What happened to Orchid?

[Kreshna Aryaguna Nurzaman]

Yes, I always wonder what happened to that one particular graphic vendor. See, during the days of Voodoo1, the two earliest (and most prominent) adopters of 3dfx chips were Diamond Monster 3D and Orchid Righteous 3D. IIRC Orchid's card was better than Diamond's card during that time.

But when the Voodoo2 came, it was Creative and Diamond; the Orchid's whereabouts were unknown. So what happened to that one vendor?

[Nightbird]

In 1998, Diamond Multimedia Systems bought Micronics Computers which owned Orchid.

[Kreshna Aryaguna Nurzaman]

Whoa. I certainly missed the news. That's too bad, since it seemed Orchid Righteous 3D is better than Diamond Monster 3D, for these reasons:

(1) Heavily-shielded pass through cable. At least what CGW said. Nonetheless, I'm sure a heavily-shielded pass through cable would yield better picture than my old Diamond MM.

(2) Slightly faster. Now to be frank, I didn't test it myself since my first Voodoo is Diamond Monster, and I didn't have an Orchid on the first place (Diamond was more common in Indonesia anyway). But I still remember reading a review on October 1996 issue of CGW: both cards were tested with Hellbender (the very first D3D games), and while Diamond's card yielded about 25 frames per second, the Orchid's card kept a consistent frame rate of 29 frames per second.

Well, 29 frames per second, and it was still astounding compared to S3 Virge, Matrox Mystique, ATI Rage 3D, and Tseng Labs ET6000. Those were the days, huh?