Today we only have two brands of graphics cards in PC, AMD and NVIDIA, to which a third will be added soon, Intel. But in the history of PC hardware there have been several manufacturers of PC graphics cards. In this article we are going to review the brands of graphics cards that have disappeared from the PC market.
The hardware market in the PC is one of the most difficult that exists, the costs are increasing and the demand as well. This means that the battlefield has left a number of companies that are now corpses or that have completely fled the PC market. Some of them are unknown, while others marked an era in PC graphics chips.
The missing graphics card brands on PC
We have made a compilation of those that we consider to be the most important due to the impact each of them had on the market. Not only for gaming, but also in the low-end and even professional range. So there are not all of them and we may have forgotten some in the process of writing this article, since there have been many that have appeared over time.
International Business Machines, where it all began
The first of the defunct brands of PC graphics cards is IBM. Today talking about a graphics card may sound strange to us, but all the PC graphics standards that were in the 80’s are derived from original IBM designs. Which graphics cards that have set standards such as MDA, CGA, EGA and the popular VGA. As well as other professional standards for high resolution displays.
IBM found itself out of the graphics card market as soon as other brands began selling theirs in a highly competitive market that began to plummet margins. An IBM accustomed to the high margins of the enterprise market completely abandoned the home graphics card market where profits were lower and there was high competitiveness.
3Dfx Interactive and its popular Voodoo
Initially 3Dfx was a company dedicated to making graphics hardware for arcade machines, but the decrease in the cost of memory led them to enter the graphics card market, although with the particularity of being exclusively dedicated to rendering 3D graphics. Being the 3Dfx Voodoo the first graphics cards capable of reproducing 3D graphics in real time.
To this day 3Dfx no longer exists, the reason is that the poor decisions of their board of directors led them to bankruptcy in 2000, just four years after achieving glory with their Voodoo Graphics they had gone bankrupt. Most of his talent ended up at NVIDIA after Jen-Hsun Huang’s company bought the remnants of the then-failed company.
As a curiosity, the NVIDIA GeForce’s 2D graphics system from its fourth generation until the withdrawal of the VGA port was inherited by NVIDIA from 3DFx Interactive. Which is paradoxical given that precisely 3Dfx became popular with 3D graphics.
3Dlabs, the professional graphics card brand
3Dlabs was one of the first companies to launch specialized hardware for PC 3D, not for use in games but for 3D modeling and CAD or computer-aided design applications. Its first graphics card was the 3DLabs GLINT 300 TX, which was launched in 1994. Today it will not sound familiar to many, but it is among the disappeared graphics card brands one of the most remembered.
It was the first graphics card that supported 100% the entire OpenGL standard, something that would not be repeated until 1999, at which time NVIDIA would end up launching its NV10 GPU or better known as GeForce 256. And when we say with full OpenGL support we We mean that it had an integrated geometric engine and did not depend on the CPU for it.
Why was it unsuccessful? 3Dlabs designed it to work with the Intel 80486, specifically with the Vesa Local Bus, a 32-bit version of the ISA standard that was not found on Intel Pentium boards. This together with the high cost as a graphics card and that 3Dlabs never had an interest in attracting PC gaming users, cemented its failure and the subsequent disappearance of the company.
ATI Technologies, a classic
It cannot be said that ATI Technologies is dead, but it is one of the disappeared graphics card brands, but that it was absorbed by AMD after its purchase in the mid-2000s. Today AMD is known as the Radeon Technology Group, the graphics subdivision of AMD. So it cannot be said that ATI has disappeared from the map, it is still alive although with the AMD brand.
ATI also had a smartphone GPU division, in charge of the Imageon architectures. Which was sold to Qualcomm and they are the people in charge of the Adreno GPUs in their Snapdragon SoCs. So its technology continues to exist and continues to be cutting-edge, but in different companies and different markets.
Matrox Graphics, the professional graphics card brand
If there is a brand that with its Matrox Millenium became the absolute standard of quality in terms of SVGA graphics cards, it was Matrox, a company that despite the high quality of its 2D cards was completely dragged into a field contrary to its own. , that of graphics cards to render 3D graphics. the consequences? The total abandonment of the market for PC graphics cards.
Their last architecture was Matrox Parhelia in 2001, which could not keep up with the NVIDIA and ATI architectures, after that and seeing how they could no longer compete in the graphics card market, they abandoned it completely. Today Matrox is a company that still exists, but in the video capture and transmission business.
Number Nine Visual Technology
Number Nine was one of the many professional graphics card companies for CAD from the PC that existed in the 80s. In the 90s they left the professional range and began to take over the mid-range of the PC. From the 90s they stopped using their own designs to sell modified versions of the S3 graphics chips.
In a search for independence, Number Nine decided to create its own graphics chip under the name Imageon 128, with specifications very similar to the ATI Rage, but it was a huge commercial fiasco and dragged it to its final demise.
S3 Graphics, the brand of low-end graphics cards
S3 began to become popular for offering SVGA graphics cards in the low end of the market, if you bought any PC during the 90s and before the arrival of 2D cards with integrated 3D, then most likely the store you had in your neighborhood would have put one of the S3 graphics cards in it. Whether it was a Trio or a Virgin.
The launch of 3D gaming cards with integrated VGA inside by NVIDIA, 3Dfx and others led them to develop their own 3D architecture under the name S3 Savage. Which had two versions: S3 Savage 3D and S3 Savage 4. Unfortunately a worse performance than the first NVIDIA GeForce and ATI Radeon together with bad drivers ended up killing it.
However today its technology is still used. Since the standard DirectX texture compression mechanism, which is used by all GPUs, was developed in the S3 Graphics labs.
Videologic and the tile rendering of its PowerVRs
Videologic to this day has not disappeared, but is known today as Imagination Technologies, so it simply underwent a name change. It is known for its architectures based on tile rendering, under the PowerVR brand, with which they tried to compete in the 3D card market for PC against 3Dfx first and NVIDIA later.
They became very famous on PC with their Kyro range, but decided to abandon the market for PC graphics cards to move to smartphones. Where its graphic architecture has been used in various smartphones such as the popular Apple iPhone.
So it is together with S3 and Matrox, another of the companies that fleeing the market for PC GPUs led to the duopoly between AMD and NVIDIA, which lasts to this day.