10 ms·

Fall of Voodoo

128 points by discreditable 9y ago

ivankolev 9y ago
Still fondly remember my passively-cooled! Voodoo 3, their rendering stack was top quality. Nvidia was the feeble newcomer. Times change fast...
- k__ 9y ago
  Hehe, all my friends had Voodoo GPUs back in the days. 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.
  - IndrekR 9y ago
    And there was simple resistor resolder hack to make GeForce 2MX think it is Quadro. It was very useless and very cool at the same time. Few people got into hardware hacking (read electronics engineering) thanks to this little and yet very positive soldering experience.
    - sevensor 9y ago
      I remember in the same era, carefully shorting a blown fuse on the package of my Athlon using a graphite pencil, so that I could overclock it. I heated my apartment with that PC.
    - Zardoz84 9y ago
      and the GF2 MX with DDR ram, can move Doom 3 at a barely playable FPS, if you downgrade the game textures. I played the whole game with these GPU.
  - ksec 9y ago
    >all my friends had Voodoo GPUs back in the days. Mostly becoz many games were better on Glide then OpnenGL
- justin66 9y ago
  > Nvidia was the feeble newcomer. 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.
  - specialist 9y ago
    IIRC, which is a poor bet, I probably choose NVidia over 3dfx because of the OpenGL drivers. I was doing CAD, VRML, OpenGL stuff thru the 90s.
    - justin66 9y ago
      If your card was anything with "Geforce" in the name that was certainly the best choice. Even before the Geforce era, 3dfx never had anything except problematic OpenGL "mini drivers" which worked okay with Quake-based games but not much else.
jwilk 9y ago
It feels weird that the article uses the term "GPU". This term wasn't widely used back then. IIRC, the Voodoo cards were called "3D accelerators".
- k__ 9y ago
  Yes. I even remember the need of two cards. A GPU and a 3D accelerator.
  - sevensor 9y ago
    I remember seeing computers marketed as having both a "2D accelerator" and a "3D accelerator" -- separate cards. I never had the cash for a Voodoo card back in the day, but I certainly wanted one!
  - clw8 9y ago
    The classic combo of Matrox for 2D and 3Dfx for 3D. Surprisingly Matrox still exists.
    - djsumdog 9y ago
      Yep, but their cards aren't really consumer. They only do expensive specialized card for multi-monitor output (think serving up 8+ screens at a train station).
  - djsumdog 9y ago
    Wasn't that only the Voodoo1/Voodoo2, with the pass through cable? I don't think any other manufacture did that.
  - mattnewport 9y ago
    That's nothing, I remember the need for 4, a 2D card, two Voodoo 2s in SLI and a dedicated hardware DVD decoder card :-) The picture quality was terrible with multiple pass through analog VGA cables...
    - 9y ago
rayiner 9y ago
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).
- airstrike 9y ago
  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.
  - oblio 9y ago
    Not entirely true. Software has natural monopoly characteristics. The only real solution around it has been alternative markets. Apple couldn't budge Microsoft in the desktop market and they went "around" them by going into the mobile market.
    - digi_owl 9y ago
      And even then they may have been a bit player if Microsoft had not flinched and thrown out their existing PocketPC platform to ship Phone 7. Keep in mind that PocketPC was not just used for "consumer" phones, but also all kinds of hand held terminals in warehouses and such. This was a market that Microsoft basically abandoned when they announced that Phone 7 and onwards would not be compatible with PocketPC software, even though they tried to extend a fig leaf by rebranding PocketPC 6.5 as Phone 6.5 (i think HP tried to sell a couple of PDAs with that). Didn't take long before we saw alternatives out there, though these days i think they are mostly Android based.
- djsumdog 9y ago
Gogogogirl 9y ago
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.
- dogprez 9y ago
  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.
  - oldcynic 9y ago
    Pretty much on the money. The hardware guys tried though. Management delayed and delayed until they'd blown all the money. In 90-91 ish they had a prototype AAA architecture and the specs were great. (3000+). PC's had caught up some way. Instead management pushed a cheap, horrible, slower machine with none of the features, no SCSI II but CPU driven IDE and AGA in place of AAA. No DSP or voice recognition. No 16 bit Paula. That was A4000. Then in 93(?) there was the planned 3D PowerPC reboot as PCs had finally caught up with AAA! Then they were no more. Was really depressing going to DevCons and getting all the NDA info in this period.
    - Gogogogirl 9y ago
      It doesn't look like AAA [1] has any 3D? From what I remember it was more like my Retina Z3 card but better. Had some discussions at conferences, it seemed Amiga hardware engineers didn't believe in 3D and were frozen in their graphics mindset of blitter and copper (huge when I wrote 68k demos in the mid-80s, but meaningless when 3D happened). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga_Advanced_Architecture_chipset https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga_Advanced_Architecture_ch...
      - phire 9y ago
        It doesn't have 3D, but what it does have is 8 and 16bit chunky graphics modes, which make doing software renderers a lot easier than the planer modes of the old chipsets. With chunky graphics, you can write out an entire pixel with a single write, which is essential for rasterisation in software 3d games. It's not like PCs got 3d graphics cards until late-95, the AAA chipsets released in 1993 might have allowed the Amega to hold on until 96, get proper Doom clones (and maybe even quake clones) and then get it's own 3d accelerators.
