As bad as it sounds, I still own the card that toppled 3dfx's crowning glory, the Creative Labs 3D Blaster GeForce2 Pro DDR 64mb.  I admire the hardware and technology that has been put into it, as it is still performing brilliantly on today's new games.

I just don't like nVidia as a company, and ALL of their strategies. 
The marketing strategies and the amount of different "MX" and "FX" and "XT" models that are produced to dupe the customer into getting something they could have really done without.  However, the customer can also be blamed here as many unexperienced graphics cards buyers buy on the "base it on bigger numbers" motto.

Other strategies such as takeover bids and the way they take to see out rivals.  The way they lied about 3dfx customer and staff support throughout the process, and gave nothing back to the 3dfx loyalists once nVidia claimed what they set out for, CAPITALISATION.

This is the factor that makes me wonder if the GF2 will be the last nVidia card I own?

Would this be due to the fact, to spite nVidia for their harsh treatment of 3dfx?
Or,
Because their future technology is now seen as inferior compared to ATI's "real" PCIExpress and Shader 3.0 technology?

Well, morally, it's both.  I have no past experience of the FX series to base my opinions on, but I do have advice, reviews and experience gathered from users who have used both the FX and the Radeon series.  And everyone says go with Radeon.

Maybe nVidia will never meet the same fate as 3dfx, and get their come-uppance, but I believe they copied some of 3dfx last marketing strategies, which are becoming bad habits for nVidia, and this will lead them to always play second fiddle next to ATI.

I just can't wait to see what Matrox, ATI, XGI and 3DLabs all have to offer us in the future.

sometimes in life you pick sides over things others might think silly, ive picked sides over a few things that have meant something to me and thats that, my brother loves nvidia and buys a new card of theres every year, i play alot of call of duty, the game looks good and my frame rates are good and its on my v5500  and that puts a smile on my face and ill not ever get over that as i kick his nvida backed ass all over the place

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Ah, amen to that m8. 3dfx is gone and dead people, if you want to continue to hold on to your voodoos, and hating the company that took in many of the employees who were stranded by 3dfx, be my guest. I don't really know if nvidia could support 3dfx users, 3dfx didn't exactly build their cards to last or be ready for the next standards. You all seem to hate nvidia because they're a corporation. Well, that's what corporations do. But just remember, hatred like yours might someday fall back on you. Nobody is perfect, everybody is looking to grab that little extra boost, that extra wad of dough, that couple extra 3D Marks, and nobody's exempt. I was once an nvidia hater, too, but I've stopped to look at things for what they really are. Nvidia bought 3dfx's technology just the same way as 3dfx bought STB (okay, it was *technically* a merger). Nvidia makes graphics cards, and hey, if the next time I go to buy one, Nvidia can give me a better product for my money, that's where my money will go. I'm already seriously looking at those nforce chipsets, they appear to be really good.

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Hmm, you all seem to love to parallel Nvidia's pixel pipelines to 3dfx, what about ATI not bringing up the latest pixel shader standards? Doesn't this sort of remind anyone of a certain hardware TnL engine? Fairly useless at the time, but almost a requirement for games produced not long afterwards...

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I don't really know about that either. Quite frankly, I've never contacted ATI tech support, but Nvidia has a tech support forum that got my linux driver issue straightened out within a couple hours, that's the fastest I've ever had anything straightened out. Hell, most of the time, tech support email addresses either never respond, or spit me back some automatically generated cr*p telling me how to do something that I already explicitly stated I've already tried. My experience with Nvidia has definately been my best one with any tech support of a company.

EDIT: Micha, I did read that article, albiet a couple months ago.

At the end of the day, people take their own opinions on things for what they see them, just like nVidia and ATI.

People like beta and amp have every right to do what they feel, and if that involves buying an nVidia card because they believe it to be the best choice for them, that is the right thing to do.

It just seems that this forum is biased to the opposite, in that most users have a bad relationship with nVidia because of how nVidia treat people on a GENERAL level.

It just seems the majority of users opinions are to choose ATI over nVidia, for whatever reason, be it that it is down to a dirty past towards the 3dfx treatment, or down to today's issues such as a GENERAL reputation of bad user support, incompetitive high prices of hardware or inferior technology standards against ATI's.

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or, in other words:
"Hmm, what can I do to hate down Nvidia today?"

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Who on earth are you talking about?

Well at least someone got it (thanks btw, Micha!)