11 ms·

3dfx: So powerful, it's kind of ridiculous (2023)

319 points by kristianp 2y ago

petermcneeley 2y ago
Relevant: This is my lengthy presentation on porting Rogue Squadron 3d from 3dfx glide over to Vulkan. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wcmKy-72_2U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wcmKy-72_2U
- panick21_ 2y ago
  Interesting, thanks for this.
snide 2y ago
There was a brief period of time where having one of these 3D cards in quake led to a pretty heavy advantage for gamers. I can very clearly remember installing the card and then loading up 2Fort4 in the Team Fortress mod and suddenly being able to see THROUGH THE WATER. Sniper's paradise!
- glitchc 2y ago
  You also needed a fast connection to minimize latency. 400 ms on dial-up was common.
  - atonse 2y ago
    I used to play games like Starsiege (the mech game) on dialup. With our 250ms pings, your brain just learned to compensate for the delay and click that much earlier to shoot. But yeah, those lucky people with their DSL modems and 60ms pings would wipe the floor with us. Nowadays, everyone has a < 10ms ping.
    - mysterydip 2y ago
      I loved playing starsiege back in 2000. I had a wired college campus connection, but shared with so many students, my pings would go anywhere from 50 to 500 depending on time of day. Near-timeouts showed the client side prediction code in action, with mechs sliding around and then freezing in place.
      - atonse 2y ago
        Yeah funny to watch the mechs slide, all the kinds of things the young whippersnappers nowadays will never witness. Plus all the weird behavior with packet loss. You could see each player's ping and PL numbers in the server player list. Those were the days.
    - hypercube33 2y ago
      The torque engine (at least tribes 2) was wild what it was capable of on dial up. 32 or 64 players was okay compared to 8 on quake 2 depending on your latency and connection speed.
      - atonse 2y ago
        I played in Tribes 1 tournaments ... I never had a computer powerful enough for Tribes 2 – it had a very bumpy launch, remember? A lot of C++ exceptions, etc. But Tribes 1 was incredible in how smoothly it handled "larger" servers. It would be so chaotic.
  - dwaite 2y ago
    When qtest was released, I was there in the IRC channel and one of the first to play. I remember connecting to someone's machine and just destroying everyone. Afterward I got a message from someone congratulating me, but being incredulous about my ping time being 26ms. I happened to be on the first floor in the first dorm on campus to get wired internet access, and they had an OC3 dedicated to it. Two months earlier there were 16 of us splitting that line, with public IP addresses. (Going back to dial-up after leaving the dorm was.. difficult). So I told him, yeah I kinda have a ridiculous internet connection here at school. He was like, "no, you don't understand - it is my machine. I am playing on the server and your ping time is lower than mine!"
- agumonkey 2y ago
  There was also a perverse effect on some games. With a graphics card, your gameplay could be altered and you had to unlearn all the reflexes you built on CPU rendering alone. Moto Racer (1997) was like that. The gameplay with a graphics card was completely different, even trajectories (I assume lag made the cpu accept a little bit more rounding errors).
  - strictnein 2y ago
    Moto Racer was one of the few games that supported the PowerVR card. I had one and it looked so good. Such a fun game.
- somat 2y ago
  If I remember correctly to get transparent water the level also had to be re processed through the "vis" program with a transparent water flag set. vis did a precalculation for where a level segment(the partition in binary space partition) could be seen from any other level segment. the end effect was that while glquake did have a option for transparent water, the geometry would not draw on the far side. making the effect useless without a bit of extra work. But I have to admit I have no idea if entities(other players) would draw or not. update: found this https://quakeone.com/forum/quake-help/general-help/4754-vispatching-guide https://quakeone.com/forum/quake-help/general-help/4754-visp... Apparently there is a no_vis option to run without the visible set optimizations.
  - Beermotor 2y ago
    Adding: the server and client had to both be running vis patched maps to be able to see other players in the water due to the way entity visibility was calculated server-side. The downside to running vis patched maps on a server is it used slightly more CPU than unpatched maps IIRC. Perhaps someone that ran more servers than I did (I ran two nodes on an Intergraph InterServe with dual P6-200s) could weigh in on what the impact was at scale.