jlebrech 9y ago
Could also be titled: when not to pivot
fsiefken 9y ago
I had the Wicked3D H3D voodoo glasses, 3D on 20 inch monitor gave me > 100 FOV when I put my nose near the screen.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
rasz 9y ago
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 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.
teddyh 9y ago
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! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rrn-QYdT4F8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rrn-QYdT4F8
alberth 9y ago
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. https://www.anandtech.com/show/307 https://www.anandtech.com/show/307 Times have really changed.
- Narishma 9y ago
  There were plenty of magazines doing those benchmarks back then, you certainly didn't need the Internet to make good buying decisions.
  - zumu 9y ago
    There was also the internet. Consider this article from Tom's Hardware circa 1998 http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/nvidia,87-8.html http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/nvidia,87-8.html
TorKlingberg 9y ago
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.
- chrisan 9y ago
  > but I don’t think anyone could have saved say, Kodak Why not? What if Kodak management had went hard on digital initially instead of clinging to film for so long?
  - throwawayjava 9y ago
    Then they would've softened their blow and perhaps delayed their relative demise until the rise of smartphones. But I do think it's fair to say that the transition was going to be a bloodbath of layoffs and declining revenue in any case.
    - nwah1 9y ago
      Someone has to make the cameras in the phones. That plausibly could've been Kodak, in an alternate reality.
      - throwawayjava 9y ago
        There still would've been a bloodbath because chemical engineers aren't EEs/SEs. All the Kodak scientists/engineers/factory workers who were designing and making film would not have immediately pivoted to digital camera design and software development. The "camera design" portion of kodak isn't where the primary bloodbath happened. The bloodbath happened when film died. In other words, kodak the company may have thrived, but only by shedding huge portions of its workforce and retooling. I guess if all you care about is stock value, then sure, Kodak could've pulled it off. But for the folks on the ground, the bloodbath would've happened either way.
jugg1es 9y ago
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.
Tloewald 9y ago
Off-topic: the PS4's PSVR box is a bit reminiscent of the old Voodoo cards with their passthrough video.
jonny_eh 9y ago
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?
- djsumdog 9y ago
  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.
  - smacktoward 9y ago
    Yes, this. They tried to go from being a company that just licensed IP to OEMs (who would do the actual manufacturing and marketing of 3dfx-powered graphics cards) to being a company that did the manufacturing and marketing themselves, and in the end couldn't pull that off. Acquiring one of the more prominent OEMs, STB, was supposed to get them the expertise they needed to do that rather than having to develop it in-house, but (as in many acquisitions) absorbing the new company turned out to be more complicated than originally expected. This resulted in the post-acquisition products (Voodoo 3/4/5) taking longer to get to market than planned and being somewhat underwhelming by the time they did arrive, which gave NVidia -- who kept on licensing their tech, now also to grumpy former 3dfx OEMs who had found themselves cut out by the STB acquisiton -- the opening they needed to eat 3dfx's lunch.
    - jonny_eh 9y ago
      None of this was in the article, what a shame!
tomc1985 9y ago
God I hate that gigantic font
ksec 9y ago
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 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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=swVoXHVW-jI
- Zardoz84 9y ago
  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 ...)
pablo-massa 9y ago
I remember those days vividly. 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 9y ago
  > 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!
  - Nition 9y ago
    I remember playing Need for Speed: High Stakes with a 4MB Permedia 2 card, and the game was clearly supposed to have alpha-transparent textures on some lights, but my card couldn't handle it and I got opaque textures with big black borders around all the streetlight lens flares etc. The worst was the Dolphin Cove track where beautiful shafts of sunlight were meant to lazily filter through the tree canopy onto the road. On my screen, they appeared as fully opaque walls blocking any view of the track ahead.
upbeatlinux 9y ago
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.
b3lvedere 9y ago
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 https://imgur.com/SLG6hp4
overcast 9y ago
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.
pmiller2 9y ago
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
- T-hawk 9y ago
  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.
cbm-vic-20 9y ago
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.
tenken 9y ago
Voodoo 3dfx 5500 baby ...
yesimahuman 9y ago
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.

