speaker 1: software that because the APIs would be compatible with specific
Speaker 1: types of graphics cards. Graphics cards would support programs that
Speaker 1: were developed using certain APIs, and you could get things
Speaker 1: like drivers to help support uh all other API s.
Speaker 1: But if a company is making a graphics card with
Speaker 1: the intent to support a specific API, that kind of
Speaker 1: software is going to perform better on that hardware air
Speaker 1: than other software. So this was becoming a confusing marketplace
Speaker 1: for developers as well as for customers. Let's say that
Speaker 1: you're out there on the market. You you want to
Speaker 1: buy a machine that is really graphically intensive so that
Speaker 1: you can do stuff like maybe maybe you're doing architecture
Speaker 1: design or or computer assistant design CAD programming. You want
Speaker 1: to make sure that the systems you buy are going
Speaker 1: to be compatible with the software that you depend upon.
Speaker 1: And that was starting to get kind of a little
Speaker 1: complicated in the early nineties, and it would only get
Speaker 1: worse before it would get better. But this environment did
Speaker 1: lead to opportunities like the founding of companies like alien Ware.
Speaker 1: You know, alien Ware being the boutique gaming rig company
Speaker 1: that that all started because the founder of alien Ware
Speaker 1: would end up building gaming rigs for friends because he
Speaker 1: was not confused by all the different types of cards
Speaker 1: and motherboards and things like that out there, and so
Speaker 1: he would build gaming rigs for them. That was possible
Speaker 1: because of this massive confusion in the marketplace. Now, one
Speaker 1: year before in Video launched, so back in there was
Speaker 1: another company called Silicon Graphics Incorporated, later known as s
Speaker 1: g I. They will release a multi platform application programming
Speaker 1: interface for two D and three D graphics called open
Speaker 1: g L one. Oh. Now, it was not initially intended
Speaker 1: to be an a p I for developers to develop
Speaker 1: three D games or games that would use three D graphics,
Speaker 1: but it was quickly adapted for that purpose. And meanwhile
Speaker 1: Microsoft was preparing a rival API release called Direct three D.
Speaker 1: And Microsoft didn't concern itself too much to make sure
Speaker 1: that open g L would run smoothly on Windows machines,
Speaker 1: which is the kind of thing that would get Microsoft
Speaker 1: in trouble down the line. They would get accused of
Speaker 1: engaging in anti competitive practices, in other words, making sure
Speaker 1: that their operating systems would support their own software and
Speaker 1: maybe not do so much to support other people's software.
Speaker 1: But it also helps illustrate how confusing this world would
Speaker 1: have become already before the video had even hit the market.
Speaker 1: But while in Video was forming, other graphics card companies
Speaker 1: were already folding or getting absorbed into larger companies. Uh So,
Speaker 1: in Vidia is coming into a market where companies with
Speaker 1: names like Gemini Technology, Headland Technology, Tamarack, Acumos, those were
Speaker 1: starting to go away. Some companies were still around, but
Speaker 1: they shut down divisions that had been working in graphics processing.
Speaker 1: Motorola did that with their division, Acer did that. So
Speaker 1: in Video was getting into a very uncertain market and
Speaker 1: the three co founders didn't have any idea how to
Speaker 1: create a business plan, and they didn't even have a
Speaker 1: product yet, but they did hold rounds of venture capital financing.
Speaker 1: To get the startup capital. They needed to design a
Speaker 1: graphics card and partner with a manufacturer to make it.
Speaker 1: Because they did not have the manufacturing facility, they were
Speaker 1: not actually gonna build the cards. They were going to
Speaker 1: design them and send those designs to a manufacturer that
Speaker 1: would be in charge of actually putting the stuff together.