- AdmiralAsshat 2y ago
  > I can very clearly remember installing the card and then loading up 2Fort4 in the Team Fortress mod and suddenly being able to see THROUGH THE WATER. Searching for "2Fort4" in YouTube yielded some interesting videos for people curious what the original Quake Mod version of the map looked like: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bJh36LuKwVQ&pp=ygUGMkZvcnQ0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bJh36LuKwVQ&pp=ygUGMkZvcnQ0 As someone who still spends at least 3 hours a week playing 2Fort on the current Team Fortress 2, it's fascinating to see how the core of the map is still basically the same after 20 years. EDIT: Another video which goes into more detail about the history of each 2fort version, going back to its original inspiration from a Doom 2 level: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tid9QwAOlng&t=375s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tid9QwAOlng&t=375s
  - cogman10 2y ago
    Interesting, didn't realize this design was that old. Feels a little like teapot :). The video also misses that there was a pretty popular 2fort for half life 1.
  - tracker1 2y ago
    I spent so much of my early 20's in that map/mod on Q1. I don't think I've had that level of just fun in any game/map/mod since then.
- macintux 2y ago
  On a very different scale, but I recall playing bzflag decades ago and discovering that I simply could not jump my tank to the second level. My graphics card was so slow that something wasn't working correctly, and no matter how many times I tried from different distances I would almost make it, but not quite.
  - stanac 2y ago
    More recent example: In GTA SA in a mission I wasn't able to reach an airplane before it took off unless I lowered the resolution of the game.
- taeric 2y ago
  This and the overwhelming advantage conveyed from fast internet connections was hard to really appreciate when you were there.
  - garciasn 2y ago
    Even having a solid dial-up connection with a ~180-185ms ping was a ridiculous advantage when most HPBs were ~350ms, particularly in clan invitationals for Q1CTF. We were playing as LPBs in the dorm at ~45-60ms and 180ms wasn't that much of a concern, aside from sliding around corners more than expected, but at 350ms you were basically shooting predictively at where you assumed they'd be next, not where they 'were'.
    - yawgmoth 2y ago
      Subspace/Continuum also used lag in its gameplay, with players warping to recently exploded spaceships so they could continue to invade. It was an established technique and had to be defended against. Edit: typo Shout out to any EG players!
nickpeterson 2y ago
My first gpu ever was a voodoo 2 8mb. I remember starting up the original unreal and getting it working. Shortly after we got a cable modem. 12 year old me was having a total blast. ;)
glitchc 2y ago
I still have a Diamond Monster Fusion kicking around somewhere in my stash. It was the first GPU I ever bought using my own money.
elif 2y ago
I remember my first like 5 paychecks when I was a teenager scooping ice cream went to a voodoo3 from compUSA. I don't even think it had a fan, and I remember being shocked how small the pci was as id been accustomed to mostly ISA "daughter boards" Wow what a trip down memory lane
- tracker1 2y ago
  I'm consistently amazed at how massive video cards are today... it really feels like it's often excessive for the sake of being excessive over any real need. I was actually happy to see the depth shrink of the Meshify C case, now I'm disappointed I'm probably going to have to swap the case for a new GPU... it's too hard to find options that fit beyond mid-range, and even then.
  - phonon 2y ago
    Those old cards were way under 50 Watts. Even a "low-end" card now like an Intel B580 (list price $250, inflation adjusted equivalent to about $125 in the late 90s.) is 225 W. Cooling and power circuitry are much more critical now.
    - tracker1 2y ago
      Even then... There's no way an RTX 5070 needs the same cooler as a 5080/5090 by any stretch, but many of these cards on the lower-mid range are using the same coolers as on the high end. I doubt they're really needed in terms of that big. I could understand a slightly heavier 2-fan model, which would fit in more cases. Even for overclocking, they don't add much. Then again, I also have a solid case without windows. But there are plenty of SFF builders that would like a more reasonably sized upper mid-range card. I'm not suggesting that single slot is enough... but a 2-slot dual fan design should be suitable/sufficient for a stock-clocked 5070 Ti.
sejje 2y ago
My first Linux experience was trying to get a 3dfx to work. Also no Internet because I hadn't gotten that far. I ran back and forth to Steven's house and searched Altavista for the answers. Good times.
- polartx 2y ago
  I was an infoseek.com man myself, but we probably still could have been friends.
  - sejje 2y ago
    gkrellm, konqueror, irssi, xmms of course i had to dual-boot windows so i could still program in vb6 and be a general shit on AOL
    - pak9rabid 2y ago
      That may have even been in the x11amp days.
dguest 2y ago
Have we crossed the threshold where more "Graphics Processing Units" are sold for ML than for graphics processing? I remember thinking it was funny that gaming ultimately subsidized a lot of the major advances in ML for the last decade. We might be flipping to a point where ML subsidizes gaming.
