nvidia

In 2000 it acquired the intellectual assets of one-time rival 3dfx, one of the biggest graphics companies of the mid to late 1990s.

On December 14th, 2005, NVIDIA acquired ULI Electronics. ULI supplies third party Southbridge parts for ATI chipsets. In March 2006 NVIDIA acquired Hybrid Graphics ^[1]

History

Jen-Hsun Huang, Chris Malachowsky, and Curtis Priem founded the company in January 1993 and incorporated it in California in April 1993 (later re-incorporating it in Delaware). The company remained relatively low-key until the late 1997-1998 period, when it launched its line of RIVA PC graphics processors. It went public in January 1999 on Nasdaq; in May of that year it shipped its 10 millionth graphics processor. In 2000 it acquired the intellectual assets of one-time rival 3dfx, one of the biggest graphics companies of the mid to late 1990s. NVIDIA established close ties with many OEM companies as well as with organizations like SGI. By February 2002, NVIDIA had shipped 100 million graphics processors.

Today, NVIDIA and ATI Technologies supply the majority of "discrete" graphics chips found in most modern mainstream PCs. NVIDIA's flagship product, the GeForce line of graphics processors, first launched in 1999. Now, the Geforce brand-name has expanded to cover graphics technology in both desktop and mobile PC graphics chipsets. For the handheld device market, NVIDIA has the Goforce product line, which are high performance, low power graphics processors designed specifically for wireless devices.

As a fabless high-tech company, NVIDIA conducts research & development of chips in its laboratories, but subcontracts the actual (silicon) manufacturing to third-parties. In the past, NVIDIA has sourced silicon production capacity from IBM, STMicroelectronics, TSMC, and UMC. The production-chain of a chip involves multiple third-parties: the foundry makes processor wafers, the test-house tests the dies for defects and sorts them based on performance-characterization, and the packager seals individual dies in a hardened case. In terms of inventory management, NVIDIA must place foundry orders months in advance of their planned sale, then hold the produced chips in a warehouse until final delivery. This leads to occasional supply/demand imbalances.

It acquired a company focused on video software such as codecs for mobile devices^[2], PACE Soft Silicon in Pune, India, to increase its number of engineers in the country. ^[3]

Products

NVIDIA's product portfolio includes graphics processors, wireless communications processors, PC platform (motherboard core-logic) chipsets, and digital media player software. Within the Mac/PC user community, NVIDIA is best known for its "GeForce" product line, which is not only a complete line of "discrete" graphics chips found in AIB (add-in-board) video cards, but also a core-technology in both the Microsoft Xbox game-console and NForce-motherboards.

In many respects, NVIDIA is similar to its competitor ATI, because both companies began with a focus in the PC market, but later expanded their businesses into chips for non-PC applications. NVIDIA does not sell graphics boards into the retail market, instead focusing on the development and manufacturing of GPU chips. As part of their operations, both ATI and NVIDIA do create "reference designs" (board schematics) and provide manufacturing samples to their board partners such as Asus.

In December 2004, it was announced that NVIDIA would be assisting Sony with the design of the graphics processor (RSX) in the upcoming Sony PlayStation 3 game-console. As of March 2006, it is known that NVIDIA will deliver RSX to Sony as an IP-core, and that Sony alone would be responsible for manufacturing the RSX. Under the agreement, NVIDIA will provide ongoing support to port the RSX to Sony's fabs of choice (Sony and Toshiba), as well as die-shrinks to 65nm. This is a departure from NVIDIA's business arrangement with Microsoft, in which NVIDIA managed production and delivery of the Xbox GPU through NVIDIA's usual third-party foundry contracts. (Meanwhile, Microsoft has chosen ATI to provide the IP design for the Xbox 360's graphics hardware, as has Nintendo for their console to supersede the ATI-based GameCube.)

• "Discrete" refers to the graphic chip's boundary/proximity to other PC hardware. A discrete piece of hardware can be physically plugged/unplugged from the motherboard, the opposite term being "integrated graphics" where the piece of hardware is inseparable from the motherboard. In the PC graphics architecture, "discrete" means graphics-hardware is encapsulated in a dedicated (separate) chip. The chip's physical location, whether soldered on the motherboard PCB (as in most laptops) or mounted on an aftermarket add-in-board, has no bearing on this designation.

