During the 1980s and 1990s a relatively large number of companies appeared selling primarily 2D
graphics cards and later
3D. Most of those companies have subsequently disappeared, as the increasing complexity of
GPUs substantially increased research and development costs. Many of these companies subsequently went bankrupt or were bought out.
Intel and
VIA Technologies remain as producers of primarily integrated solutions, while
Matrox targets niche markets. Amongst the notable discrete graphics card vendors,
ATI Technologies — acquired by
AMD in 2006 and since renamed to
AMD — and
NVIDIA are the only ones that have lasted. During 2022 Intel entered the discrete GPU market with the
Arc series and has three more generations confirmed on two year release schedules.
Defunct graphics chip makers
These companies designed graphics chips and cards.
3dfx – assets were acquired by
Nvidia during its Chapter 11 bankruptcy[1]
3Dlabs – merged with Creative Labs' personal entertainment division to form
ZiiLABS
Silicon Graphics Incorporated (SGI) – quit developing 3D graphics in-house in the early 2000s and bought GPUs from other companies; later went completely out of business in 2009; its assets were bought in the resulting Chapter 11 bankruptcy by Rackable Systems, which changed its name to
Silicon Graphics International