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Hardware

Goodbye, Number Nine 91

Posted by emmett from the thanks-for-the-memory dept.
homerj79 writes: "Just got word from Ace's Hardware that Number Nine Visual Technology has shut its doors forever. This is sad news to hear about an old schooler in the graphics business. #9 was a pioneer in the graphics industry, introducing the first 128-bit chip, and the first 256-color and 16.7 millon-color cards. #9 was on a downward spiral as of late, with the company selling all of its technology and assets to S3 last year. This is the saddest news I've heard since Hercules announced it was going under. EBNews has a nice article on the company here."
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Goodbye, Number Nine More

Goodbye, Number Nine

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  • The graphics card market is breaking into 2 segments. The office/home segment where most of the heavy lifting is going to be handled by the CPU and where the 'graphics card' is simply more or less a port connector. The other segment is the high end 3D market which not only is very expensive to develop and support but holds a comparitively small market. You see the high end of the market going over the top where cards now have >1 ASIC processor, their own power supplies, special cooling, etc. To say nothing of the large investment in driver software and maintenance. At the low end of the market you basically become just a software company. With cycles to burn, current CPU's can be used for most functions previously relegated to peripherals: modem/DSL/cable, sound & video.
  • Let me illustrate by constructing a timeline:

    Number Nine has good OEM Sales.

    Microsoft releases DirectX.

    Number Nine declines DirectX support.

    OEM sales subsequently fall.

    Number Nine USED To have good OEM relations, until they refused DirectX. That is what crippled them. It's not the fact that they didn't have OEM sales to begin with, because they did.

    It's all moot anyway...They're dead now. :(

    -- Give him Head? Be a Beacon?

  • no dissasemble number nine!

    Want to work at Transmeta? MicronPC? Hedgefund.net? AT&T?

  • I remember when #9 was a card to avoid. I purchased a case of these cards when they were still buggy. Called them, they didn't want to make it right.

    I was left holding the bag for these cards. I threw them out after a few years, as I never could get them to work right.

    Others won't agree, but I'm left unmoved by their departure.

  • Many of you may have noticed this before, but did you ever stick one of the older Sega Genesis CD's in a CD player and play the audio track? It's a bunch of voices saying "Number Nine" backwards. Being the unobservant poseur that I am, I wonder if Number Nine had something to do with Sega's graphics rendering...it might have been specific games that did that, but for the life of me I can't remember which.
  • Same here. Been fighting with piece-of-shit #9 VLB/ISA/PCI cards based on S3 chips with non-standard ramdac and clockchip implementations at work. And when you got them finally working they're f*cking slow. Hate 'em. I can't say that they deserved what happened 'cause haven't tried any non-outdated products from them lately.
  • I mean, would YOU buy a AGP called "The Savory Truffle"?

    Hmm, I think you mean Savoy Truffle.

    And, hell yes, I would. I mean they would have a way cool tune for the commercial, and they could re-write the words:

    Cool TNT, or a nice Matrox part?
    My game of Quake is a finely tuned art.
    3dfx, I've heard is really good news...
    But you'd have to have them all pulled out to get the Savoy Truffle(tm)!

  • I was hired as the replacement after you and Carol left (you both interviewed me) and it was one of the best jobs I've ever had. Great bunch of people, just a little misled.
  • <i>S3 were huge back then too (#1 in fact) and they are now out of the graphics card business</i>

    They own Diamond, ya know.

    <i>This isn't that strange. Your #9 analysis is very weak. The Imagine 128 Series2 was still a major card and it was PCI. It wasn't the fast bus which sealed their fate, it was 3D. </i>

    I talked about the Imagine series--my point was that the fast bus killed the viability of their ridiculously profitable cards extremely quickly. They did come up with the Imagine series, which did well for quite some time(PCI is several years old, ya know), and we're in strong agreement that it was the rise of 3D that #9 couldn't keep up with.

    I'm not sure it's fair to say the key in the card business is IHV support--it sure works for ATI, as I talked about, but both nVidia and 3DFX went extremely long amounts of time with frustratingly low levels of IHV support. It's the IHV's that kept ATI alive through their years of having substandard products(though they pulled a great coup with their niche-fitting All In Wonder series), and it's the IHV's that are keeping Trident alive today. But I remember being shocked to find systems booting up with nVidia TNT's, and I don't think I've ever randomly come across a system that pre-shipped with a Voodoo 3, no matter how much I know they must be out there.

    Matrox has 3D that's usually about half a generation behind, but their niche plays(like being able to view the cinematics of Star Trek Armada on a separate screen!) are genius.

    I don't think we really disagree, Performer Guy. You yourself spent most of your time talking about *other companies* in an attempt to analyze the fall of #9.

    Who else do you think is on life support? We do disagree about Matrox--they're having enough problems fulfilling their demand :-)

    Yours Truly,

    Dan Kaminsky
    DoxPara Research
    http://www.doxpara.com
  • I Still use my old #9 128bit PCI video card. I remember it was the first 128bit out and it had an amazing 4 megs of video ram!!!! And even back then, it got 1600x1200 at 16.7K and 72Khz. I can't deal with anything below 1600x1200. Its a pain.

  • Re:Number Nine and OpenLDI (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Many Matrox cards and some GeForce-based cards have LDI connectors built-in.
  • I bought an Aptiva w/Athlon 550 just a few months ago. An 8M #9 card came installed in the AGP port, and it could run the UT demo pretty darn well. But, seeing that it was "only an 8M video chip", I replaced it with one of ATI's latest offerings with 32M of memory, since I wanted decent game performance and DVD playback. You know, there wasn't much on an improvement on UT, although the DVD playback skipped less. Probably due to more memory.

    But what really impresses me is that the gaming quality of an 8M #9 was close to that of a 32M ATI chipset. Interesting, I wonder what they would have done with 32M? I wish more companies would find ways to stretch the capabilities in our machines instead of using the "brute force required" approach that keeps Intel in business.

