Weitek

Weitek Corporation was an American manufacturer of math coprocessors and, later, (S)VGA-compatible display drivers, founded in 1981. Nvidia licensed the company's SVGA core and incorporated it into the Riva 128, where it sat, effectively unmodified, until at least GeForce 4. The core was widely praised for its extremely high DOS performance, with Doom in Mode X running at over 70 fps (twice its actual frame-limited speed).

The core licensed to Nvidia was never actually used in any Weitek cards (the last GPUs released by Weitek were the Power 9000 and 9100, based on the W5186 and W5286 VGA cores - themselves licensed from Unisys - respectively); while their 2D accelerated performance was quite good, these cards could not be easily extended for better VGA designs (Weitek lacked the capital to invest in a new 3D design), so they hired a team to design a new VGA core. According to the designer of the core, the design was successfully completed but due to the aforementioned financial problems, the VGA core could not be used in any new cards. Weitek's last profitable quarter, prior to selling to Rockwell on the brink of bankruptcy, was when they licensed their VGA core to Nvidia.