By April of 2000, Nvidia, not burdened with running its own manufacturing and marketing business, launched the GeForce 2 GTS, which not only ran at higher clock speeds than its predecessor but incorporated existing technologies, such as full-screen anti-aliasing, which minimizes the "jaggies" that previously plagued the appearance of diagonal lines, with new ones like per-pixel shading. Again, the company went to game developers and charmed them, earning Nvidia-based cards the right to boast of displaying visual qualities no other card could offer. And that month, ATi showed a preliminary version of its Radeon chipset, which would win back some hardcore credibility for the company.

Months prior, 3Dfx had announced its Voodoo 5 line, which would add little other than increased clock speed -- but the company's only news was that the card would be delayed until June. Add to that production and bitter labor problems at the Juarez plant and 3Dfx was reporting fiscal woes in early 2000.

In August, the company pre-announced that its fiscal report for that quarter would show a "large" loss. Revenues had dropped to $67 million, down from $104 million for the previous quarter, while Nvidia's yearly revenues topped $452 million. 3Dfx still had a gross operating profit of about $10 million, but the cost of acquiring Gigapixel resulted in a $100.5 million net loss for the quarter. 3Dfx was burning through its now limited cash supplies; the company looked desperately for new strategies.

One was to develop a new consumer chip using the technology it purchased from Gigapixel. This chip, code-named Rampage, never made it past the larval stage. Part of the reason was what Jon Peddie now calls a "dissipation" of the company's resources. In November 2000, 3Dfx said it was pursuing plans to branch out into the general-purpose graphics chip market (set-top boxes, game consoles, cellphones and other devices), an area long dominated by ATi, Intel and others.

Not one of these products shipped.

That same month, 3Dfx closed the Juarez plant and announced it would get out of the business of manufacturing the cards themselves.

And then it was a short 30 days until 3Dfx let it be known that it had laid off its entire staff and sold a variety of assets (not including the Juarez plant) to ... Nvidia.

The gaming press was stunned. There had been nothing but ominous news from 3Dfx for a while but this was a shock. Suddenly, the competition was over and the enemy was us: For $112 million Nvidia picked up not only 3Dfx's patents, brand names and inventory, and Gigapixel's assets, but also over 110 3Dfx employees, including one of the founding architects of 3Dfx, Gary Tarolli.

Game over, man. Nvidia was the winner. And six months later, the company introduced a new product. And six months later, another. Pixel shaders, vertex shaders -- technology marches on.

Does this mean that Nvidia rules every computer running Quake III? Not by half.

The size of the retail aftermarket is "about 10 percent" of the total 3D card market compared to the OEM deals made by companies like Dell and IBM, points out MaximumPC's Ung. And even in the aftermarket, ATi has retained a strong place; the situation on the Mac side of things, where you can order up a new Power Mac G4 with a GeForce 4 MX, GeForce 4 Ti or Radeon card, is not a bad reflection of the larger picture.

And where Nvidia may currently count for about two-thirds of the standalone chip market, according to Nvidia's Burke, in the larger "integrated" scene, which includes motherboard-based graphics chips and more, Nvidia chips represent significantly less than half of the market.

However, Nvidia may be making a move in that direction with a motherboard design dubbed nForce -- it was enough to impress übergeek site Anandtech into calling it "the biggest step forward in chipset technology we've ever seen." Leveraging technologies and techniques learned from its contributions to the Xbox, the nForce (which will be released as a final product by most major motherboard manufacturers) features an integrated graphics accelerator chipset, though users should be able to expand to a different accelerator card if they wish; perhaps even a Radeon. The motherboards should be available this summer; there's no word yet on when nForce-based PCs should hit the market. Whether this can knock into ATi's good OEM karma is the big question.

On the other end of the spectrum, Nvidia is targeting the professional 3D workstation market with its Quadro line of chipsets. These go into the monster boxes that render 3D scenes more complex and lifelike than is possible on a mere mortal's machine. By most reviews, Nvidia was welcomed into the market, which had been impacted by the implosion of DEC, the hobbling of SGI and other trauma. The fact that professionals can now spend a mere grand and, with a Windows box, match or surpass the performance of last year's specialized workstations has given Nvidia the luster of a minor savior with that crowd.

Of course, none of this is guaranteed to last. Nvidia may be at the top of the heap in most people's heads now, but the same elements that brought the company to prominence could easily be used to unseat it. On one side, 3Dfx-like financial problems loom over Nvidia, from SEC investigations into Enron-like accounting irregularities and allegations of insider trading, to a dispute with Microsoft over the pricing and availability of Xbox components. And then there are rumors, vehemently denied by Nvidia, that Microsoft may drop it from the lineup for the yet-unannounced Xbox 2.

There's also the fact that the maturation of Direct3D (as part of a bigger conglomerate of APIs called DirectX), which allowed and prompted Nvidia's rise, has lowered the barrier for the next upstart. DirectX is a de facto standard in Windows. That means that those who would design new hardware don't have to face the same turmoil that caused previous chip makers such grief. In a way, the pioneers have made it easy for the kids today.

Will that matter to the true believers at Next Game? Perhaps. There is, as there has always been, a next generation of games on the way, games that will certainly bring today's technology to its knees. Doom IV, Dungeon Siege, Duke Nukem Forever -- all these will sorely tax today's crop of video cards as gamers look to achieve the cinema-quality graphics that previews have hinted at. It's a virtual certainty that many of these gamers will rush out and plop down a few hundred dollars just to shoot at the most lushly rendered monsters yet.

That doesn't mean that the new games will actually be any fun to play. As any gamer could tell you, for every new Doom or Warcraft, there's a Rune or a Blair Witch game -- something that may look good but offers such dull and lifeless gameplay that a few rounds of the original Doom or Marathon would be infinitely more appealing. Or even Pong. Even the most exquisitely rendered Balrog can't make up for a bad story or dumb design.

Despite that, there seems to be no slowing of the cycle of software pushing new hardware and new hardware prompting new content. Most of us have reached our limit in what we need from a word processor or a spreadsheet or an e-mail program. But will we ever reach a limit in what we lust for in entertainment?

The recent history of gamers and game technology suggests not. Just ask the guy purchasing a copy of Jedi Knight II at the local software outlet: Will you upgrade? The question isn't if but when.

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