  • Too bad I didn't have a moderation option for "Poetic".
  • Nope. That was on the 4 pack game, as a joke/homage to the Beatles, which is were Number 9 got their name from too.
  • N9 was doomed when the street price for a 128 -II was 400ish, and a Matrox Mill 2 was 200. THe Mill 2 was a better card, as it was comparable business wise, and for 2d DOS games it was far superior. Game over, out of touch, good luck and god bless

    matt
  • you didn't happen to work at a *very* large insurance firm that is in the process of demutualizing, did you?

    matt
  • S3 has announced it's intention to sell (and may have already sold) it's graphics business to someone, probably VIA was the speculation last I looked, just check the press, it's official. They may own Diamond but Diamond never designed graphics chips, and infact with the reference designs produced by the chip vendors Diamond never did much of any graphics hardware design. It's is probably a healthier business to be in but it means they simply sell other folks designs with minor tweaks at best, often just software tweaks if that. Also it's only healthier if you're not shackled to a flagging chip vendor who can't design a competitive card for you to move through your sales channels.

    S3 made a loss of $98 million in FY98 on declining revenues (halved from FY97), from FY96 profit of $42 million. It's not a pretty picture, and they are bailing on the graphics business.

    There's no question that support by OEM's et.al. is key to any graphics chip company (which I was calling an IHV). It's their bread & butter. That's why the supply dries up so darned quickly when you fall behind in the performance stakes. They drop you like a ton of bricks when you fall behind, it's totally cutthroat and very non linear.
  • I agree with your assessments.

    What is amazing about nVidia is the fact that their first graphics chip product (NV1) was considered a major breakthrough because (in theory) you didn't need draw thousands of flat triangles to represent curved objects. Unfortunately, the implementation didn't quite work, but it laid the groundwork for better things to come.

    The arrival of the Riva 128 chipset was the breakthrough that nVidia needed: it processed 3-D graphics quite quickly for its day, and it supported 8 MB of RAM, also a lot in those days. It worked particularly well with DirectX 5.0, in fact it was in many ways almost as fast as the original 3Dfx Voodoo chipset (but didn't need to hog a precious PCI slot).

    nVidia really hit its stride with the Riva TNT and Riva TNT2 chipsets, which offered a major leap forward in 3-D performance and compared well with even Voodoo3. The GeForce 256 and GeForce GTS are outgrowths of the technology pioneered by the Riva TNT/TNT2 chipsets, which have far surpassed 3dfx's efforts (there are much doubts about Voodoo5).

    But nVidia can't rest on its laurels even now. Both ATI and Matrox have heavily invested in improving their graphics chipsets, and the current ATI Rage Fury and Matrox G400 are nothing to sneer at, to say the least.
  • So how does this effect the dreams of those of us who dream of having an SGI flat panel display on our linux machines?

    Well, the Graphics/Video Cards section of the SGI Flat Panel Q&A [sgi.com] on SGI's Web site says:

    SGI is committed to continue selling and supporting the digital graphics cards that are bundled with the Silicon Graphics 1600SW flat panel display. Production of the Number Nine cards for SGI continues uninterrupted, and the card will remain part of the 1600SW digital flat panel solution.

    (production by whom? S3?) and also says:

    Are there any other video adapters that support the 1600SW?
    At this time there are not, but we hope to have something to announce by spring or summer of 2000.

    and:

    When will the 1600SW support DVI?
    Keep watching our Web page for more news on this.

    XFree86 4.0 doesn't support the Revolution IV-FP, according to the Number Nine page in the XFree86 4.0 driver status stuff [xfree86.org]:

    22. Number Nine

    3.3.6:

    Support (accelerated) for the Imagine 128, Ticket 2 Ride, Revolution 3D and Revolution IV is provided by the XF86_I128 server.

    4.0:

    No native support for these chipsets, because the old driver has not been ported.

    Summary:

    No Number Nine chips are supported in 4.0.

    I don't know if this means "has not yet been ported", i.e. that there is a port in progress, or not.

  • yup. The Revolution IV, and the SR9 [nine.com] they sound half decent.
    As everyone knows their 2D cards really kicked ass, I'm sure their 3D ones were just as good.
  • Huh??? Number Nine has supported Linux, either directly or indirectly, since around 1993. I personally was responsible for much of this activity, and Perl was not a part of it.
  • It is, isn't it? Because they failed to toe the Microsoft party line, they went belly-up. And there are STILL some ignorant types out there that insist Microsoft does not hold an unhealthy monopoly over the industry!!



    Bust up the bastards NOW!

  • Not every #9 Revolution IV card supports the flat panel interface. I understand that SGI has a boatload of #9 cards that do support them, however. Apparently SGI also has a trick or two up their sleeves to keep the flat panels alive.
  • I have owned Number Nine cards with the original S3 chipsets (before the VirGE disasters). I moved from a Cirrus Logic 5429 VESA to the Number Nine FX Motion 531 - 2MB DRAM with a S3 868 chipset; I thought I was in heaven. Next I bought a Number Nine GXE 64 Pro with a S3 964, 220MHz TI RAMDAC, and 4MB VRAM - was drooling (...When I'm 64!). My final Number Nine card was the Number Nine FX Motion 771 that had 2MB VRAM and an S3 968 chipset. I bought it thinking that I could toss 2MB more VRAM on it, but it didn't have sockets. It was still a pretty card. All of these Number Nine cards worked beautifully with X - they still do.

    Then S3 started designing things like the VirGE. Number Nine was never the same after that. I wish I had experience with the Number Nine TTR series with their own graphics engines.... Anyone have one or two for sale?

  • I kept waiting for them to branch out to other '60s songs and make a Video Potion #9 board.

  • And re-read my post. How can you have crippled OEM sales if you never had them to begin with? ATI destroyed that potential, not Microsoft. It was a minor point in my post, anyway.

    jf
  • I'm left unmoved by their departure.

    Ditto. My system came with a #9 Motion 771, which used the S3 Vision968. This chip had a horrific bug: it used memory it didn't say it used. This caused all sorts of problems. Can you find any mention of it on the S3 or #9 site? No. I found out about it from a Voodoo2 installation note (the problem actually occurred with a USB controller).

    I wasn't thrilled with the card anyway, because each driver kit was worse than the last. #9 taught me to never delete an old driver kit, a lesson that helped me to survive the Voodoo3.