- somenameforme 2y ago
  The 'death' of PC computing has been rather exaggerated. Each year hundreds of millions of PCs are still sold, and that's exclusively referring to prepackaged stuff. There's then the increasingly large chunk of people that simply upgrade a frankenputer as necessary. As for gaming Steam has users in the hundreds of millions and continues to regularly grow. And while that is certainly going to encompass most people, I'm sure there are some oddballs out there that game but don't use Steam. So GPUs sold primarily for ML probably still make up a tiny share of the overall market, but I expect they make up a huge chunk of the market for cards like A100. Gaming hasn't been bleeding edge (in terms of requirements) for a very long time and card prices drop quickly, so there's just no point in spending that sort of money on a card for gaming.
  - adastra22 2y ago
    GPUs for data centers makes up a vastly larger portion of NVIDIA’s sales.
    - somenameforme 2y ago
      These are very different stats. He was referring to unit sales of GPUs, not $ sales. The A100 is a $8000+ video card and so cards like it are going to dominate in revenue, even if their sales numbers are relatively low. For contrast the most popular card, per the Steam hardware survey, is (inexplicably - probably because of prepackaged kits) the RTX 4060, which is a $300 card.
      - genewitch 2y ago
        4060 was probably the only 4000 series GPU available for a while, too. I have a 3090 for AI and gaming and I haven't seen a reason to "upgrade" yet. In fact, I might try and get a 3090ti instead.
panick21_ 2y ago
When the reveal the information about SEGA the whole leadership team should have been on a plane to Japan the next day, all to apologize bow and scrape. And trying to make your own board in that moment, was just an incredible self own.
- rob74 2y ago
  > And trying to make your own board in that moment, was just an incredible self own. ATI built their own boards too at the time (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radeon_R100_series#/media/File:Radeon7500agp.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radeon_R100_series#/media/File...), so the strategy of wanting to control more of the value chain doesn't sound that misguided to me. Not sure when ATI stopped doing that - was it after they were acquired by AMD in 2006 or before?
  - panick21_ 2y ago
    The problem is, they already had a large group of board providers, it was a big market advantage for them. If you listen to the Computer History Museum interview, many of these providers jumped ship. Also the bought a board provider that wasn't very successful, and their resulting boards weren't very successful either.
  - Delk 2y ago
    The same article also has another photo of a Creative-branded card. Other card brands also definitely marketed cards with ATI chips. I remember I had a R200-based card from some third-party manufacturer. ATI and Nvidia also had reference cards but I don't know if those ended up being sold in the mass market or not.
- speed_spread 2y ago
  The board I can understand, the guys having worked at SGI before and seeing how much more you could extract of the arch by having total control over the hardware (minus the CPU, obv). Essentially building customer-oriented x86 SGI machines, branching out of the gaming market and challenging workstation vendors. A 64 bits Opteron+Voodoo based Windows machine would have been something to behold. But the Sega thing probably torpedoed the funding that would have been required for them to become independent of graphic card vendors. They knew it was a matter of time before their advantage eroded. I think what really did them in was DirectX, they stuck with Glide and allowed NVidia to develop a proper implementation of the new Microsoft thingie which was heavily marketed to developers. Their moat became a prison.
stuff4ben 2y ago
I loved playing No One Lives Forever 1&2 on my Voodoo 5 5500. That was the height of my PC building days. Now as a wizened old man, I'm stuck with these Apple Macbook Pros/Airs and they do well enough. But I do miss building my own machines...
- bee_rider 2y ago
  How wizened? If you are close to retiring, maybe you can build a pc and play some games. Keep the brain running, and stay in touch with friends (if they’ll do multiplayer).
- ckozlowski 2y ago
  This was posted on HN the other day. Enjoy! http://nolfrevival.tk/ http://nolfrevival.tk/
- nfriedly 2y ago
  FWIW, you can build a fully functional desktop for ~$400 with integrated graphics (that can play most modern games on lower settings), or maybe $600 with a discreet GPU. Less if you go with used parts.
blindriver 2y ago
The first time I lost all my money in the stock market was when I went all in on 3dfx stock against nvidia. Ah, the good ol’days!
- guax 2y ago
  ouch, I am certain some people did the same for nokia against android/apple :P
  - InDubioProRubio 2y ago
    anti-matter-millionaires
nateb2022 2y ago
Previously discussed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35026862 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35026862 (2 years ago, 376 comments, 671 points)
robertlagrant 2y ago
My first 3D card was a Righteous Orchid 3d. It had a mechanical relay in it to switch between 2d and 3d modes, so it made a distinctive click[0] when you loaded Quake3D. Or, too many times, it didn't, and I had to try again. [0] https://riksrandomretro.com/2021/06/07/the-righteous-click https://riksrandomretro.com/2021/06/07/the-righteous-click
BoredPositron 2y ago
I have more memories of my 3dfx Voodoo cards than of any other old hardware. The OpenGL implementation was so buttery smooth that there is simply nothing to compare it to. Quake 2 at 120fps on a 90Hz CRT was just something else entirely. It felt like there was no input latency at all and even with a higher ping of 80-100 in RocketArena it felt smoother than modern shooters on a 144hz panel.
