Downfall
Unfortunately, Rendition was always one step behind other competitors. The 2D engine added to the V1000 was more of an afterthought to offer features competitive with the S3 ViRGE, the NVIDIA RIVA 128, and the Matrox Mystique, but it turned into a liability as consumers discovered its barely adequate performance and various display oddities. The V2x00 series 2D accelerator was somewhat improved but it again didn't keep pace and was far behind the best 2D accelerators of the day. In addition, Rendition could never seem to keep up with 3Dfx and NVIDIA in terms of 3D performance. The V2200 was late to market, and performed no better than previous-generation chips from competitors. The V2x00 was late due to an apparent sabotage of the 4 input NAND gate circuit's output resistance - the result was that the chip couldn't be fully clocked. It took nearly six months to discover this problem but by then it was too late. Despite these delays, the V2x00 shipped with fully conformant OpenGL and D3D drivers. Even with drivers better than the competition at the time, demand simply wasn't there for V2x00 because of sub par performance relative to the card's peers and the inevitable release of even faster cards during this time of rapid change within the industry.
The company was eventually purchased by Micron, who kept the development team intact as a source of embedded graphics solutions for their own line of motherboards. Rendition's engineers were initially excited by the prospect of utilizing Micron's embedded DRAM technology for a high-end graphics processor, but such a product never surfaced commercially.
Micron resurrected the Rendition brand name as a value line of RAM by Micron Technology's consumer memory division, Crucial Technology. Micron has since re-branded the Rendition line as SpecTek Select, aimed at OEMs and resellers
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Famous quotes containing the word downfall:
“Show me one thing here on earth which has begun well and not ended badly. The proudest palpitations are engulfed in a sewer, where they cease throbbing, as though having reached their natural term: this downfall constitutes the heart’s drama and the negative meaning of history.”
—E.M. Cioran (b. 1911)
“Children demand that their heroes should be fleckless, and easily believe them so: perhaps a first discovery to the contrary is less revolutionary shock to a passionate child than the threatened downfall of habitual beliefs which makes the world seem to totter for us in maturer life.”
—George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)