Graphics chipsets

• NV1 – NVIDIA's first product based upon quadratic surfaces
• RIVA 128 and RIVA 128ZX – DirectX 5 support, OpenGL 1 support, NVIDIA's first DirectX compliant hardware
• RIVA TNT, RIVA TNT2- DirectX 6 support, OpenGL 1 support, The series that made NVIDIA a market leader
• NVIDIA GeForce
  • GeForce 256 – DirectX 7 support, OpenGL 1 support, hardware transform and lighting, introduces DDR memory support
  • GeForce 2 – DirectX 7 support, OpenGL 1 support
  • GeForce 3 – DirectX 8.0 shaders, OpenGL 1.2 support, features memory bandwidth saving architecture
  • GeForce 4 – DirectX 8.1 parts (except for MX), OpenGL 1.4 and a new budget core (known as MX) that was based on the GeForce 2
  • GeForce FX series – DirectX 9 support, OpenGL 1.5 and claimed to offer 'cinematic effects'
  • GeForce 6 Series – DirectX 9C support, OpenGL 2.0 support, features improved shaders, reduced power consumption and Scalable Link Interface-operation
  • GeForce 7 Series – DirectX 9C Support, WDDM (Windows Display Driver Model) Support, OpenGL 2.0 support, Improved shading performance, Transparency Supersampling (TSAA) and Transparency Multisampling (TMAA) anti-aliasing, Scalable Link Interface (SLI)
• NVIDIA Quadro (High quality workstation solutions)
• NVIDIA GoForce – For PDAs & Smartphones

Personal computer platforms / chipsets

• NVIDIA nForce
  • nForce IGP (AMD Athlon/Duron K7 line)
  • nForce2 (AMD Athlon/Duron K7 line, SPP (system platform processor) or IGP (Integrated Graphics Platform) and MCP (Media and Communications Processor), also features SoundStorm)
  • nForce3 (AMD Athlon 64/Athlon 64 FX/AMD Opteron, MCP only)
  • nForce4 (4X, Base, Ultra and SLi) (PCI Express support for AMD Athlon 64 processors and SLI technology on the SLi edition)
  • nForce 500
• Xbox GeForce3-class GPU (on an Intel Pentium III/Celeron platform)
• PlayStation 3 (RSX 'Reality Synthesizer')

Market History

Pre-DirectX

NVIDIA's original graphics card called the NV1 was released in 1995, based upon quadratic surfaces, with an integrated playback only soundcard and ports for Sega Saturn gamepads. Because the Saturn was also based upon forward-rendered quads, several Saturn games were converted to NV1 on the PC, such as Panzer Dragoon and Virtua Fighter Remix. However, the NV1 struggled in a market place full of several competing proprietary standards.

Market interest in the product ended when Microsoft announced the DirectX specifications, based upon polygons. Subsequently NV1 development continued internally as the NV2 project, funded by several millions of dollars of investment from Sega. Sega hoped an integrated sound and graphics chip would cut the manufacturing cost of their next console. However, even Sega eventually realised quadratic surfaces were a flawed implementation, and there is no evidence the chip was properly debugged. The NV2 incident remains something of a dark corporate secret for NVIDIA.

A Fresh Start

NVIDIA's CEO Jen-Hsun Huang realized at this point after two failed products, something had to change if the company was to survive. He hired David Kirk, Ph.D. as Chief Scientist from software developer Crystal Dynamics, a company renowned for the visual quality of its titles. David Kirk turned NVIDIA around by combining the company's 3D hardware experience, with an intimate understanding of practical implementations of rendering.

As part of the corporate transformation, NVIDIA abandoned proprietary interfaces, sought to fully support DirectX, and dropped multimedia functionality, in order to reduce manufacturing costs. NVIDIA also adopted an internal 6 month product cycle goal. The future failure of any one product would not threaten the survival of the company, since a next generation replacement part would always be available.

However, since the Sega NV2 contract was secret, and employees had been laid off, it appeared to many industry observers that NVIDIA was no longer active in research and development. So when the RIVA 128 was first announced in 1997, the specifications were hard to believe: Performance superior to market leader 3dfx Voodoo Graphics, and a full hardware triangle setup engine. The RIVA 128 shipped in volume, and the combination of its low cost and high performance 2D/3D acceleration made it a popular choice for OEMs.

Market Leadership

Having finally developed and shipped in volume the market leading integrated graphics chipset, NVIDIA set the internal goal of doubling the number of pixel pipelines in its chip, in order to realize a substantial performance gain. The TwiN Texel (RIVA TNT) engine NVIDIA subsequently developed, allowed either for two textures to be applied to a single pixel, or for two pixels to be processed per clock cycle. The former case allowing for improved visual quality, the latter doubling maximum fill rate.

