3Dlabs

» see 3dlabs.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

3dlabs lived in a part of the pc industry i never had access to. the company built professional graphics processors for cad workstations, 3d animation suites, and medical imaging. those machines cost more than a car and i was a turkish student running an athlon xp at home, gaming on whatever geforce or radeon i could afford that year. the wildcat line was visible to me only as a name in maximum pc magazine reviews, somewhere in the back pages where they covered the workstation segment for completeness.

the company was formed in april 1994 as a management buyout of dupont pixel systems in the uk. the founding team had been doing scientific visualization hardware inside dupont and decided it was a real market that needed a real company. they raised money, listed on nasdaq in october 1996, and spent the late 90s building two parallel lines: the glint and permedia chips for the prosumer end, and the wildcat boards for the high end.

permedia was the half that almost reached me. it was the consumer-priced 3dlabs gpu, marketed against the early 3dfx voodoo and matrox products in 1997. it never won a meaningful share of the gaming market. permedia 2 and permedia 3 came and went without becoming the card anyone in my friend group actually bought. by the time the geforce 256 shipped in 1999, the consumer gpu race had two real players and 3dlabs was not one of them.

~ the case file ~

~ the workstation years ~

where 3dlabs did own a market was professional 3d. the wildcat brand defined the high end of opengl-accelerated workstation graphics from around 1998 through 2003. solidworks, autocad, alias maya, lightwave, softimage: this was a market that paid four figures per gpu and needed certified opengl drivers more than it needed framerate. 3dlabs's drivers were certified for everything that mattered. the wildcat 4 and wildcat realizm boards were what high-end commercial 3d artists and engineers actually ran.

creative labs bought 3dlabs in june 2002 for around $100 million. creative was trying to diversify out of sound cards and saw a profitable workstation gpu business as a hedge. the workstation business kept ticking over for another three years under creative ownership.

~ how the consumer gpu absorbed the workstation segment ~

the structural problem was that consumer gpus passed workstation gpus on raw performance somewhere around 2002-2004. once the geforce fx and the radeon 9800 existed, a workstation oem could put a $400 consumer chip on a board with certified drivers and call it a quadro or a firegl and charge $2,000. nvidia and ati could amortize their chip development across millions of gaming gpus and still ship workstation variants. 3dlabs amortized everything across a few tens of thousands of workstation sales per year.

that economics gap closed the company. in february 2006, 3dlabs announced it would stop developing professional 3d graphics chips and focus on embedded media processors instead. the wildcat realizm line was the last gpu it shipped. nvidia quadro and ati firegl absorbed the entire customer base within two years.

~ what it became ~

the media-processor pivot lived inside creative as a separate unit for three more years. in january 2009 it merged with a creative product division and rebranded as ziilabs, which built arm-based media processors that mostly nobody bought either. ziilabs was eventually sold to intel in 2012 for its patent portfolio.

what 3dlabs left behind was a generation of workstation-class opengl drivers and the institutional knowledge that built them, most of which got hired into nvidia and ati. the wildcat brand is a museum piece now. the company exists as a footnote in the history of professional graphics, the one that lost when consumer gpus turned out to scale farther than anyone expected.

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