Some may find this hard to believe, given the absolute state of the market today, but if you were building a gaming PC in 1998, the hard part wasn’t finding somewhere that had 3D cards in stock for a reasonable price. It was choosing the right one among a glut of potential, reasonably affordable options.
In 1998, 47 companies were designing or selling PC graphics, driving a market that hit 130 million units and outsold PCs themselves. Just two years later, at the turn of the new millennium, only 15 remained, and not long after that, there were merely two: Nvidia and ATI, nowadays part of AMD.
