CURTIS PRIEM AND CHRIS MALACHOWSKY’S idea for a graphics-chip venture was perfectly timed. In 1992, two major developments—one in hardware, one in software—accelerated the demand for better graphics cards. The first was the computer industry’s adoption of the Peripheral Component Interconnect (PCI) bus, a type of hardware connection that transferred data among the expansion cards (such as graphics accelerators), the motherboard, and the CPU at a much higher bandwidth than that available from the prior Industry Standard Architecture (ISA) bus. The process of designing higher-performance cards
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