  • No, I M Weasel

  • The Strange Case Of The Video Card Industry (Score:5)

    by Effugas ( 2378 ) on Wednesday May 17, 2000 @05:55AM (#1067256) Homepage
    I actually don't think there's an industry more bizarre than the one that creates Video Cards.

    #9 was more than a contender, guys--they were the *leaders* in quality cards for years. They made their fortunes in the ISA market engineering the first cards that could actually push *serious* video through a seriously slow interface. Their highest end card, which was generally significantly more powerful than the machine it was placed in, sold for over a grand but enabled extremely high resolution functionality with the necessary acceleration to support it. The switch to VLB, and then PCI, really took alot of wind out of their sales--to be blunt, the bus stopped sucking and their chips weren't as necessary to achieve good performance. Their stopgap manuever--licensing S3's once market-leading chipsets of first the S3-868 and then the truly excellent S3-968--should have fortold for them the viability of licensed chipsets. But the good reaction they got to their Imagine-128 boards--expensive as they were--led them down a path where there really could only be one winner: Fastest Chipset.

    3DFX truly had an intriguing business model. By not supplanting the 2D market, they could build off the engineering successes of companies like S3 while focusing on their core skills of 3D Design. And focus they did--<b>it was, and still is, unprecedented in the history of the computer hardware industry for any company to have had such a technological leap over their competition for as long as 3DFX did.</b> Their Voodoo 1 was quite literally revolutionary, and was at least two generations above <b>anything</b> their competitors could get out the door. With video card generations turning over every six months to a year, card after card came out that couldn't meet what 3DFX had long since delivered.

    3DFX surpassed the hype of the "RISC programmable core" Verite video processor, and finally fulfilled the promises of a hype-addicted but surprisingly leading edge small company that decided to bring 3D to the PC desktop before anyone else...no one other than a small startup by the name of nVidia.

    Does anybody else here remember the Edge3D? Proclaiming loudly the benefits of their propietary and rather unique quadratic mapping methodology(essentially, developers could specify four points that would make a texture appear to wrap cylindrically or spherically around a target polygon), it was the first 3D chip for the PC and <b>it stunk</b>. Badly. From what I remember reading, a number of developers tried porting their games to the chipset but couldn't get performance that matched a raw video card--all those years of learning tricks for extracting the most ridiculous performance levels out of the x86 disarchitecture simply outweighed the underengineered nVidia Edge3D.

    About the only thing that card was good for was playing ported games from the Sega Saturn--and, since nobody else would write games to the Edge API, Saturn controllers were bundled with many Edge 3D cards. This was all rather ironic, considering that the Sega Saturn was probably the biggest console miscalculation in history--it was designed to be the ultimate 2D system just as Sony(who had once been collaborating with Nintendo for their new "Playstation" system you might have heard of) was about to bring gamers into the brave new world of 3D. A basic 3D chipset was spooged in at the last minute, but to say it was drastically underpowered would be an understatement. It was weaker than words can describe, so it's games ported quite well to the Edge 3D. :-)

    nVidia's Edge came out; it was an utter failure. Next came the S3 Virge, and for all the excitement with the "FreeD"(Free 3D with that 2D card) excitement...it turned out to be significantly faster just to play Descent on a Pentium with a *good* card. Even the Verite I spoke of earlier really wasn't all that nice, despite apparently some trademark RISC Core coding by Carmack himself. Nope, wasn't till 3DFX came along with their Voodoo 1, with the Wizard's Tower demo, this ridiculously cool thing with Dolphins jumping all around, and (finally!) a 3D Fighting Demo for PC that we finally had three dimensional graphics as de rigeur for a gaming PC.

    What's ridiculous is that, for as long as 3DFX was on top with their Voodoo 1, just as competitors were starting to catch up they pulled out their Voodoo 2 with SLI functionality. Two cards, twice the profit for 3DFX, twice the power to keep competitors at bay--it was a beautiful thing. But as I said earlier, those cards never used their own 2D engines--they depended on other 2D cards. Diamond was quite happy to sell both their 2D solution from S3(which I bought, and if you ever get me inebriated enough I'll tell you about what happened between me, a broken Stealth, and an emotionally unstable woman in Diamond Tech Support) and their 3D solution from 3DFX--the veritable Monster 3D series. But #9, having seen good success from their Imagine 128 line and believing(quite arguably) that the declining profits of the card industry practically mandated making your money off the chip side, stuck to only selling 2D cards until they could get their 3D solution out the door.

    By the time they did, it wasn't even a contender.

    Also, by the time they did, 3DFX had long since finally listened to their OEMs who were complaining about cost structures from having to ship two cards instead of one and integrated 2D into their cards--first awfully, with the Voodoo Rush(ed), later castrated, with the Voodoo Banshee, and fiiiinally correctly with the Voodoo 3.

    So #9 was left with a 3D card that couldn't cut it, 2D cards that didn't measure up to industry expectations, and no pre-existing relationship with any major chip vendor(at this point, just nVidia since 3DFX bought STB and stopped OEMing out its chips due to plummeting prices of their cards). Having gone entire generations without an industry-contender product--not even in a market niche!--they had nowhere to go and plenty of debt.

    It was just time to turn the page. It's too bad--particularly since, if I remember correctly, they really had the Compaq/Dell/etc. style connections that have sustained ATI much to the confusion of gamers worldwide wondering how such a generally "Behind the curve" company could always get its products into millions of corporate desktops. ATI always managed to do the bare minimum to keep those OEMs--#9 just didn't or couldn't and lost what it had.

    It's too bad. They made *good products*--their Motion771 was my favorite card to get for quite some time. But it's a different world right now--and it's getting even more different, with 3DFX having lost (from what I've heard) most of its core engineers and having been lapped by nVidia's GeForce2 processor(replete with Per Pixel Shading Acceleration By The GPU! I wonder if it does Quadratic Texturing too...) ATI's making noises of industry leading again, but then they did that with their Rage chipset and...well. Rage indeed. Matrox, of course, is doing well in the position #9 should have been in with their extreme quality RAMDAC's for high-res performance and now, dual head support implemented absolutely beautifully(got a TV? Play the DVD there? OK.) S3's just out their getting Savaged...though I have to wonder if they've picked up the "cheap quality 3D" market that they fed for so long with their truly lousy Virge. They own Diamond though, and Diamond (last I checked? Has this changed?) pushes quite a bit of nVidia product out the door. At +$200 a card, that's among the more expensive components left in modern machines!

