The Nvidia Way: Jensen Huang and the Making of a Tech Giant

by Tae Kim

It was a single game, the first-person shooter DOOM, that sealed the NV1’s fate. At the time of the chip’s launch, DOOM was the most popular game in the world: its kinetic visuals and gruesome, fast-paced combat were unlike any other gaming experience ever produced. This was in large part due to the technical wizardry of John Carmack, the game’s designer and cofounder of its publisher, id Software. Carmack built the game using the 2-D Video Graphics Array (VGA) standard and leveraged every hardware-level trick he knew for maximum visual impact. Priem had been sure that most game designers would switch to the NV1’s 3-D accelerated graphics and leave VGA behind. So the NV1 chip only partially supported VGA graphics and relied on a software emulator to supplement its VGA capabilities—which resulted in slow performance for gamers playing DOOM.