New features included a 24-bit Z-buffer with 8-bit stencil support, anisotropic filtering, and per-pixel MIP mapping. In certain respects such as transistor count, the TNT had begun to rival Intel's Pentium processors for complexity. However, while the TNT offered an astonishing range of quality integrated features, it failed to displace the market leader Voodoo 2, because the actual clock speed ended up at only 90 MHz, about 35% less than expected.

However, this was only a temporary respite for Voodoo, as NVIDIA's refresh part was a die shrink for the TNT architecture from 350 nm to 250 nm. Stock TNTs now ran at 125 MHz, ULTRAs at 150 MHz. The Voodoo 3 was barely any faster and lacked features such as 32 bit color. The RIVA TNT2 marks a major turning point for NVIDIA. They had finally delivered a product competitive with the fastest on the market, with a superior feature set, strong 2D functionality, all integrated onto a single die with strong yields, that ramped to impressive clock speeds.

The GeForce Era

Not content to sit back, the fall of 1999 saw the release of the GeForce 256 (NV10), most notably bringing on-board transformation and lighting. The GF256 ran at 120 MHz and was also implemented with advanced video acceleration, motion compensation, hardware sub picture alpha-blending, and had four-pixel pipelines. When combined with DDR memory support, NVIDIA's technology was the hands down performance leader.

Basking in the success of its products, NVIDIA won the contract to develop the graphics hardware for Microsoft’s Xbox. The result was a huge $200 million advance. However, the project drew the time of many of NVIDIA's best engineers. In the short term, this was of no importance, and the GeForce 2 GTS shipped in the summer of 2000.

The GTS benefited from the fact NVIDIA had by this time acquired extensive manufacturing experience with their highly integrated cores, and as a result they were able to optimise the core for clock speeds. The volumes of chips NVIDIA was producing, also enabled them to bin split parts, picking out the highest quality cores for their premium range. As a result, the GTS shipped at 200 MHz. The pixel fill rate of the GF256 nearly doubled, and texel fill rate nearly quadrupled because multi-texturing was added to each pixel pipeline. New features included S3TC compression, FSAA, and improved MPEG-2 motion compensation.

More significantly, shortly afterwards NVIDIA launched the GeForce 2 MX, intended for the budget / OEM market. It had two pixel pipelines fewer, and ran at 175 and later, 200 MHz. Offering strong performance at a bargain basement price, the GeForce 2MX is probably the most successful graphics chipset of all time. A mobile version called the GeForce2 Go was also shipped at the end of 2000.

All of which finally proved too much for 3dfx whose Voodoo 5 had been delayed, and the board of directors started the process of dissolving 3dfx. This became one of the most spectacular and public bankruptcies in the history of personal computing. NVIDIA purchased 3dfx primarily for the intellectual property which was in dispute at the time, but also acquired anti-aliasing expertise, and about 100 engineers, who subsequently worked extensively on development of the ill fated FX series, to some minds proving 3dfx lacked the expertise to develop high performance integrated cores.

Shortcomings of FX series

At this point NVIDIA’s market position looked unassailable, and industry observers began to refer to NVIDIA as the Intel of the graphics industry. However while the next generation FX chips were being developed, many of NVIDIA’s best engineers were working on the Xbox contract, developing the SoundStorm audio chip, and a motherboard solution.

It is also worth noting Microsoft paid NVIDIA for the chips themselves, and the contract did not allow for falling manufacturing costs, as process technology improved. Microsoft eventually realized its mistake, but NVIDIA refused to renegotiate the terms of the contract. As a result, NVIDIA and Microsoft relations, which had previously been very good, deteriorated. NVIDIA was not consulted when the DirectX 9 specification was drawn up. Apparently as a result, ATI designed the Radeon 9700 to fit the DirectX specifications. Rendering color support was limited to 24-bits floating point, and shader performance had been emphasized throughout development, since this was to be the main focus of DirectX 9. The Shader compiler was also built using the Radeon 9700 as the base card.

In contrast, NVIDIA’s cards offered 16 and 32 bit floating point modes, offering either lower visual quality (as compared to the competition), or slow performance. The 32 bit support made them much more expensive to manufacture requiring a higher transistor count. Shader performance was often only half or less the speed provided by ATI's competing products. Having made its reputation by providing easy to manufacture DirectX compatible parts, NVIDIA had misjudged Microsoft’s next standard, and was to pay a heavy price for this error. As more and more games started to rely on DirectX 9 features, the poor shader performance of the GeForce FX series became ever more obvious. With the exception of the FX 5700 series (a late revision), the FX series lacked performance compared to equivalent ATI parts.