    As far down as #9 has sunken, nVidia has risen to the top of the heap, not as far above as 3DFX was in its prime but a good generation ahead. To think that it was three years ago that I was being laughed at for saying nVidia was to stage a massive comeback, as I had seen their Riva 128 at WinHEC and It Was Good(and I had also seen Cyrix's M2 processor struggle through Quake and had been practically ordered not to release the results of my ill-gotten TimeDemo)...

    Wow. People wonder why there's so much excitement and activity on gaming sites like Bluesnews and Old Man Murray. Companies race, fight, live, and die on a field that's ever shifting, not particularly predictable, and booby trapped left and right.

    In other words, the Video Card industry is pretty much Tech's Gladiator Pit. Want a Ticket?

    Yours Truly,

    Dan Kaminsky
    DoxPara Research
    http://www.doxpara.com
  • Search for: Linux

    Sorry, but search returned no results.

    Try http://www.nine.com/support/docs/linux.html [nine.com]

  • I bought a Reality 332 (original Virge) card from them, but it had some problems.

    Namely, on my old (it was 1996) fixed-frequency montor, I couldn't run the card at high resolutions. So I called them. No one answered. I had to leave a message.

    "Hi, I'd like to ask how to control the sync rates used by your card/driver at high resolutions so it can work with my fixed-frequency monitor. Thanks!"

    I got a call back when I was at work:
    "The Number Nine 332 card only supports multi-sync monitors. You must acquire a multi-sync monitor to use this card. If you have further questions you may contact me at XXX-XXX-XXXX"

    I thought it was really clever of them not to mention this anywhere in the product description, sales lit, etc. (a lot of people still had such monitors then). Luckily, a trip to the s3 ftp site turned up a dos utility that would program the card to your preferred sync rates. I dropped it in the autoexec, and ha, it worked.

    I called back the support flack:
    "Hello there, this is the guy who called about his fixed freqency monitor before.. ticket number A56B34XX-QQ. I have a further question. Would you like me to train your support department on your products? It seems the Reality 332 supports fixed-frequency just fine. I am using it successfully right now. To learn more about your products, visit the s3 web site."

    All I can say is thank goodness s3 was running a decent operation at the time. That virge was a highly dependable 2d card for dos, demos, windows, linux, games, etc. The 3d sucked, but hey it was cheap anyway, and the other option at the time was the verite, and I'm glad I didn't buy that.

  • Maybe now SGI will bother to make their 1600sw flat panel screen useable with the
    industry standard DDI instead of the propriatary
    port that requres bundling with the old #9 card.
  • Some people think diversity in the marketplace is a good thing, and that it avoids the creation of monopolies like (cough) Microsoft.

    It's really an ideological question .. if you support diversity, you support open systems. If not, you take your Microsoma like everyone else and be happy.
  • Maybe with instructions on how to get your card working with Linux?
    I would love to get my GXi card running as a framebuffer. (or frankly anything better than the windows 3.1 stuff it came with)

    cya, Andrew...

  • In Dec '95 I ordered my first PC, and paid an extra $110 to get a 64-bit video card with 2 megs of VRAM, instead of the 32-bit card with 1 meg of DRAM. As it turned out I got the Motion 771 from #9. That card kicked ass, and it did so for a long time. When I started to outgrow and upgrade components on my PC (monitor, hard drive, modem, memory) my #9 card never fell short of my demands.

    For a long time there, #9 was one of the few (at least to my knowledge, in the general market) to offer VRAM, when everyone else was doing tricks with WRAM, EDO-DRAM, etc. WRAM, as I was told only did its magic under Windows, and VRAM could outperform it under DOS applications. This was important to me, since I was very heavily into Doom, Doom2, Heretic, Hexen, Duke Nukem, etc. I loved those classic DOS games, and never liked Quake or the new "3d" ones.

    Later I did buy a Voodoo card for $30 bucks in '98 to see what 3d was all about, but wasn't that impressed. Yeah I could actually play Quake2 if I wanted, but Id Software sucked after Doom2 so you can keep your 3d.

  • Unfortunately, driver specs for hardware from dead companies is almost never available. This is because companies never really "die" -- rather, their assets are sold at auction to the highest bidder (at the most extreme, Chapter 7 liquidation), including all "intellectual property". The "intellectual property" (chip specs, patents, etc.) tend to be bought out by companies (often former competitors of the dead company) who want the patents to add to their own patent blackmail portfolio (that is, as counter-patents for other people's patents), who have no interest in the actual hardware designs or drivers.

    Unfortunately, rousing such people to do anything with the aquired "intellectual property" is pretty much impossible. The actual hardware designs are not viewed as something that could make money, but it would cost money to get somebody off their duff to dust them out and publish them, and the accountants would scream about how "hey, you're giving away something we paid for! How do we account for this on our depreciation charts?!". So dead, generally, means dead...

    A shame, really. It'd be great if somebody could set up a "dead hardware specs exchange" that would pay these companies for the specs to this dead hardware, and then publish it. But the problem is, how would such a "dead hardware specs exchange" be funded? That's the #1 problem keeping such an idea from happening.

    BTW, the problem of dead software companies is even worse... that's one reason why Microsoft became so big (people being scared to buy from a company that might not be around in five years, thus choosing the "safe" choice), and also, BTW, the reason why Linux has gained market share lately while, e.g., Be Inc. has not (Be might not be around in five years, while it would take a massive nuclear war with resulting destruction of humanity to rid the world's hard drives of the Linux source code).

    -E

  • Yes, the Revolution IV, and some other models too.


    (rant)I wasn't impressed when 3d cards entered the marketplace. PC Manufacturers started putting 3d cards from good name companies (Diamond, Mattrox, etc) in their mainstream offerings, but the things you needed 3d for (games like Quake, Hexen II, etc.) mostly required a specific chip (3dfx) that was hard to find to say the least. And why should I buy a seperate 3d card, when I've already paid for one anyway. And why should I have to run the output of my video card into another video card, and tie up a pci slot? Huh? Answer me that!
    (/rant)

    But OEM's stopped using #9 and went with Mattrox and Diamond and others because they had better numbers. But I had a #9 Motion 771 with 2 megs of VRAM which served me well for 3 years. The 3d card wars are still hot and we'll see what comes in the future.

