Do we owe our 7800 GTX's to Microsoft?Firing Squad has a solid discussion/article posted on their site debating the benefits of the Xbox to PC hardware, specifically the video card market. Anybody even remotely interested in the graphics industry, or video cards in general over the past three years should give the article a read. Here's a snippet from the first page:
"By 2000, graphics technology was moving so fast that only the best engineers could keep up. S3 and Matrox (and PowerVR) had fallen far behind. 3Dfx would have collapsed on its own weight through feature creep and poor management. NVIDIA was already on their way to the top and this had so concerned ATI that they bought-out ArtX, the company that would give ATI their Radeon 9700.The exact impact on Microsoft on the ATI/NVIDIA rivalry is difficult to know. NVIDIA received $200 million up-front from Microsoft for the Xbox. That was as much as the entire 3dfx company was worth in 1998, when the Voodoo2 was at its peak. Likewise, the original plan was for DirectX 8 to provide an API for the pixel shader in the GeForce 2 GTS. But something happened to the DirectX8 spec where all of a sudden, the minimum level of support was the GeForce 3. That something was Microsoft.
Without Microsoft, it's possible that the GeForce FX could have come out earlier. Then again, if NVIDIA never received that $200 million investment from Microsoft, maybe ATI would have had an even bigger lead on NVIDIA when they launched the Radeon 9700."
There's lots more in there so give it a go.
Article Link: Face Off: Was the Xbox Naughty or Nice?