NVIDIA started to become ever more desperate to hide the shortcomings of the GeForce FX range. A notable 'FX only' demo called Dawn was released, but the wrapper was hacked to enable it to run on a 9700, where it ran faster despite a perceived translation overhead. NVIDIA also began to include ‘optimizations’ in their drivers to increase performance. While some that increased real world gaming performance were valid, hardware review sites started to run articles showing how NVIDIA’s driver autodetected benchmarks, and produced artificially inflated scores that did not relate to real world performance. Oftentimes it was tips from ATI’s driver development team that lay behind these articles. As NVIDIA’s drivers became ever more full of hacks and ‘optimizations,' the legendary stability and compatibility also began to suffer. While NVIDIA did partially close the gap with new instruction reordering capabilities introduced in later drivers, shader performance remained weak, and over-sensitive to hardware specific code compilation. NVIDIA worked with Microsoft to release an updated DirectX compiler, that generated GeForce FX specific optimized code.

Furthermore, the GeForce FX series also ran hot, because they drew as much as double the amount of power as equivalent parts from ATI. The GeForce FX 5800 Ultra became notorious for the fan noise, and acquired the nicknames ‘Dustbuster’ and 'leafblower.' While it was withdrawn and replaced with quieter parts, NVIDIA was forced to ship large and expensive fans on its FX parts, placing NVIDIA's partners at a manufacturing cost disadvantage compared to ATI. As a result of the FX series' weaknesses, NVIDIA quite unexpectedly lost its market leadership position to ATI.

Performance Leadership

NVIDIA's fightback began with the GeForce 6 series, which addressed the key issues that had plagued the FX series, namely shader performance and power consumption. By working closely with developers, especially as part of NVIDIA's "The way it's meant to be played" program, the company renewed its determination to produce integrated, easy to manufacture hardware, in line with industry requirements and expectations.

The results of this improved corporate focus came with the release of the GeForce 7 series. With 24 pixel pipelines, it gave NVIDIA the undisputed performance lead for the first time since the ATI 9700 release. More importantly, the parts shipped in volume the day the product was formally released. Pricing and availability has continued to be excellent, while ATI's comparable next generation parts suffered from repeated delays.

In 2005 NVIDIA also took advantage of the high bandwidth of PCI-Express, to introduce a new technology called Scalable Link Interface (SLI). Under this system, two graphics cards can be combined, to theoretically double graphical performance (though actual "real-world" performance is usually less). This has done much to re-establish NVIDIA's reputation among niche high end gamers. This system is similar to the Crossfire versions of ATI's new X1000 series.

Dominance in discrete desktop cards

According to a survey^[4] conducted by Jon Peddie Research, a leading market watch firm, concerning the state of the graphics market in Q2 2006 show that, while NVIDIA's market share in graphics chips overall remained at 3rd place at 20.30%, it is the dominant force in the discrete graphic card solution with a market share of about 51.5%.

Open Source development

Main article: NVIDIA and FOSS

NVIDIA provides binary GeForce graphics drivers for X11 and a thin open-source library that interfaces between the Linux, FreeBSD or Solaris kernels and the proprietary graphics software. NVIDIA's Linux support has promoted mutual adoption in the entertainment, scientific visualization, defense and simulation/training industries, which have been traditionally dominated by SGI, Evans & Sutherland and other relatively costly vendors.

Because of the proprietary nature of NVIDIA's drivers, they are at the center of an ongoing controversy within the Linux and FreeBSD communities. Many Linux and FreeBSD users insist on using only open-source drivers, and regard a binary-only driver as wholly inadequate. However, there are also users that are content with the officially-supported drivers.

Original Equipment Manufacturers

• 3D Fuzion
• Albatron
• AOpen
• ASUS
• Best-In-Graphics (BIG)
• BFG
• Biostar
• Chaintech
• Club 3D
• ELSA
• eVGA
• Geniman International Limited (GIL)
• Gainward
• Gigabyte
• GRANDMARS
• Inno3D
• Leadtek
• Micro-Star International (MSI)
• Palit
• PEAK
• POV
• Prolink Computer Inc
• PNY
• QDI
• Sparkle
• XFX
• Xmdia
• Xpertvision
• Zebronics (Top Notch Infotronix)

See also

• ATI Technologies
• Comparison of ATI Graphics Processing Units
• Comparison of NVIDIA Graphics Processing Units
• Matrox
• NVIDIA Demos

External links