  • I had the Motion 771 and DirectX 3 worked fine on it. I later moved up from 95 to NT Workstation which didn't support anything higher than DirectX3 so I don't know if the higher versions were supported.
  • This totally sucks. I really liked their cards. I had the pleasure of picking out that sweet silicon graphics/#9 digital display- for someone else- what an imazing display- and on NT!

    oh well...
  • What is amazing about nVidia is the fact that their first graphics chip product (NV1) was considered a major breakthrough because (in theory) you didn't need draw thousands of flat triangles to represent curved objects. Unfortunately, the implementation didn't quite work, but it laid the groundwork for better things to come.

    Forgot about that...but I'm not sure it really laid any groundwork. I mean, think about it--five years later, are we really doing much that we'd otherwise have to fake with more poly's? All the advances seem to be focused on fill rate--reduce the number of passes to add this effect, automate anti-aliasing to create that effect, etc. Is there anything that's automatically doing something akin to "smooth quad divide", i.e. automatically tesselating incoming polys into smoother forms?

    Yours Truly,

    Dan Kaminsky
    DoxPara Research
    http://www.doxpara.com
  • After I paid > $2000 for the display, I didn't mind shelling out another $100 for an X server that supports it well, from Xi Graphics, http://www.xig.com/ Works perfectly.

  • woah, that was weird. this article really caught my eye, as i've been using the dj name "number nine" for quite a while. in fact, a few other djs even sent me a copy of the article (scary: i didn't know so many people read slashdot these days!)

    strange. but this really is too bad -- i remember having a kickass number nine video card back in the day.

    but more importantly, i wonder if they'll sell me nine.com! :)

    - j - djnumbernine.com [djnumbernine.com]

  • I bought a Revolution 3D video card when it came out, along with the memory daughter card. In the end, I had a $500 card that was bought for the sole purpose of using 3D Studio MAX. I had this card because it was advertised by #9 that 3DS Max was one of their primary target applications.

    What is important is that 3D Studio MAX requires specialized drivers in order to utilize its 3d functionality. Of course, since number 9 was targeting MAX as one of their primary applications, I assumed that the drivers would be included with the card. Wrong. So, I checked their web site -- no drivers. At this, I became worried. However, being a relatively calm person, I called up their tech support and asked them the status of the drivers.

    The tech folks said that the drivers were in testing and would be released within the month. Ok, I'm happy. I'll just use software rendering until then. A month rolls around -- no drivers? I call again. This time, they say it is going to be another couple of months. So, now I start getting a little irritated. A month has passed, I can no longer return the card, and it is looking like they rooked me. I don't have enough money to be throwing it away like that, so I try to get some confirmation that they are, in fact, working on the drivers. They refused to send out any beta drivers, any incompletes, any anything for assurance.

    Well, the story has an unhappy ending. After Autodesk released Max 2.0 (a couple weeks after, actually), Number 9 finally released the Max v1 heidi drivers. HAHA, great. Of course, v1 drivers aren't compatible with v2. I was screwed by number 9, and they didn't care -- they never offered any sort of reperations or even a simple apology.

    So, I say this: GREAT. I'm happy they are out of business, and I hope their managers can't find replacement jobs. It is a sweet dessert to my eyes to read this news.

    Tanner
  • Yeah, what happened to Tseng Labs?
    I recall the ET4000/W32p being the first common chipset with 2D acceleration and awesome transfer rates. It really must have rocked those days.
    (I couldn't afford one and was stuck with my lousy Paradise :-)

    But what happened to them after?
    I also remember them bringing out the ET6000, beating the Matrox Millennium in 2D performance, but I think they too missed the 3D train and have gone the same way as #9.

  • Highly competitive industry (Score:3)

    by joshv ( 13017 ) on Wednesday May 17, 2000 @03:45AM (#1067272)
    As someone who actually bought shares in 3DFX I know personally how competitive this industry can be. It seems like no one company has been able to stay on top of the video card/3D accelerator market for too long.

    nVidia is there right now. Who will it be in the future?

    This pattern also seems to be followed in other PC peripheral markets as well. Hayes went out of business after falling from the top of the modem market. Sound card hardware has been commoditized to the point where I doubt anyone is making much money in that market, accept for nich, high end hardware.

    The moral of the story, if you are the owner of a high flying PC peripheral company, sell out sooner, rather than later.

    -josh
  • Number 9
    Number 9
    Number 9

    Years ago, the company I worked for at the time spent a good chunk of change to get us all state of the art computers. Dell P100s with #9 Imagine 128s and 21" Nokia Monitors and 1 Gig hard drives. Oh, it was heaven.

    Having a 21" monitor was very nice. Having the I128 with 8 Megs of RAM was very nice. We could run 1600x1200x65535. Very nice.


    --
    then it comes to be that the soothing light at the end of your tunnel is just a freight train coming your way

  • The real reason for the demise. (Score:3)

    by jabber ( 13196 ) on Wednesday May 17, 2000 @04:42AM (#1067274) Homepage
    They ran out of Beatles songs to keep the product line going...

    I mean, would YOU buy a AGP called "The Savory Truffle"?
  • It does not seem that long ago that Number 9 was one of the best and brightest in the industry, with the 771 and Imagine 128. Now they are another casualty in the graphics adapter wars.

    At least we can be thankful there are no dominators in this sector like Microsoft is to software. As someone mentioned, some new player dominates the industry for a short period, then loses it. But as Hercules illustrates, it can at least be cyclical, allowing the occasional comeback. It seems sad to say, but this is what real competition is like in a small highly-dedicated market.

    -L
  • So how does this effect the dreams of those of us who dream of having an SGI flat panel display on our linux machines? Those display's require #9 cards (or at least they used to).
  • did they ever have a 3d product?
  • I mean, would YOU buy a AGP called "The Savory Truffle"?

