> What ever happened? For 3dfx, the Voodoo 3 happened. Whereas previous Voodoo cards were sold by a large variety of OEMs (like Diamond or ELSA), 3dfx decided

> What ever happened? For 3dfx, the Voodoo 3 happened. Whereas previous Voodoo cards were sold by a large variety of OEMs (like Diamond or ELSA), 3dfx decided to make the Voodoo 3 graphic card on their own. It was a perfectly fast and capable card, but also expensive (for its time), not as easy to get as OEM cards were, couldn't do 32-Bit textures (16-Bit only), and didn't support AGP Texturing. nVidia's TNT2 was a bit slower, but not by much, and thanks to the many OEMs making cards, you could pick one up anywhere and usually pretty cheap. (Just make sure you're not getting the M64 by accident. But even then, that one might've been a good way to get a capable 3D graphics card for cheap). 3dfx was still competitive here and probably the best gaming card, but they had clearly bitten off more than they could chew, and it looks to me that their R&D just didn't produce anything else than "Voodoo 2 but a bit faster and delayed multiple times". When nVidia released the Geforce 256 (Hardware Transform and Lighting!), that was it. Both the Voodoo 4 and 5 were duds (though seeing 3dfx's complete brute force approach with the never-released Voodoo 5 6000 still brings a smile to my face), they couldn't get other products to the market quick enough, and went bankrupt starting in mid 2000. I don't even think it was about "GPU" stuff: The first programmable shader card (and thus "GPU") was the Geforce 3 in 2001, at which point 3dfx was already out of money and without perspective. I'm not sure if they could have been saved if Sega would have chosen them for the Dreamcast (seeing how the Dreamcast sunk Sega's console business) and it might have been possible to save 3dfx still, but realistically, the one-two punch of the Voodoo 3 and Geforce 256 killed them.