The 3dfx timeline gives you an idea of how much the computer field has slowed down and consolidated. Voodoo was released in 1996, into a market with half a dozen competitors. Voodoo 2 in 1998, the same year as the first viable NVIDIA card (Riva TNT). NVIDIA released the GeForce 256 in 1999, cementing its dominance. 3dfx released its last card in 2000, just four years after its first. NVIDIA is now still dominant, 18 years after establishing dominance with the GeForce.
Think back on how much consumer computing changed from 1996 to 2000. Four years back from the present, in contrast, is the Haswell-based Macbook Pro and iPhone 5s (a perfectly fine setup today).
Most of the other companies are still there though. PowerVR still makes 3D chips, but only for the embedded market (e.g. Android phones). Matrox gave up on 3D and now only makes specialized cards for 8 and 16+ monitor displays (airports, kiosks). IIRC, even Trident switched to embedded graphics.
The thing that bothers me is that if you want a PCI-E card on a consumer system, you only have nVidia/AMD. Intel only does embedded now with none of their offerings on a card (like the only i740). There is no Ryzen 7 with an APU, so if you're building a small developer box, you have to buy a discrete graphics card and can't rely on embedded (unless you want to drop to the Ryzen 5, which was just released with an APU).
There are rumors that Intel might be getting back into this space. If anyone could try to compete with the big two, it's probably them.
In 1998 3dfx was incredibly dominant in the market. I don't think that after the release of Voodoo 2 many people would have bet on another company being the market leader. Riva TNT was ok, but it wasn't a breakthrough for Nvidia.
Oh man, the Riva TNT was the 3D card I ever had, back when popular opinion said that hybrid 2D/3D cards would never be as good as a dedicated 3D card.
So amazing to get 30fps with fullscreen trilinear filtering. It really felt like the future... and then you jump back to the present and your graphics card is basically a renderfarm that you send geometry and shaders off to and it does the rest.
That's pretty much standard in every industry, though. Competition will kick underperformers out of the market and some amount of consolidation is inevitable. It's not Nvidia doesn't have any competition nowadays.
I was just getting to know the world of computers, I think it was the year 97, I had 13 years old and my first PC, Pentium 200mhz with Windows 95, I thought the games were fabulous! Quake 1, Duke Nukem, Carmageddon, Moto Racer.
But one day I bought the Diamond Monster 2 with a Voodoo 2 chip and 12MB Ram (3DFX accelerator card), I put that thing on my PC and it was like traveling to the future, the games looked amazing and I had a performance boost.
I think the game that impressed me most at the time was Need For Speed 2 Special Edition, before the card I had it installed and played, but the "Special Edition" was for being compatible with 3DFX and adding additional features, in addition to the smoothed textures, in a track mosquitoes were sticking to the screen, I do not remember what other special features.
Moto Racer, Descent Freespace and Tomb Raider 2 come to my mind now as others that I feel huge visual gap between regular graphics and 3DFX.
Then came Quake 3 Arena in 1999 and it blew my mind, I think that in 2000/2001 I upgrade to a Pentium 4 and maintain the legendary Diamond Monster 2 because it was still kicking ass. Awesome card, it has a place in my heart.
> I think the game that impressed me most at the time was Need For Speed 2 Special Edition, before the card I had it installed and played, but the "Special Edition" was for being compatible with 3DFX and adding additional features, in addition to the smoothed textures, in a track mosquitoes were sticking to the screen, I do not remember what other special features.
I think NFS2SE had transparent glass if you had a 3DFX card, or maybe that was NFS3, I remember wishing I had one either way!
I remember I bought a TNT card instead of a Voodoo for my first computer because it had a nicer looking box in the advertisement from the local electronics store. I didn't have internet at that time, so I used box art instead of user reviews for deciding on purchases. I think the box had a fighter jet.
> I put that thing on my PC and it was like traveling to the future,
Yes! It was 1998 or 1999. I remember coming home from Micro Center, installing the Diamond Voodoo2 card and trying Descent Freespace on it. I think it came with it as a demo or even a full version. Then lots of hours playing NFS as well. It was the future.
From what I remember, the term GPU was invented by NVIDIA's marketing team for the GeForce campaign. It sounded a bit weird in the beginning. In hindsight, it was a strike of genius.
It kinda feels weird that we use the term "GPU" to describe modern cards. Seems to me that there is much more demand for these components in the AI and cryptocoin mining markets than anything utilizing graphics.