    I dunno, sounds like a pretty sweet video card to me. Though it would probably leave a sour taste in your mouth after using it for a while...

  • Isn't it amazing that by not complying with a Microsoft specification, you can go under?

    But failure to design its products in compliance with the then-emerging DirectX software interface from Microsoft Corp. crippled the company's OEM sales.

    Number Nine had some serious breakthroughs in it's day, three of which were mentioned above. However, simply the lack of early DirectX support doomed the company? Sheesh.

    Number Nine is one of the first companies to offer its users drivers certified by Microsoft's Windows Hardware Quality Labs (WHQL). (From Number Nine's site.)

    Seems like a case of Too Little, Too late. Number Nine didn't support DirectX early on, and their sales to OEMs started to slip. Later on, they scrambled to gain sales back and in (what seems to be) desperation, they slapped on a WHQL certification.

    It's a shame to see a pioneer fail....especially due to something so small.

    -- Give him Head? Be a Beacon?

  • When the high-end PC graphics card market was driven by people who needed the best 2D acceleration at the greatest resloutions and color depths, Number Nine was at its prime. Then 2D high-end PC graphics cards began to plateau, and 3D began emerging. Number Nine's first Imagine 128 series had great expandability and great 2D but really no 3D capability. The Imagine 128 Series 2 came out and still had no real 3D capability, so gamers were actually better off with an S3 Virge! Hardware accelerated OpenGL was now available on Windows platforms, but Nine missed the boat hoping to continue after the "high end" 2D market. By the time the Revolution 3D chips came out, 3Dfx was making waves in the 3D market, and S3 Virge chips were in the very low cost market (where S3 was still making tons of money). The Revolution 3D had much better 3D - relative to the other Nine cards. But it was unspectacular compared to most available chipsets. You can still find these cards that Nine was trying to sell for $300+ in bargain lots. Why pay $300 for 2D that is about the same as a Matrox Millennium II or the I128 Series II, and 3D that sucks? True the Revolution could expand to 32MB and had AGP, but that wasn't enough to make it compare to even a 6MB, $150 Voodoo Graphics card in games!!! Selling their technology to S3 and picking up the Savage 4 on their SR9 was too little, too late.
  • a TRS-80 I have lying around somewhere, and an ATARI console.
  • 18 months ago year, I inherited a 3 or 4 year old #9 video card. I had no documentation for this card. I emailed a quick driver question to their customer service, and from that mail they offered to email me an updated video BIOS chip. Mind you, I was NOT reporting a problem, but they wanted to do the "right thing" since the card was not registered (even if they did send postcards or email notifications). How many companies would do that today, even if you DID register? Registering typically is a way of harvesting demographic information (Microsoft is a particularly selfish example...) \
  • I suspect that the greatest cost of a graphics card is merely the fact that it is a card, and plugs into a slot. Once you get past that expense, you get to the things we have, today.

    The 'base function' graphics that you refer to isn't worth the slot to plug it in. In fact, it's usually integrated on the motherboard. I would expect the base function graphics card market to completely dry up and blow away because of this.

    The curious part is if the base function graphics will get sucked into the Northbridge, using UMA for the display buffer. Sure, it's no high-performance solution. If you want that, buy a card and use a slot.
  • As someone posted on TMF's [fool.com] message board:

    Another one bites the dust

    Another one bites the dust

    And another one's gone
    And another one's gone
    Another one bites the dust

    Hey, I'm gonna get you too
    Another one bites the dust

    Just look at all the companies that have either gone under, left the graphics ring, or were bought out...

    Hercules, Tseng Labs, Cirrus, NeoMagic, Oak Technologies, Paradise, Chips and Technologies, Real3D, etc...

    So who's next? The investor linked above suggests 3D Labs, as it's burning cash at an alarming rate. Trident hasn't been doing too well lately either.
  • Number Nine was one of the least-friendly companies about questions like "why don't you have Mac drivers?" or "what about Unix, then?".

    As I recall, they had some Mac cards at one point,
    which were the same hardware as their PC cards, and cost 3x as much. At the time, I was looking for Mac cards, and believe me, when I established that they had "identical" cards at wildly different prices just to gouge the mac market, I started ignoring their cards entirely.

    I think they died because they botched, and because they didn't react well to the market.
  • This isn't that strange. Your #9 analysis is very weak. The Imagine 128 Series2 was still a major card and it was PCI. It wasn't the fast bus which sealed their fate, it was 3D.

    S3 were huge back then too (#1 in fact) and they are now out of the graphics card business, is the 4-5 year death spiral a new 'Moores law' for troubled card IHV's? This was another player who couldn't get enough 3D performance soon enough and rev it fast enough. They gave it a good fight but couldn't match the product turnaround and performance hikes of other IHV's.

    The key in the card business seems to be win the big OEM deals, get DELL, Gateway et. al. to bundle your cards. #9 were too slow to build fast 3D cards, their ticket to ride was too little too late, and earlier cards couldn't texture. They missed the 3D boat and it killed them. This keeps happening in the PC space. When you miss like that the buyers are so fickle that almost all of your business dries up overnight and when that happens it's difficult to catch up, difficult to retain staff, difficult to hire people and difficult to fund new development. You're on a steep slippery slope.

    This is still happening in PC land, IHV's are leap frogging each other regularly. The latest rule seems to be that you must produce a significant performance and/or feature boost every 6 months or lose lot's of ground. You've seen 3Dfx miss, and now their VSA 100 is nice but they're behind on T&L and are a little off the money on fill performance unless you throw a lot of parts at the problem and that sucks power and costs $$. Their hail mary play is to buy Gigapixel and try and come back with something interesting and competitive maybe in a year (maybe spoiling the other Gigapixel liscensees was added incentive). In the meantime they are probably praying that the tbuffer is interesting enough to tide them over.

    There are also some really desperate schemes to try and scale performance, for example ATI's time multiplexed dual pipeline card. The demand for more performance is so great that you absolutely must turn a new product or wave your business goodbye overnight. It's easier to lay out a board than it is to design a new chip and if your chip can't scale well then you add a big assed FIFO on the front, add two parts, multiplex the video at the back and you're still in business. ATI mobility chips seem to be doing well (no real competition yet) but they've lost ground on the desktop. I don't see charisma producing enough performance to beat GeForce2 never mind the followon which might even beat charisma out the door in volume, and nVidia are doing a good job of stealing their feature thunder with some ...err... marketing.

