Hybrid Graphics

» see hybrid.fi as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Most dead companies have to be dated from the outside. Hybrid Graphics dated itself. Go to the June 2007 capture of hybrid.fi and the whole front page is a notice: "Hybrid Graphics is now NVIDIA Helsinki... As of June 8, 2007, the Hybrid crew is embracing our NVIDIA future with glee, and is to be known as the NVIDIA Corporation's Helsinki office. We would like to thank all our customers and friends for the happy times as Hybrid during 1994-2007." Underneath it, a heading reading "Where have all the Hybrideans gone?" points at three successor addresses. The phone number stayed the same.

Before the phones, it was a games company. From 1994 until roughly 2000 Hybrid sold game middleware, and from 1996 its main product was SurRender 3D, an OpenGL-based graphics library cited in the lineage of Westwood's W3D engine. In 2000 it shipped dPVS, a visibility optimization library whose job was working out what a game engine did not have to draw, and it ended up inside Star Wars Galaxies and EverQuest II. The image-rendering half of the business was spun out as Fake Graphics in 2004. dPVS itself was sold to Umbra Software in 2006, so by the time NVIDIA arrived the company had already been pruned down to one thing.

That one thing was mobile 3D, and Hybrid got there first. At 3GSM in Cannes on 24 February 2004, the Khronos Group's own press announcement records that "Hybrid Graphics announced that they have released the world's first OpenGL ES conformant software implementation," built around a rasterizer called Gerbera and bundled with a test suite and a JSR-184 wrapper. The same paragraph carries the detail that actually matters: Hybrid licensed that implementation to Khronos as part of the official OpenGL ES 1.0 Adopter's Pack, the kit handed to every company that adopted the standard. A small Finnish software house had written the reference copy of mobile graphics.

OpenGL ES is a name I have typed a great many times in the course of doing computer vision work, and not once did I wonder who had written the first one. Nobody puts the middleware vendor on the box. The standard got remembered and the phones got remembered, and hybrid.fi today serves a page whose title element reads "For Lease" above a mailto link for anyone who wants the domain.

~ the case file ~

~ fourteen months ~

NVIDIA announced the deal from the Game Developers Conference in San Jose on 22 March 2006. Its press release is unusually explicit about what was supposed to happen next: "Hybrid Graphics will become a subsidiary of NVIDIA Corporation and will continue to market and sell its products under the Hybrid name." No terms were disclosed. Mikael Honkavaara, Hybrid's chief executive, said joining NVIDIA would let the company accelerate its growth. Jen-Hsun Huang said billions of handheld devices would be sold over the next decade.

The handheld prediction came true many times over. The brand did not last to see it. Fourteen months and seventeen days after that promise to keep selling under the Hybrid name, the name was retired and the office was renamed. NVIDIA's own release had already put Nokia and Symbian at the head of Hybrid's customer list, reckoning that those customers between them reached well over half the existing handset market. The same release credited the company with graphics on hundreds of millions of handhelds since its inception. Buying all of that and then deleting the word on the door is an ordinary corporate decision. What is unusual is having the promise and the deletion both on the record, dated, fourteen months apart.

~ what the farewell page still lists ~

The tombstone is worth reading in full because it does something most shutdown notices do not, which is tell you where the work went. Under "Where have all the Hybrideans gone?" the embedded graphics line points at NVIDIA and the modeling line points at Fake Graphics, with visibility optimization handed off to Umbra Software. The page also keeps live links to the Rasteroid downloads and the developer forums, plus a research paper archive and, at the very bottom, a Christmas games archive that somebody had maintained for years and nobody was going to maintain again.

The last thing on it is a street address: Urho Kekkosen katu 3b, 00100 Helsinki. It is the same building, with a different sign.

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