- adastra22 2y ago
  Funny thing is it was probably 40fps but you remember it feeling like 120fps.
  - BoredPositron 2y ago
    The voodoo 4 4500 could push up to 140fps at 800x600. https://www.philscomputerlab.com/3dfx-voodoo-shootout-project.html https://www.philscomputerlab.com/3dfx-voodoo-shootout-projec...
- pak9rabid 2y ago
  RocketArena players unite! God I spent an ungodly amount of time playing RA3.
trashface 2y ago
It was truly jaw dropping firing up quake 1 for the first time on 3dfx voodoo1. Double the resolution of software and super smooth framerate, and much better quality texture mapping too. I recall tweaking some setting (gl_flashblend?) so that I could see pretty glowing orbs around my rockets (and strategically, also everybody else's rockets).
- rob74 2y ago
  I was the unfortunate owner of an S3 ViRGE card at the time - the (in)famous "3D decelerator". I managed to get Quake running on it, and it looked nice, but was slower than with software rendering...
  - indemnity 2y ago
    Ahhh, what a piece of shit that was! I spent summer lawnmowing money on that thing. When I got a real job next summer, bought an AGP Matrox Millenium G200 and after that the NVIDIA GeForce2, and never strayed from NVDA since!
  - vasac 2y ago
    I had an S3 ViRGE too. It really was a decelerator, and the number of games that actually supported it was minuscule. I managed to run GLQuake, but without any textures - just shades of gray - and even that ran at most a couple of frames per second. But there was another game - Terminal Velocity - that actually looked a lot better with hardware rendering, although it was still slower than software rendering. So, I would run it with hardware rendering to enjoy flying and then restart the game with software rendering to actually fight the enemies. :)
- matwood 2y ago
  It's hard to convey just how revolutionary the original voodoo cards were. There aren't many times in my life where there was a clear line of before and after, but this was one of those times.
  - FirmwareBurner 2y ago
basfo 2y ago
I remember how i was amazed when i got my first 3d card, a Voodoo 2. It was like having an arcade at home. The 3dfx logo spining up when you launched a GLide game was something. Unreal in particular was amazing, i remember as a kid just watching the lighting and the water. At that time every light in a game had to be colored, just because it could be done. Small rooms with green, red and blue lights moving all over the place, so 90s. I never had that "Wow" factor again, from there everything felt like incremental instead of revolutionary. How an absolute market leader disapeared in 2 years is incredible. I think i only got the same wow factor the first time i tested a VR headset.
rayiner 2y ago
Crazy illustration of "nothing happens anymore." 3dfx seemed just as dominant in the 1990s as NVIDIA does today. But from founding to selling to asset sell-off, the company lasted just six years. Meanwhile NVIDIA has been king of the hill since the GeForce was released in 1999, which was 25 years ago.
- mywittyname 2y ago
  AMD overtook Nvidia at times in the gaming space. I'd say that Nvidia has been king of the hill since the introduction of CUDA, since that's what really cemented their position in the tech sector.
  - hylaride 2y ago
    Pre-AMD acquisition ATI also often had better hardware specs than NVIDIA, but their drivers were so often buggy and terrible. By the time they'd been fixed the reviews were long since done on the initial release versions. AMD seems to run a better software shop, at least.
- reginald78 2y ago
  The 90s was an absolutely crazy period for PC hardware. So many flash in the pan companies making a novel devices and then dying entirely as their niche became obsolete. There used to be tons of display board manufacturers and very few of them survived the 3D acceleration introduction.
  - tverbeure 2y ago
    You'd buy a computer magazines and it almost felt like the performance of CPUs and GPUs when up month by month.
p0w3n3d 2y ago
I have one question: wasn't the 3dfx a graphics postprocessor? I thought it didn't render the image in higher quality, but it did postprocessing only... Never had opportunity to have voodoo, but later, when got a decent NVIDIA, I played Need for Speed 2, which had demo videos "rendered in 3dfx" with snow etc, and my graphics was crispy and no-snowy. I tried to look up why my NVIDIA does not have those effects, and I learned that they were overlayed over the original image only by 3dfx voodoo...
