In the fast-paced world of computer products, brand loyalty, such as the kind that Apple engenders, is the exception. Perhaps that is a reflection of the greater influence of marketing -- no longer do you see "Ford families" or "GM loyalists" on the roads -- or a recognition of the turnover rate in the what's-hot category of the tech market. In the 3-D card world there wasn't even much loyalty to certain technologies. Gamers bought what produced the best results: the fastest game play, the best image, the most reliable and stable card.

If you ask 19-year-old Greg Tan in between his attempts to hijack a beautifully rendered cargo ship on his screen at Next Game, he'll tell you that better graphics are a plus but the key factor is speed: "If I'm losing because the game's too slow," he says, "then I'll upgrade." He doesn't pay much attention to brand names but does keep track of what his friends are saying about individual products. "If it's got a reputation as being slow, that's a big negative," he says. "As long as I'm winning and killing people, I'm happy."

Just such happiness was what Nvidia's TNT card promised to deliver. It won industry and press awards for its performance and compatibility with gaming APIs. But even more important, Nvidia began to successfully imitate 3Dfx's strategy of targeting top 3-D software developers, hoping to get them on board with the advanced features the new chip offered.

Those features, with names like "stencil," "destination alpha," "full-time multitexture" and with 32-bit color (which 3Dfx would take another year to support) represented the advances Nvidia had been planning for a year, almost two product cycles before. With support for more colors, the TNT could show subtler gradations, such as those in a sunset, without the "banding" or leaps in colors that 16-bit cards suffered from. More colors also meant, again, more realistic scenes. The other features allowed for better depth imaging, better object textures and other improvements to overall visual quality --which was becoming almost as important a selling point as the ability to churn out high frame rates.

"At this point," Hook says, "they had a strategy that worked: Release products quickly with lots of incremental improvements, build and keep strong OEM partnerships, don't alienate partners by competing with them, and start cultivating strong developer relations."

The "release products quickly" part would become a crucial advantage as 3Dfx continued to delay its next generation of product, the Voodoo 3. This would finally be 3Dfx's one-card solution, and it was promised that the Voodoo 3 would support at least some of the features of the Riva TNT.

Ever since the Riva 128 card, Nvidia had been on a strict six-month schedule of product releases and revisions. If a new card came out in the spring, expect a faster version in the fall. And expect a new card the next spring. As Gordon Ung, a senior editor at MaximumPC, says, Nvidia's management learned to "execute like Germans." That meant that Nvidia could put out two or three product cycles while 3Dfx was delayed on one.

Tony Tamasi, now general manager of graphics processors for Nvidia but then 3Dfx's director of product marketing, says: "Fundamentally, I think the thing that Nvidia brought to the industry was a rhythmic, six-month product pace. This was a philosophical paradigm shift in the industry." Previously, product cycles had been eight months to two years. However, the frantic pace of consumer demand made the old model untenable.

As the computer world knowingly approached Y2K and unwittingly faced the NASDAQ crash, the unsupportable, Dale Carnegie-like optimism that fueled the dot-com world was actually being fulfilled in the games market. Here, it really was true that every year brought closer the fever dream of "Toy Story" on the desktop. Consumers, ready to toss a few hundred here or there to meet the system requirements of, say, Quake III or Unreal Tournament, were primed for regular technology advances. They expected it. And it was crucial for chip makers to deliver.

Delivering was key, agrees Jon Peddie, president of Jon Peddie Research and a longtime industry analyst. Nvidia, he says, "executed flawlessly." He notes that Nvidia didn't succumb to the same disease of "creeping featuritis" that 3Dfx did. "If a product doesn't have all features working by the time they cut it and delivered, they hold the feature for the next revision," he says. They could do this because both the engineers and the management knew that the held feature would show up in the next revision, six months down the line.

"3Dfx was one of the worst sinners in not shedding items and shipping," Peddie adds. "They did such a great job on the first three products, buyers were willing to wait" -- but that patience went only so far.

"3Dfx coasted a long time on Glide compatibility and name recognition," says Hook, "but neither of those would last forever -- and they knew it."

It'd been a while since 3Dfx had a big hit. The Voodoo 2 was yesterday's news, the 2-D/3-D cards had hemorrhaged resources and money from the company, and Nvidia was the new darling of an audience that 3Dfx knew was hungry for the next big thing. All those pressures led to 3Dfx's next, last, desperate move.

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