CHANCES are you've never heard of Jen-Hsun Huang. If you are into playing games on the PC, however, he is the genius who helps your beige box out-perform a PlayStation II.

Huang is the chief executive officer of graphics chip company nVidia. His personal mantra is: "I am always 30 days from going out of business."

At least, Huang's company has 30 days. The graphics accelerator industry has claimed some high profile casualties of late, not least, the firm that started it all: 3Dfx Interactive.

Graphics cards are the add-in boards which compute the wonderful images painted by PC games these days. They are expensive, fragile and virtually obsolete by the time they hit the shops.

For a while it seemed as though nVidia would be an also-ran in the 3-D accelerator market. It's first card - the NV1 - was rushed to market and didn't sell.

The reason his first project failed was a California company called 3Dfx Interactive. Formed for the same reason as nVidia - to cash in on the desire for arcade-quality graphics on the PC - 3Dfx unleashed its Voodoo add-in card at the same time as the NV1.

Voodoo was the first graphics accelerator board to deliver what it claimed. Games played on a PC equipped with such a card looked far better than anything the Sony PlayStation could muster. They even looked smoother and sharper than the Nintendo 64, a machine that hadn't even gone on sale when the Voodoo hit the shelves.

The 3Dfx company followed Voodoo up with a sequel - Voodoo II - which delivered twice the performance and put the company's products even further ahead of the competition.

Things started to go wrong with the Voodoo III. Launched in December 1998, barely 12 months after the arrival of Voodoo II, the new chipset boasted further performance improvements.

Impressive as the specifications were, however, many PC owners were reluctant to trade up. They were perfectly happy with their existing cards.

Then Huang's company hit back with a chipset called the TNT and rapidly followed it up with a sequel which boasted several features missing from the Voodoo, most noticeably the ability to run games in 32-bit colour. This made TNT2 games looked sharper than their Voodoo rivals.

Huang's company then developed an aggressive strategy to put 3Dfx and its other rivals out of the game. It cranked out 3-D graphics chips at a bewildering rate that has proved too hot for 3Dfx.

3Dfx threw in the towel just before Christmas. Much of its intellectual property has been sold to nVidia which may keep the Voodoo name.

Graphics accelerator cards are locked into an exponential increase in performance. Before long nVidia may find its only real competition is from within.

Which is a heck of an accomplishment for a company that's only 30 days from going out of business.