I wonder if we're about to witness the second death of PC gaming?
LGR on YouTube did a nice episode about this a while back:
LGR Tech Tales - 3Dfx & Voodoo's Self-Destruction
This episode covers the founding, voodoo-powered rise, and ridiculously powerful fall of 3Dfx Interactive. Join me in LGR Tech Tales, looking at stories of technological inspiration, failure, and everything in-between!
You might also like watching Computer History Museums "3dfx Oral History Panel with Ross Smith, Scott Sellers, Gary Tarolli, and Gordon Campbell" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3MghYhf-GhU
Ross Smith, Scott Sellers and Gary Tarolli were 3dfx founders, they left Silicon Graphics to do this startup.
Access to information (e.g. the Internet) has been a game changer for buying "3D acceleration" as it was called back then.
I remember fondly in the late 90s just walking into a Best Buy (maybe Circuit City) and buying a GPU off the shelf.
I had no benchmark data like today. I bought based on whether or not I liked the packaging and how much video RAM did it have. Because I really didn't have much more data to go off of.
I subsequently bout the Diamond Viper 770, linked below.
Few things worth pointing out that is missing from the article.
1. Direct X, and arguably Microsoft, trying to dethrone Glide, made a huge impact. Although that was later in the time line when 3Dfx was going downhill anyway.
2. Too late to the "Graphics" Card market. After Voodoo 2 it took them too long ( Long in that state of time, when everything was moving fast ) to release a 2D/3D Graphics Card. Voodoo Banshee wasn't good enough compared to RivaTNT.
3. Prices, Voodoo was quite a bit more expensive then others.
God, reading this article makes me feel old. Lots of memories coming back. Reading about benchmarks between all these Graphics Card. Internet was still in its early days back then. Most of the information were from Monthly magazine I got from WH Smith, PC Gamers used to do these test. Lot of cool games coming from those CD Demo disk. There is S3 Savage 3D, ATI Rage, Matrox, 3D Labs which was the Semi Professional Graphics Card company back then, which is now under Creative, aka Sound Blaster's company. Even Intel has i740. And PowerVR. Nvidia went from the underdog, and Geforce changes everything. I remember the early days how every new product from different company would hype their spec, like S3 is going to change the world etc. Then we soon learn all the paper spec didn't matter, if the drivers wasn't giving it the full potential. One of the reason why PowerVR didn't do well on desktop. ( Actually this is still the case in Mobile Phones.... )
GPU today isn't exciting anymore, at least in terms of Grpahics, not compute. We are limited by Technology node, and lots of drivers optimization to get AAA games to work better.
Gaming at the time was very geeky. Who would have thought today we have something called E-Sport, and it seems everyone is a gamer. Somewhere along the line I ditched PC gaming and went to console. I miss PC gaming, mainly because I bought a Mac, and despite what Apple say, they really don't gave a crap about gaming on Mac. Sigh
i740 I had it. Was a piece of crap that rendered with a lot of bugs.
Also I have, after, a card with Trident 3d chip.
Later I grabbed a Creative GeForce 2 MX DDR. I managed to ran Doom 3 over it at a barely playable 20 FPS using some paths to allow Doom 3 ran over Voodoo 2 (mainly resizing textures ...)
Nvidia was never really feeble. Even when 3Dfx was shocking everyone with their raw throughput and had a bit of a moat (until DirectX stopped sucking) with the Glide API, Nvidia got their foot in the door with 32-bit rendering and decent OpenGL. 3Dfx made sense for a lot of us - anyone using Quake would get it if they could, since raw performance mattered a lot and you don't suffer too much for only having 16-bit rendering of all those shades of brown - but with anything later than the original Voodoo, you felt like you were making a bit of a trade-off.
I've still got a Voodoo 3, I think. No telling if it actually works, but it was the only add-on card I've ever had that warped with time. Poor heat sink design and/or not enough layers on the PCB, I guess.
Still remember enjoying Descent. And how I argued with Commodore staff at conferences on why Amigas didn't move into hardware 3d as it was the clear future to see.
I love Amigas but seems like their fate was sealed by then. By the release of Doom in 1993 it was over for sure. Their whole shtick was that they had special hardware that let them do things PCs couldn't. Doom proved them wrong.
I remember those gpu wars. Also had a Voodoo 3000 card which was relatively cheap but still very fast. It took quite some time to get those games running optimally though. Playing Quake on it was fantastic.