    Matrox,... well I hope they have some super secret design ready to ship real soon or they might hit the same brick wall other victims have.

    #9 will probably not be the last to go. Let's hope there are always enough players to keep things interesting and moving at a brisk pace. There's nothing worse than VP's and marketing droids in a monopoly setting prices and development schedules.
  • Hey, to tell you the truth I used to have utmost respect for them but they failed to move with the market. They were producing graphics cards (Imagine 128 series 2) for $500-$600 when a Matrox Millenium at the time could have been purchased for around half of that -- with comparable performance, if not better in some cases. Maybe I'm a bit jaded because I slapped down the extra $$ for one only to recieve a complete lack of driver support later on down the road. (I beleive it was a lack of NT4 support, but I really don't recall). I grew up right near the company and I was always cheering for the local guys, but it became harder and harder as it was becoming a clearly understaffed (ala multiple driver promises, but very few executions)and just a general death spiral... There were some talented folks there that I'm sure can contribute to the industry in other places...

    later...cj
  • This failure to comply with Direct X statement is complete nonsense.

    The failed to build a fast 3D texture board.

    Even the Imaging 128 Series 2 supported Direct X & D3D (it didn't texture but that's a hardware deficiency), the trouble was they never managed to produce an interesting 3D card after 3D arrived. The supported DirectX and Direct 3D in every single card they made in the relevant time period. Direct X support was always there and was never the issue with Number Nine. Features and performance was the problem.

    This ignorant revisionist claptrap is rather annoying.
  • >Does anybody else here remember the Edge3D?

    ya, sure, my neighbor has one, it's got a Nvidia NV1? chipset, it's sitting in the garage somewhere rotting away.



    Zetetic
    Seeking; proceeding by inquiry.

    Elench
    A specious but fallacious argument; a sophism.
  • Sorry, but I just have to ask it:

    What's going to happen to 7 of #9? :)

    kwsNI

  • Quarters--

    Pay attention for a sec--3DFX utterly rewrote the rules of the video card industry, while giving "switchover time" to everyone else by dint of their 3D-Only nature. #9 had two options--OEM the latest and greatest 3D chipsets from whoever would license their chips(this used to include 3DFX) or stick to 2D only while people bought 3DFX's 3D Solution until the Ticket to Ride managed to happen.

    It did manage to happen, and for what I remember it was pretty decent 2D but not competitive 3D.

    You literally cannot understand the fall of #9 without understanding the rise of 3DFX, and the rise of 3DFX is much more interesting considering its present fall. Understand, at this point two of the oldest leaders in the video industry--Hercules and #9--are out of business, while STB (makers of the beautiful STB Lightspeed 128--wonder whatever happened to Tseng Labs?) has been absorbed by 3DFX and even Diamond is owned by S3. These are huge companies with huge amounts of respect from the various OEMs--but they all died in one form or another.

    Lead, Follow, or Get Out Of The Way. #9 was forced to do the last of that, and there's really no other way to analyze that than to look at what they were getting out of the way *of*.

    Yours Truly,

    Dan Kaminsky
    DoxPara Research
    http://www.doxpara.com
  • Got 4 of them 2MB & 4MB
  • WOW!! Revolution 512x32 w/Genlock Module for capture. I still have one in working order. Those were the GO-Go day's. We couldn't make enough of them. There is one in the Smithsonion Institute showing weather patterns. The product even saw action during Desert Storm. The best part of the Cambridge office were the sub's at Ma Magoo's. Rick
  • well, i saw the fall for #9 coming a long time ago , after the Imagine 128 series 2, the 3d revolution took place and they never caught on. Their "Revolution 3D" and "Revolution 4" card sucked at 3d, even my lowly matrox g200 can beat the crap out of it.

    It's sad to see a company that produced excellent video cards [i still remember the first Imagine 128s, 4 MEGS OF RAM BABY! (= ] but when you don't keep up with your competition you are gonna get blown out of the water (duh) A few years ago, Matrox was in a similar position as #9, both companies produced excellent 2D cards with no 3D capabilities. But Matrox managed to stay alive with the G200 which offered acceptable performance at the time and then the G400 was much faster and it had unique features like EMBM and Dualhead display. #9 OTOH, didn't produce anything good in the past few years, and once they sold their technology to S3, it was pretty much all over... Goodbye #9...




    Zetetic
    Seeking; proceeding by inquiry.

    Elench
    A specious but fallacious argument; a sophism.
  • No sorry but you are mistaken. Revolution 512x8 was introduced in the early 80's using an NEC 7220 graphics processor, competing with Control Systems, Nth Engine, Imagraph, PixelWorks and a few select others. Cirrus was founded in 1984 and Trident 1987. Number Nine had already designed a board which did 512x512 @16.7 million colors when these guy's were just babies.
  • Nope, it was just an old code grinding shop.
    --
    then it comes to be that the soothing light at the end of your tunnel is just a freight train coming your way
  • I tried the same thing. I had trouble using one of their S3 based (968?) cards in an OS/2 box. The text messages on bootup were scrambled. They didn't even offer me the BIOS update (which was all that was left, after trying different drivers and slots). They basically just shoved me off because I ran OS/2.
  • "PC gamer card"
  • You could buy my old #9 Revolution IV card...
    In fact, I bet you will find a bunch of them for quite some time...(Like the Revolution IV)

    I wouldn't worry unless you plan on buying an SGI flat panel more than 2 years from now...
  • Yes, I would.

    Would you buy a AGP called S3 Virge? I did that too, of course it was the only AGP that was supported in the kernel that I could get and afford at the time.

    And after that card, A Savoy Truffle would be grrrreat!

    Devil Ducky
  • As I get older, I have more time behind
    me to ponder. I like to think back to 1978
    standing there in a computer store watching
    a woman move a whole paragraph with just a
    few keystrokes. I was just blown away.

    She was using a Sol. Those were the best
    days for me.

    And the graphics on the Apple II, pure magic!