128 points by discreditable 9y ago

Still fondly remember my passively-cooled! Voodoo 3, their rendering stack was top quality. Nvidia was the feeble newcomer. Times change fast...

k__ 9y ago
Hehe, all my friends had Voodoo GPUs back in the days. 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.
- IndrekR 9y ago
  And there was simple resistor resolder hack to make GeForce 2MX think it is Quadro. It was very useless and very cool at the same time. Few people got into hardware hacking (read electronics engineering) thanks to this little and yet very positive soldering experience.
  - sevensor 9y ago
    I remember in the same era, carefully shorting a blown fuse on the package of my Athlon using a graphite pencil, so that I could overclock it. I heated my apartment with that PC.
  - Zardoz84 9y ago
    and the GF2 MX with DDR ram, can move Doom 3 at a barely playable FPS, if you downgrade the game textures. I played the whole game with these GPU.
- ksec 9y ago
  >all my friends had Voodoo GPUs back in the days. Mostly becoz many games were better on Glide then OpnenGL
justin66 9y ago
> Nvidia was the feeble newcomer. 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.
- specialist 9y ago
  IIRC, which is a poor bet, I probably choose NVidia over 3dfx because of the OpenGL drivers. I was doing CAD, VRML, OpenGL stuff thru the 90s.
  - justin66 9y ago
    If your card was anything with "Geforce" in the name that was certainly the best choice. Even before the Geforce era, 3dfx never had anything except problematic OpenGL "mini drivers" which worked okay with Quake-based games but not much else.

jwilk 9y ago

It feels weird that the article uses the term "GPU". This term wasn't widely used back then. IIRC, the Voodoo cards were called "3D accelerators".

k__ 9y ago
Yes. I even remember the need of two cards. A GPU and a 3D accelerator.
- sevensor 9y ago
  I remember seeing computers marketed as having both a "2D accelerator" and a "3D accelerator" -- separate cards. I never had the cash for a Voodoo card back in the day, but I certainly wanted one!
- clw8 9y ago
  The classic combo of Matrox for 2D and 3Dfx for 3D. Surprisingly Matrox still exists.
  - djsumdog 9y ago
    Yep, but their cards aren't really consumer. They only do expensive specialized card for multi-monitor output (think serving up 8+ screens at a train station).
- djsumdog 9y ago
  Wasn't that only the Voodoo1/Voodoo2, with the pass through cable? I don't think any other manufacture did that.
- mattnewport 9y ago
  That's nothing, I remember the need for 4, a 2D card, two Voodoo 2s in SLI and a dedicated hardware DVD decoder card :-) The picture quality was terrible with multiple pass through analog VGA cables...
  - 9y ago

rayiner 9y ago

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).

airstrike 9y ago
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.
- oblio 9y ago
  Not entirely true. Software has natural monopoly characteristics. The only real solution around it has been alternative markets. Apple couldn't budge Microsoft in the desktop market and they went "around" them by going into the mobile market.
  - digi_owl 9y ago
    And even then they may have been a bit player if Microsoft had not flinched and thrown out their existing PocketPC platform to ship Phone 7. Keep in mind that PocketPC was not just used for "consumer" phones, but also all kinds of hand held terminals in warehouses and such. This was a market that Microsoft basically abandoned when they announced that Phone 7 and onwards would not be compatible with PocketPC software, even though they tried to extend a fig leaf by rebranding PocketPC 6.5 as Phone 6.5 (i think HP tried to sell a couple of PDAs with that). Didn't take long before we saw alternatives out there, though these days i think they are mostly Android based.
djsumdog 9y ago

Gogogogirl 9y ago

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.

dogprez 9y ago
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.
- oldcynic 9y ago
  Pretty much on the money. The hardware guys tried though. Management delayed and delayed until they'd blown all the money. In 90-91 ish they had a prototype AAA architecture and the specs were great. (3000+). PC's had caught up some way. Instead management pushed a cheap, horrible, slower machine with none of the features, no SCSI II but CPU driven IDE and AGA in place of AAA. No DSP or voice recognition. No 16 bit Paula. That was A4000. Then in 93(?) there was the planned 3D PowerPC reboot as PCs had finally caught up with AAA! Then they were no more. Was really depressing going to DevCons and getting all the NDA info in this period.
  - Gogogogirl 9y ago
    It doesn't look like AAA [1] has any 3D? From what I remember it was more like my Retina Z3 card but better. Had some discussions at conferences, it seemed Amiga hardware engineers didn't believe in 3D and were frozen in their graphics mindset of blitter and copper (huge when I wrote 68k demos in the mid-80s, but meaningless when 3D happened). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga_Advanced_Architecture_chipset https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga_Advanced_Architecture_ch...
    - phire 9y ago
      It doesn't have 3D, but what it does have is 8 and 16bit chunky graphics modes, which make doing software renderers a lot easier than the planer modes of the old chipsets. With chunky graphics, you can write out an entire pixel with a single write, which is essential for rasterisation in software 3d games. It's not like PCs got 3d graphics cards until late-95, the AAA chipsets released in 1993 might have allowed the Amega to hold on until 96, get proper Doom clones (and maybe even quake clones) and then get it's own 3d accelerators.