Specs and scores were all they could talk about. I also remember that very nice parody: https://imgur.com/SLG6hp4
I remember my Voodoo3 quite fondly. There was quite a performance boost in games based on the Quake engine. I also recall their being poor Linux driver support until 2005 or so.
My Voodoo3 ran right up through CS v1.6 (albeit struggling at times). A new system I built in 2005 used 2x BFG 6800s in SLI (3dfx tech nvidia inherited). While impressive I seem to recall their being some variation in nvidia's SLI spec/implementation. Perhaps 3dfx SLI performance was seemingly better because of Glide support but my memory escapes me (obviously not an apples to apples comparison).
FWIW, there was also a huge aftermarket of Voodoo cards on eBay (1999-2004) and a decent community providing 3rd party driver support.
The article blames management failure, but I'm not convinced. There's a general bias to blame management any time a company fails. Of course management is always responsible, but I don’t think anyone could have saved say, Kodak.
In this case, Nvidia and ATI were already making 3D accelerators for the professional 3D rendering market. All they had to do was to make stripped down cards that wouldn't cannibalize their high margin business, and sell them in volume for a price gamers could bear.
Maybe 3Dfx could have made a moat out of GLide, but OpenGL already existed and Microsoft was working on Direct3D.
Nvidia and ATI were already making 3D accelerators for the professional 3D rendering market.
Were they? I don’t see any professional cards in Nvidia’s early line-up, at least not the one shown on Wikipedia. The first Quadro doesn’t show up till 1999 and the verbiage suggests the pro cards were an offshoot of the gaming cards, not the other way round.
I'm glad the article goes into STB. I really think this was what killed 3Dfx. It was a big move, but if you were following 3Dfx back the, you saw the issues.
I think they tried to lay off duplicate staff. With the Voodoo3, you saw drivers that just didn't work half the time. Textures were rendered totally wrong, people would downgrade drivers to get things working, etc. I have a felling they laid off or lost people critical in the hardware itself.
The website went to shit too. It got terrible. They either axed or lost a ton of web staff and focused more on the graphics used on all their box art.
Finally, the cards/chips just didn't scale well. I even remember a ton of articles at the time talking about how much efficiency was lost with the multi-chip design; how many things had to be duplicated in memory for the different GPUs. The Voodoo5 even required an external plugin power source.
nVidia to this day still sells its chips to everyone else. 3Dfx was trying to get into the ATi space, where you only had one ATi card and didn't have to worry about reference vs vendor drivers. It might have worked if they tried to keep both units separate for a while and not merge them into one entity.
Wait, so what went wrong? They took too long to release new product? That's not surprising to anyone watching at the time. But… why? What went wrong internally?
I think it was the failed merger with STB. They should have kept with the nVidia route of making chips for other companies instead of trying to integrate the entire pipeline like ATI.
My Voodoo 5 5500 was, at the time, and for years afterward, the best consumer level card I'd seen for OpenGL rendering. I still remember playing Diablo 2 on it and never lagging, even when insane numbers of mobs were on the screen. RIP
Diablo 2 doesn't use OpenGL. It does use Glide, the native hardware API for Voodoo cards. And it looks amazing and silky smooth with Glide compared to the game's Direct3D mode.
I remember the day clearly when a case of Voodoo 2's showed up in our dorm room, 1998. Going from software rendered Quake 2, to accelerated was the beginning of the end for my grades that semester.
This making me reminisce so hard. I remember fondly the days where I convinced my mom that the Voodoo card was for some school thing and was so excited to slap that baby into the ISA slot of my Pentium 2.
TDFX shareholders got screwed when they were "acquired" by nVidia. I suppose that was a good thing, it made be skeptical of crummy companies during the dot com days.
I have many fond memories configuring my voodoo card on Linux, reveling in my high glxgears score and super smooth Tux racer rendering. A simpler time.
[+] [-] rayiner|8 years ago|reply
Think back on how much consumer computing changed from 1996 to 2000. Four years back from the present, in contrast, is the Haswell-based Macbook Pro and iPhone 5s (a perfectly fine setup today).
[+] [-] djsumdog|8 years ago|reply
The thing that bothers me is that if you want a PCI-E card on a consumer system, you only have nVidia/AMD. Intel only does embedded now with none of their offerings on a card (like the only i740). There is no Ryzen 7 with an APU, so if you're building a small developer box, you have to buy a discrete graphics card and can't rely on embedded (unless you want to drop to the Ryzen 5, which was just released with an APU).