Speaker 1: Wong has said in interviews that he tried to make
Speaker 1: a business plan to present to potential investors. He really tried,
Speaker 1: but he just wasn't able to do it. And essentially
Speaker 1: he told investors, I tried to make one, but I
Speaker 1: ran out of time before I could finish it. And
Speaker 1: the response was essentially, that's okay. We wouldn't have believed
Speaker 1: your business plan anyway. But the three engineers knew their
Speaker 1: technology backward and forward, and they were able to get
Speaker 1: enough confidence and investors to secure funding to the tune
Speaker 1: of around twenty million dollars. And I would like to
Speaker 1: take this opportunity to say that I also do not
Speaker 1: have a business plan. Money please, I guess it doesn't
Speaker 1: work for me. Well, anyway, this whole process took about
Speaker 1: a year, So from ninety three to ninety four, the
Speaker 1: company is just kind of getting started. They're starting to
Speaker 1: design their work, they're raising finances. They form a strategic
Speaker 1: partnership with a company called s G S Thompson micro Electrics.
Speaker 1: This company would actually be the one to manufacture the
Speaker 1: first graphical user interface accelerator chip that in Vidio designed.
Speaker 1: They also partnered with another company called Diamond Multimedia Systems
Speaker 1: to take these chips and install them in multimedia accelerator boards.
Speaker 1: So if you think of a graphics card like an
Speaker 1: actual expansion card that you would put in a computer,
Speaker 1: Diamond Multimedia Systems built the card and the chip that
Speaker 1: powers the card was made by Nvidia. So producing graphics
Speaker 1: cards required a lot more work than just one company,
Speaker 1: is my my point here. The first product out of
Speaker 1: Nvidia would come to market in n and it was
Speaker 1: the in V one nd PC. Consumers would know it
Speaker 1: as the Diamond Edge three D graphics card, and the
Speaker 1: chip was chosen by Sega to go into the Sega
Speaker 1: Saturn game console. The Diamond Edge three D was a
Speaker 1: conventional pc I card. Pc I stands for Peripheral Component
Speaker 1: interconnect They would later end up being replaced by other formats,
Speaker 1: but this was the standard that we used to plug
Speaker 1: in expansion cards. It was a type of computer bus.
Speaker 1: A computer bus is essentially a channel or a pathway
Speaker 1: that exists between different components and a computer. So PC
Speaker 1: I card slots would allow PC owners to swap out
Speaker 1: expansion cards that would allow you to augment your PCs capabilities.
Speaker 1: It might be a sound card, or a graphics card
Speaker 1: or something along those lines. So how did Nvidio's first
Speaker 1: product do well? According to A A Wong, not so great.
Speaker 1: He said that when they got their finished card back
Speaker 1: from the manufacturers, they on that of what they had
Speaker 1: designed wasn't working in the actual build out. And the
Speaker 1: card was supposed to process both two D and three
Speaker 1: D graphics, plus act as a sound card, plus a
Speaker 1: game pad port for Sega Saturn controllers, plus a PC
Speaker 1: joystick port, and more so it was packing a ton
Speaker 1: of features onto a single card. And it might have
Speaker 1: been a bit too ambitious. Uh. It nearly meant the
Speaker 1: invidios story could end before it could really begin. But
Speaker 1: as we'll find out, and video was able to weather
Speaker 1: that storm. We'll come back in just a moment, but
Speaker 1: let's take a quick break to thank our sponsors. Wong
Speaker 1: has talked about a demo his company held that would
Speaker 1: show off this en V one ship, and they showed
Speaker 1: it off at a trade show called Compute Text. He said,
Speaker 1: even though many of the features were not working in
Speaker 1: this demo, it still made a really good impression. But
Speaker 1: then in Video came back the following year to Compute
Speaker 1: Text and they showed off the exact same demo, and
Speaker 1: then he saw that the reactions were not as positive.
Speaker 1: And that's where he learned that if you show up
Speaker 1: to the same conference twice, you know, in two different years,
Speaker 1: and you just show the same demo, that's a big mistake.
Speaker 1: It sends a bad message. And he said we almost
Speaker 1: went out of business. In a piece published in I E.
