nVidia pretty much started out from the old 3DFX company, that made the Voodoo cards. Back then, it was ATi Riva TNT vs. 3DFX Voodoo 1/2/3 cards, just like it\'s Radeon vs. GeForce now. So those two just never liked eachother. 
Actually, that\'s not right.

Riva TNT was made by Nvidia, and ATI wasn\'t very popular at that time, and it was merely \"in construction\". It was a fight between the two giants, 3Dfx and Nvidia. Sadly, soon after the \"coming\" of ATI, and its Radeon, things begun to change, and 3Dfx had some financial problems. Things ended up pretty strange, 3Dfx being bought by Nvidia.

And now, Nivida is heavily using their technologies, an example being the SLI one, which was 1st for the VooDoo 5 5500 cards.