There are rumors that Intel might be getting back into this space. If anyone could try to compete with the big two, it's probably them.
[+] [-] oblio|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] taneq|8 years ago|reply
So amazing to get 30fps with fullscreen trilinear filtering. It really felt like the future... and then you jump back to the present and your graphics card is basically a renderfarm that you send geometry and shaders off to and it does the rest.
[+] [-] airstrike|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] _noqo|8 years ago|reply
I was just getting to know the world of computers, I think it was the year 97, I had 13 years old and my first PC, Pentium 200mhz with Windows 95, I thought the games were fabulous! Quake 1, Duke Nukem, Carmageddon, Moto Racer.
But one day I bought the Diamond Monster 2 with a Voodoo 2 chip and 12MB Ram (3DFX accelerator card), I put that thing on my PC and it was like traveling to the future, the games looked amazing and I had a performance boost.
I think the game that impressed me most at the time was Need For Speed 2 Special Edition, before the card I had it installed and played, but the "Special Edition" was for being compatible with 3DFX and adding additional features, in addition to the smoothed textures, in a track mosquitoes were sticking to the screen, I do not remember what other special features.
Moto Racer, Descent Freespace and Tomb Raider 2 come to my mind now as others that I feel huge visual gap between regular graphics and 3DFX.
Then came Quake 3 Arena in 1999 and it blew my mind, I think that in 2000/2001 I upgrade to a Pentium 4 and maintain the legendary Diamond Monster 2 because it was still kicking ass. Awesome card, it has a place in my heart.
[+] [-] paulbennett|8 years ago|reply
I think NFS2SE had transparent glass if you had a 3DFX card, or maybe that was NFS3, I remember wishing I had one either way!
[+] [-] Guest9812398|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rdtsc|8 years ago|reply
Yes! It was 1998 or 1999. I remember coming home from Micro Center, installing the Diamond Voodoo2 card and trying Descent Freespace on it. I think it came with it as a demo or even a full version. Then lots of hours playing NFS as well. It was the future.
[+] [-] jwilk|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] blue11|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] k__|8 years ago|reply
I even remember the need of two cards. A GPU and a 3D accelerator.
[+] [-] rimunroe|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] AnIdiotOnTheNet|8 years ago|reply
I wonder if we're about to witness the second death of PC gaming?
[+] [-] teddyh|8 years ago|reply
LGR Tech Tales - 3Dfx & Voodoo's Self-Destruction
This episode covers the founding, voodoo-powered rise, and ridiculously powerful fall of 3Dfx Interactive. Join me in LGR Tech Tales, looking at stories of technological inspiration, failure, and everything in-between!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rrn-QYdT4F8
[+] [-] rasz|8 years ago|reply
Ross Smith, Scott Sellers and Gary Tarolli were 3dfx founders, they left Silicon Graphics to do this startup.
[+] [-] alberth|8 years ago|reply
I remember fondly in the late 90s just walking into a Best Buy (maybe Circuit City) and buying a GPU off the shelf.
I had no benchmark data like today. I bought based on whether or not I liked the packaging and how much video RAM did it have. Because I really didn't have much more data to go off of.
I subsequently bout the Diamond Viper 770, linked below.
https://www.anandtech.com/show/307
Times have really changed.
[+] [-] Narishma|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ksec|8 years ago|reply
1. Direct X, and arguably Microsoft, trying to dethrone Glide, made a huge impact. Although that was later in the time line when 3Dfx was going downhill anyway.
2. Too late to the "Graphics" Card market. After Voodoo 2 it took them too long ( Long in that state of time, when everything was moving fast ) to release a 2D/3D Graphics Card. Voodoo Banshee wasn't good enough compared to RivaTNT.
3. Prices, Voodoo was quite a bit more expensive then others.
God, reading this article makes me feel old. Lots of memories coming back. Reading about benchmarks between all these Graphics Card. Internet was still in its early days back then. Most of the information were from Monthly magazine I got from WH Smith, PC Gamers used to do these test. Lot of cool games coming from those CD Demo disk. There is S3 Savage 3D, ATI Rage, Matrox, 3D Labs which was the Semi Professional Graphics Card company back then, which is now under Creative, aka Sound Blaster's company. Even Intel has i740. And PowerVR. Nvidia went from the underdog, and Geforce changes everything. I remember the early days how every new product from different company would hype their spec, like S3 is going to change the world etc. Then we soon learn all the paper spec didn't matter, if the drivers wasn't giving it the full potential. One of the reason why PowerVR didn't do well on desktop. ( Actually this is still the case in Mobile Phones.... )
GPU today isn't exciting anymore, at least in terms of Grpahics, not compute. We are limited by Technology node, and lots of drivers optimization to get AAA games to work better.