jlebrech 9y ago

Could also be titled: when not to pivot

fsiefken 9y ago

I had the Wicked3D H3D voodoo glasses, 3D on 20 inch monitor gave me > 100 FOV when I put my nose near the screen.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

rasz 9y ago

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 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.

teddyh 9y ago

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! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rrn-QYdT4F8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rrn-QYdT4F8

alberth 9y ago

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. https://www.anandtech.com/show/307 https://www.anandtech.com/show/307 Times have really changed.

Narishma 9y ago
There were plenty of magazines doing those benchmarks back then, you certainly didn't need the Internet to make good buying decisions.
- zumu 9y ago
  There was also the internet. Consider this article from Tom's Hardware circa 1998 http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/nvidia,87-8.html http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/nvidia,87-8.html

TorKlingberg 9y ago

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.

chrisan 9y ago
> but I don’t think anyone could have saved say, Kodak Why not? What if Kodak management had went hard on digital initially instead of clinging to film for so long?
- throwawayjava 9y ago
  Then they would've softened their blow and perhaps delayed their relative demise until the rise of smartphones. But I do think it's fair to say that the transition was going to be a bloodbath of layoffs and declining revenue in any case.
  - nwah1 9y ago
    Someone has to make the cameras in the phones. That plausibly could've been Kodak, in an alternate reality.
    - throwawayjava 9y ago
      There still would've been a bloodbath because chemical engineers aren't EEs/SEs. All the Kodak scientists/engineers/factory workers who were designing and making film would not have immediately pivoted to digital camera design and software development. The "camera design" portion of kodak isn't where the primary bloodbath happened. The bloodbath happened when film died. In other words, kodak the company may have thrived, but only by shedding huge portions of its workforce and retooling. I guess if all you care about is stock value, then sure, Kodak could've pulled it off. But for the folks on the ground, the bloodbath would've happened either way.

jugg1es 9y ago

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.

Tloewald 9y ago

Off-topic: the PS4's PSVR box is a bit reminiscent of the old Voodoo cards with their passthrough video.

jonny_eh 9y ago

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?

djsumdog 9y ago
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.
- smacktoward 9y ago
  Yes, this. They tried to go from being a company that just licensed IP to OEMs (who would do the actual manufacturing and marketing of 3dfx-powered graphics cards) to being a company that did the manufacturing and marketing themselves, and in the end couldn't pull that off. Acquiring one of the more prominent OEMs, STB, was supposed to get them the expertise they needed to do that rather than having to develop it in-house, but (as in many acquisitions) absorbing the new company turned out to be more complicated than originally expected. This resulted in the post-acquisition products (Voodoo 3/4/5) taking longer to get to market than planned and being somewhat underwhelming by the time they did arrive, which gave NVidia -- who kept on licensing their tech, now also to grumpy former 3dfx OEMs who had found themselves cut out by the STB acquisiton -- the opening they needed to eat 3dfx's lunch.
  - jonny_eh 9y ago
    None of this was in the article, what a shame!

tomc1985 9y ago

God I hate that gigantic font

ksec 9y ago

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 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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=swVoXHVW-jI

Zardoz84 9y ago
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 ...)

pablo-massa 9y ago

I remember those days vividly. 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 9y ago
> 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!
- Nition 9y ago
  I remember playing Need for Speed: High Stakes with a 4MB Permedia 2 card, and the game was clearly supposed to have alpha-transparent textures on some lights, but my card couldn't handle it and I got opaque textures with big black borders around all the streetlight lens flares etc. The worst was the Dolphin Cove track where beautiful shafts of sunlight were meant to lazily filter through the tree canopy onto the road. On my screen, they appeared as fully opaque walls blocking any view of the track ahead.

upbeatlinux 9y ago

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.

b3lvedere 9y ago

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 https://imgur.com/SLG6hp4

overcast 9y ago

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.

pmiller2 9y ago

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

T-hawk 9y ago
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.

cbm-vic-20 9y ago

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.

tenken 9y ago

Voodoo 3dfx 5500 baby ...

yesimahuman 9y ago

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.