    I'd like to open a computer museum that looks
    like an "old style" compter store. Have lots
    of magazines from the period.

    I have an old 10 meg hard drive on my bookshelf
    here at work. It's huge. It originally sold for
    over $700. That kind of thing would make a cool
    display too.

    Just time tripping.
  • Practically every part of the industry is competetive. Not just graphics accelerators. Look at the Intel vs. AMD wars, Aureal vs. Creative (well ok so that ones over) the OS wars currently going on. In an industry that moves so fast only the most competetive will be able to keep up. And nothing lasts forever.


    My Home: Apartment6 [apartment6.org]
  • #9 missed out on the 3d card 'revolution'. Always a step behind 3dfx, nVidia, and even Matrox. Who would have thought only a few years ago that those crappy S3 Virge cards could have financed the buyout of Diamond Multimedia and the eventual demise of S3? #9 was almost always good about customer support, and the hardware was decient to say the least. -- they will be missed.
  • Were there any other supporters of this connection tech other than Number Nine? I've been wanting to move off this card, but the sgi flat pannel only comes with an OpenLDI connector. Oh well. The card wasn't all that bad, I just couldn't play quake 3 under it.
  • >Isn't it amazing that by not complying with a
    >Microsoft specification, you can go under?

    I think that this is a gross oversimplification of what happened. I don't remember seeing too many OEMed #9 cards or chips even in their salad days.

    Personally, I think you can chalk up them not moving fast enough to the 3D and portable markets, being shut out of the potenital OEM market by ATI, and suffering the same fate as S3 (until they made some headway with the Savage), Cirrus Logic, and Trident.

    I don't think we can blame Microsoft for EVERYTHING.
  • > Just look at all the companies that have either gone under, left the graphics ring, or were bought out...
    > NeoMagic

    The laptop video chipset ? What happened to them?!
  • Alas, I knew #9 well.. For much of my younger career, and up until recently, they'd been the shining light in 2D video cards. I will miss them. However, I do have one rather major concern.

    Do we have available, the driver specs for full use of all the cards? I'm talking the register level stuff! We might want this when upgrading X drivers or if something new presents itself!
  • They've announced that they're shifting their business to "Wireless Multimedia Communications". NeoMagic used to be in a relatively uncrowded market niche, but they recently have come under heavy pressure as other companies introduced mobile video chipsets (ATI in particular). NeoMagic chips will still turn up for a while, but there won't be much further development.

    http://www.neomagic.com/press1.html
    "NeoMagic will shift its focus to developing 'Wireless Multimedia Communications' technologies, based on our vision to provide semiconductor solutions for mobile Internet appliances and digital imaging products for the Internet..."
  • My very first SVGA card was a #9 Vision 330, that card gave me an incredible jump in speed over the older Trident card I had been using until then (which wasn't a bad card itself, VGA card that thought it was a VESA SVGA card :)

    When upgrades finally forced me into a motherboard that lacked a VLB slot, I switched over to an Imagine 128.. still a good card, though "The 11th Hour" wouldn't run on it until #9 sent me a new bios chip (which they did as soon as I called up and asked about the problem.. great service).

    Unfortunately, my old roomates bought some Revolution 3D cards a while back, after hearing from me about my luck with the company so far... and they couldn't run any 2D or 3D games they wanted without severe graphics glitches. ick. :(

    I still use my Imagine 128 (rev 2) though.. I have it in my dual-boot Linux/Windows box. Works great in Win98, but I still haven't found a way to make it work under X Windows. Redhat 6.1 supposedly has the driver for it, but every combination of options I've tried has only given me errors and dumped me back to the prompt. And I don't know enough about X configuration to modify the config myself.. :(
  • 12+ years and 40+ products later I say gooddby to this graphics industry pioneer. To all those Niner's I worked with it's time to let the old lady rest in peace with the dignity it deserves. Rico

  • Wow (Score:1)

    by mholve ( 1101 )
    That really sucks. I've been a loooong time fan of #9. I have two of their cards in my home boxen, too. (Imagine 128 Series I) Their cards haven't really been that exciting the last few years though, so I'm not terribly surprised.
  • It might reduce the likelihood of getting support for them in XFree86 4.0, though :-(
  • I still USE an unenhanced Apple ][e simply because it's still the most hackable machine in existence. I haven't learned C enough to truly play in the Unix world (am getting there with Perl, tho)

    --
  • Wow. My first real job was in Number Nine's tech support department, back in '92-93. This was when they were still very heavily into the CAD market and moving into the Windows market; their products were still based on the TI 34020 graphics processor chip (#9GXi, #9GXiTC). Going into the Windows market was a difficult corporate shift: "Games? People want to use our cards for *games*?!"

    I'm actually not very surprised they went under; the video card business was insanely fast-paced and competitive even then, and it's only gotten worse since. I well remember the flap about people optimizing their drivers for high Winmark numbers; #9 was one of the worse offenders in that regard, although to be fair they only did that after ZD Labs ignored their complaints about ATI doing it.

    The minsmanagement when I was there got pretty staggering at times. I left after one of our other support people left and they wouldn't let my manager hire a replacement-- which meant the department consisted of her, me and the receptionist, and we were getting utterly swamped even before that other person left. The manager and I quit on the same day, purely by coincidence. The receptionist became the department manager shortly thereafter (which was a much better use of her skills anyway).

  • It also depends what you mean by "on top." nVidia's GeForce2 is arguably the most powerful PC gamer card available, but ATI is outselling everybody by a long shot. Places like Gateway and Dell use the cheap ATI cards almost exclusively (not that the ATI hardware is lousy; their new chipset is pretty competitive with GeForce).

    magic

  • Let me restate the quote:

    But failure to design its products in compliance with the then-emerging DirectX software interface from Microsoft Corp. crippled the company's OEM sales.

    So yes....You didn't see many OEM cards. That's why.

    -- Give him Head? Be a Beacon?

  • I mean, would YOU buy a AGP called "The Savory Truffle"?

    I think it's "Savoy Truffle," but I'd buy one anyway! Imagine, now, the Number9 HelterSkelter 3000 AGP :)
  • I'm gonna miss having video cards that sing to me when they start up...

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