Gaming at the time was very geeky. Who would have thought today we have something called E-Sport, and it seems everyone is a gamer. Somewhere along the line I ditched PC gaming and went to console. I miss PC gaming, mainly because I bought a Mac, and despite what Apple say, they really don't gave a crap about gaming on Mac. Sigh
I miss 3Dfx, I miss Voodoo.
Good Old Times.
P.S - And somehow this song pops up in my head
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=swVoXHVW-jI
[+] [-] Zardoz84|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ivankolev|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] justin66|8 years ago|reply
Nvidia was never really feeble. Even when 3Dfx was shocking everyone with their raw throughput and had a bit of a moat (until DirectX stopped sucking) with the Glide API, Nvidia got their foot in the door with 32-bit rendering and decent OpenGL. 3Dfx made sense for a lot of us - anyone using Quake would get it if they could, since raw performance mattered a lot and you don't suffer too much for only having 16-bit rendering of all those shades of brown - but with anything later than the original Voodoo, you felt like you were making a bit of a trade-off.
I've still got a Voodoo 3, I think. No telling if it actually works, but it was the only add-on card I've ever had that warped with time. Poor heat sink design and/or not enough layers on the PCB, I guess.
[+] [-] k__|8 years ago|reply
A friend of mine even got a Voodoo 5500 and we tried to get Quake 3 Arena so tuned that we couldn't see any pixels anymore.
I was the first one with a GeForce 2MX, which worked quite well and long considering it was the budget version of the gf2.
If I look at the performance indexes, the Voodoo 5500 wasn't very much better than the GF2MX.
[+] [-] Gogogogirl|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dogprez|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] b3lvedere|8 years ago|reply
Specs and scores were all they could talk about. I also remember that very nice parody: https://imgur.com/SLG6hp4
[+] [-] upbeatlinux|8 years ago|reply
My Voodoo3 ran right up through CS v1.6 (albeit struggling at times). A new system I built in 2005 used 2x BFG 6800s in SLI (3dfx tech nvidia inherited). While impressive I seem to recall their being some variation in nvidia's SLI spec/implementation. Perhaps 3dfx SLI performance was seemingly better because of Glide support but my memory escapes me (obviously not an apples to apples comparison).
FWIW, there was also a huge aftermarket of Voodoo cards on eBay (1999-2004) and a decent community providing 3rd party driver support.
[+] [-] TorKlingberg|8 years ago|reply
In this case, Nvidia and ATI were already making 3D accelerators for the professional 3D rendering market. All they had to do was to make stripped down cards that wouldn't cannibalize their high margin business, and sell them in volume for a price gamers could bear.
Maybe 3Dfx could have made a moat out of GLide, but OpenGL already existed and Microsoft was working on Direct3D.
[+] [-] pvg|8 years ago|reply
Were they? I don’t see any professional cards in Nvidia’s early line-up, at least not the one shown on Wikipedia. The first Quadro doesn’t show up till 1999 and the verbiage suggests the pro cards were an offshoot of the gaming cards, not the other way round.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nvidia_graphics_proc...
[+] [-] chrisan|8 years ago|reply
Why not? What if Kodak management had went hard on digital initially instead of clinging to film for so long?
[+] [-] djsumdog|8 years ago|reply
I think they tried to lay off duplicate staff. With the Voodoo3, you saw drivers that just didn't work half the time. Textures were rendered totally wrong, people would downgrade drivers to get things working, etc. I have a felling they laid off or lost people critical in the hardware itself.
The website went to shit too. It got terrible. They either axed or lost a ton of web staff and focused more on the graphics used on all their box art.
Finally, the cards/chips just didn't scale well. I even remember a ton of articles at the time talking about how much efficiency was lost with the multi-chip design; how many things had to be duplicated in memory for the different GPUs. The Voodoo5 even required an external plugin power source.
nVidia to this day still sells its chips to everyone else. 3Dfx was trying to get into the ATi space, where you only had one ATi card and didn't have to worry about reference vs vendor drivers. It might have worked if they tried to keep both units separate for a while and not merge them into one entity.
[+] [-] adamroderick|8 years ago|reply
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