Age of Nvidia

While 3Dfx was revolutionizing the field, Nvidia was learning how to play nice with Microsoft.

"In 1995 Microsoft decided to roll its own 3-D APIs," recalls Alex St. John, a former Microsoft developer who was one of the leaders of the effort to make the company a player in gaming graphics.

In true Microsoft fashion, the company "rolled its own" by purchasing another company -- in this case, the British firm Rendermorphics, which had developed a set of graphics tools based on the polygon approach. Then Microsoft began approaching graphics hardware manufacturers, including Nvidia.

At the time, Nvidia had just made a deal with Sega (which would later fall through) for providing graphics acceleration chips for what would become the Dreamcast console. Since Sega and Nvidia were both exploring quadratic textures, it seemed like a good match.

But Microsoft, which had just purchased a polygon-based technology, respectfully disagreed.

"When the first [quadratic] products went out," St. John says, "it was well known that Microsoft didn't support them." And so, he says, Microsoft put its considerable marketing power behind other companies, such as Creative, that were building accelerator cards using 3Dfx chips. Even though 3Dfx's Glide was nominally competing with the Microsoft Direct3D API, the more high-end and accelerated games that showed up for Windows, the more desirable a new Windows-based PC would be.

St. John says he remembers making the point bluntly to Nvidia representatives, telling them, "You guys need to learn triangles [polygons] like everyone else."

Nvidia took the advice to heart: "They got really religious," St. John says. Nvidia began working on polygons.

Though having Microsoft on your side has rarely hurt a company, this was far from an anointing for Nvidia. The company still didn't have a commercially successful hardware product; Microsoft's own 3-D technology was clunky at best and drove developers away with buggy and difficult code. 3Dfx and Glide were still the darlings of a cabal composed of developers, hardcore gamers and the press.

It was a step, to be sure, and one that helped set the stage for the friendship that would eventually lead to Nvidia's becoming the graphics-chip supplier for the Xbox. But Nvidia needed more than a helping hand from Redmond to start making its ascent.

And of course 3Dfx and Nvidia weren't even the only players in the market -- that is, if Nvidia could even be counted as a competitor at that point. By early 1997, companies such as Matrox and Diamond had their own products, some of which were even competitive with the Voodoo. The Voodoo name, plus the established Glide API, still held a solid lead in the field. But ATI's Rage Pro 3-D card, which was catching on thanks to its ability to accelerate both 2-D and 3-D graphics, was a strong second.

But by 1997, Microsoft's influence with developers was already beginning to make its own Direct3D API (soon to be rebranded "DirectX") a serious challenge to Glide. And Nvidia wasn't going to make the same mistake twice.

According to Monk, "Nvidia had learned from their initial mistake regarding Direct3D and decided to adopt it wholeheartedly ... This was not so critical while D3D was feeble, but eventually Microsoft would get their act together, and once developers had gained a greater confidence with Direct3D, they no longer felt it necessary" to support Glide versions of their games.

For gamers, Microsoft's influence was increasingly noticeable. Purchasers of a new game would install it, learn that their system required an update of Microsoft's gaming APIs, and then wait while the upgrade was installed.

And then ooh and ah at the wonders of new technology. The late '90s were heady years, not just for stock market speculators, start-up entrepreneurs and a world discovering the joys of online life, but also for a surging crowd of PC gamers. Games like 1997's Total Annihilation and Diablo, 1998's Starcraft and Quake II, and a host of others improved technically by leaps and bounds over what had been released the year before. The startling pace of change for the software APIs, the hardware chips and the games themselves was just one more proof that time, in the Internet era, ran faster than ever before.

Later, at the turn of the millennium, time slowed again for most of the tech industry. The economy began to stutter and air exploded from the dot-com balloon. But for gamers and the gaming biz there was no break. The pace remained breakneck, and only the nimblest would be able to keep up.

First of two parts. Read Part 2.

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