OK Taswegion, seeing as Tannin is too lazy, I better have a go at it. I had best warn you that I am too young to remember any of this, so I'm just repeating the bedtime stories Tannin used to tell me when I was little. As to whether there is any truth to them or not, I'll leave you to judge for yourself.
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ISA
First there were very basic 16 colour cards. That was pretty boring.
Then nicer cards came along. The two most common brands were Trident and Cirrus Logic. Tridents were usually a little bit cheaper (a couple of dollars maybe) but, oddly enough, more consistent. Cirrus Logic went through too many different chipsets, where Trident tended to stick with one base design for longer but tweak it up as they went along. Trident always had better drivers. Except when they f*ed it up and had worse drivers. But mostly they were easier to install and more feature-rich.
The high end to midrange belonged to Tseng. Or possibly Matrox. I can't remember if Matrox was around already, it probably was. The Tseng cards were a tiny bit tricky to get right, but went like bicycle lizards on a hot day.
And there were various other chipset manufacturers, dozens of them .... Oak, Avance Logic, ATI, Realtek .... lots more.
VESA
The VESA era introduced heaps better performance. Cirrus Logic and Trident were still the major players, and the Tridents were still the better of the two. (Be careful here, it's a religious issue. Think Ford vs Holden.) S3s were fast and fragile; Tseng was still the next step up but rather expensive, and if you wanted to destroy the budget completely, Western Digital's long running line of truly excellent cards reached its peak at this time: they were superb, but much too dear for most people. Many of the other players were still around also.
PCI
More of the same. Cirrus Logic faded away, S3 rose and rose, Trident held its ground, then began to fall into the ever-cheaper entry-level market segment. Number 9 was the absolute peak (US$2000 a pop for an Imagine 128, and their best S3-based card was maybe US$400), Tseng had its final bit of glory with the ET6000, and some no-one-ever-heard-of-it company called 3DFX brought out this weird and useless thing for gamers called a Voodoo. This was the beginning of the end. Nobody knows why some people wanted to waste a perfetly good computer by playing games on it, but there you go. With humans, sometimes you just have to shrug your shoulders and accept that they are like that.
AGP
S3 ruled the volume market, Trident were just barely hanging on, nearly everybody else had given the game away or, like Matrox, retreated to a profitable niche. The moronic games playing weenies took over the entire world and it was a completely new environment, dominated by two companies: the Good Guys were 3DFX, the Bad Guys were another start-up company with a stupid name with funny capitals in the wrong places, which I'll ignore. (That's Nvidia.) (Ignore the capitals I mean, not the company.)
3DFX made Good Products: the well-regarded Voodoo II and the wonderful Voodoo III. (We will ignore the horrible 3DFX Banshee here, as I'm telling the story and I'll ignore as much evidence as I have to.) Nvidia made Bad Products, the best-remembered of them was the TNT-2. Voodoo cards worked, TNT cards didn't worked. (Most of the time.) (S3 cards and even old Tridents worked too, but we are not supposed to mention them anymore in case someone thinks we used them to make computers or something. It's sort of like having holes in your underwear: everybody does it but you are not supposed to talk about it.)
By this time, there were only two real honest-to-goodness video card driver software people left on the planet. All the others were thickheads with more thumbs than a hatful of bottoms. (Sorry, I seem to be having some trouble with my metaphors tonight.) One of the two good programers, an old retired guy who only worked part-time, was at Matrox. The other one worked for 3DFX making Voodoo drivers.
Then one day the Voodoo guy went off to take up a new career as a novelist or something involving long periods of time spent sitting under a palm tree drinking something cold and fizzy and not writing video drivers, and most especially not helping the other people at the 3DFX factory make nice new video cards. Luckily the old retired guy at Matrox was still coming in two afternoons a week and you could get nice stuff like G-450s.
Before too long there was only Nvidia left, and their cards worked fine, but only if you didn't want to load the drivers and use more than 16 colours. So Nvidia made the novelist an offer he couldn't refuse and he came along and fixed up the driver software for them, which turned Nvidia into Good Guys instead of Bad Guys.
So now there was only one, unless you count Matrox or S3. Oh, and another one called ATI. ATI had spent the last ten years making very good video chipsets with seriously weird drivers that either worked perfectly or else failed completely, depending on what foot you wore the red sock on. Seeing as this had been a farly successful strategy for them, they decided to spend the next ten years doing the same thing, and at least so far, have executed on the strategy perfectly. (I don't wear socks, which is why I always use Nvidia cards.)
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