Speaker 1: E E. Spectrum that has the title in Video co
Speaker 1: founders remember their startup Roller Coaster Ride, Huang said quote,
Speaker 1: we had this idea that computer graphics was going to
Speaker 1: be the driving force of technology and fuel would be
Speaker 1: video games. A year and a half later, we nearly
Speaker 1: went out of business. The technology was wrong, the market
Speaker 1: strategy was wrong, architecture was wrong, and the execution wasn't
Speaker 1: good end quote. So what do you mean the architecture
Speaker 1: was wrong. Well, for one thing, the way the n
Speaker 1: V one would render graphics was through a process called
Speaker 1: quad texture mapping, But just as the cards were starting
Speaker 1: to ship out of manufacturing facilities, Microsoft was finalizing Direct
Speaker 1: X one point Oh, that's what incorporated Direct three D
Speaker 1: and Direct three D did not use quad texture mapping.
Speaker 1: It used triangular polygons to map textures. And Microsoft's dominance
Speaker 1: in the operating systems space for PCs meant the game
Speaker 1: developers were more likely to build games tailored to Microsoft's
Speaker 1: approach because most of their customers were Microsoft customers. They
Speaker 1: weren't gonna go the quad texture mapping strategy that in
Speaker 1: Video had used, so in Video tried to compensate for this.
Speaker 1: They released a driver that would uh if you installed
Speaker 1: the driver if you had the Envy one chip in
Speaker 1: your computer, it would try to wrap triangles as if
Speaker 1: they were quadratic surfaces to give the Envy one a
Speaker 1: semi compatible platform with Direct three D. But the NV
Speaker 1: one failed to attract many developers apart from those early
Speaker 1: Sega ports. Sega obviously had tapped them for the Saturn,
Speaker 1: so ports from Sega Saturn to the PC. If you
Speaker 1: had a in Video V one, they ran pretty good,
Speaker 1: really good actually, And I think it's interesting that Wong
Speaker 1: was very candid about this, about how this decision was
Speaker 1: not a good one early on in the company's history.
Speaker 1: But Wong and Malachowski have both credited in Videos success
Speaker 1: at least in part to an acceptance that sometimes things
Speaker 1: just don't go the way you planned and you have
Speaker 1: to pivot and make changes. They say their work was
Speaker 1: adaptable and that's what allowed them to survive. They could
Speaker 1: adapt their thinking and their strategies and their technologies to
Speaker 1: make the best of a bad situation. They could learn
Speaker 1: from their mistakes and work to avoid them in the future, well,
Speaker 1: you know, making brand new mistakes. Despite the issues with
Speaker 1: the NV one, and Video was able to land a
Speaker 1: deal with Sega, and ports of Sega games to the
Speaker 1: PC depended upon that in V one architecture, and n
Speaker 1: V one had the honor of becoming the first commercial
Speaker 1: graphics processor that could do three D rendering, video acceleration
Speaker 1: and graphics user interface acceleration. However, the sales of the
Speaker 1: NV one were a disappointment, but they did help keep
Speaker 1: the company above water, so they began work on its
Speaker 1: successor the design of the n V two. But then
Speaker 1: the company got some bad news. Sega had decided they
Speaker 1: were not going to go within video or uh the
Speaker 1: graphics chip for their next video game console, which was
Speaker 1: the Dreamcast. Instead, they were going to go with power
Speaker 1: VR for that. So in Video had to figure out
Speaker 1: what they were going to do next. And speaking of that,
Speaker 1: in our next episode, we're going to look at how
Speaker 1: in Video came from this shaky start and we're able
Speaker 1: to cement themselves as industry leaders in the graphics card arena,
Speaker 1: how they were able to invent the term graphics processing unit,
Speaker 1: what that actually means, what is a graphics processing unit,
Speaker 1: what made their first graphics processing unit a GPU, And
Speaker 1: we'll also talk about some of the problems the company
Speaker 1: has encountered since then. I hope you enjoy this episode
Speaker 1: in the next one, and if you guys have any
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