- vlovich123 2y ago
  No it’s definitely a 3D renderer. Glide was a competitor to OpenGL and Direct3D that was proprietary to 3dfx. Don’t remember why the quality was higher.
  - tialaramex 2y ago
    Yeah, the earliest models are literally 3D only as discussed in the article, they have separate pass through cable for your existing 2D graphics because even just making a flat 2D window isn't viable directly, Glide really wants to render only textured triangles which is fine for Quake but no good for Windows.
    - jrootabega 2y ago
      I had one of those 3D-only cards on my first computer. I didn't know about the passthrough and got pretty annoyed that my games sucked and never worked with the hardware 3D stack. I don't know if they didn't document it correctly, or if I just missed it. But when some support person finally told me, I was so pumped. I spent a while manually moving the cable to the 3D card when playing a game, until I finally got a passthrough cable.
- pavlov 2y ago
  The Voodoo was a 3D-only accelerator. It didn’t have a traditional 2D graphics core at all, so you needed another basic video card which plugged into the Voodoo using VGA passthrough. When an accelerated game was launched, the Voodoo took over and replaced the 2D card’s output completely. That’s probably why you remember it being a post-processor. It didn’t apply effects to the 2D signal, but it needed it for all non-accelerated programs. 3dfx also supported more blending modes than most competing cards at the time. That could be why the snow effect didn’t work on your card.
time0ut 2y ago
In early 2000, I cobbled together a gaming PC from used parts that I bought or traded for. It had a K6-2, a Voodoo 2, and 192 MB of RAM. It was amazing and such an upgrade over my family’s Celeron. The big games were TFC, Counter-Strike, Unreal Tournament, and StarCraft. We LAN’d every weekend. It was heaven.
ferguess_k 2y ago
I recall Unreal has an option to switch to use the 3dfx card, and if IIRC, it has some additional features like more colourful lights and such. Unreal was such a beast back in the day that it completes beats Quake 2 and other contemporary FPS even on software rendering. TBH it still looks beautiful even by today's standards, if you ignore the low polygon counts. I'm not a person who cares too much about graphics, even for FPS (I don't really enjoy most of the modern FPS except Wolfenstein, which has interesting gameplay), and I argue that too much graphics eye candies simply decrease the overall quality of the game, but 3dfx definitely was a huge bang back in the day.
- ido 2y ago
  the performance boost also made a significant difference in how well the game played: i remembered when the voodoo 1 came out i had a 100mhz pentium and running quake (in low resolution) was "fine" but ran at like 20-25fps. With a voodoo that game ran at a smooth 60fps which made it so much more fun for such a fast-paced game (while also running at a higher resolution with smooth textures and improved lighting effects). It made a huge difference on multiple axes.
  - ferguess_k 2y ago
    Yup it was really a huge difference. FPS really needs 60 FPS and up. Anything less feels clunky.
    - genewitch 2y ago
      Playing diablo II (R) now on a 2k 165hz display with a card that can run it that fast makes it real pretty. A lot of love went into that game.
  - ben7799 2y ago
    The percentage change in resolution you ran the games at was also absolutely mind blowing too. For the most part we went from running the game at 320x200 or 320x240 to 640x480 in that first round of acceleration. I think in terms of % change it is a bigger leap than anything we've really had since, or certainly after 1920x1080. So you suddenly had super smooth graphics, much better looking translucency and effects, and the # of pixels quadupled or more and you could just see everything so much more clearly.
orthoxerox 2y ago
I still remember these massive performance jumps you could get around the turn of the millennium. First it was Pentium 166 MMX (SIMD FP math), then it was 3dfx Voodoo, then it was GeForce 256 (hardware T&L) and AMD Athlon Thunderbird (just blasting past anything Intel could offer).
- Sesse__ 2y ago
  MMX wasn’t actually that useful. The vectors were only 64 bits wide, you had no float support and the supported operations were kind of uneven... SSE and especially SSE2 were a much bigger leap.
  - ido 2y ago
    what gave the pentium mmx the big speed boost (I also remember it being quite significant) was probably the bigger 16kb cache (pentium classic had only 8kb) rather than mmx itself.
    - Sesse__ 2y ago
      Yup. More cache, higher clock speeds, slightly more flexible instruction pairing. Few applications used MMX anyway, I think.
  - orthoxerox 2y ago
    I remember upgrading from Cyrix 5x86 to the aforementioned Pentium and suddenly being able to play Carmageddon. I've been thinking it was due to MMX for almost 30 years!
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- pak9rabid 2y ago
  Quake2 with a K6-2 and Voodoo2 was a kickass combo. At some point iD software released the 3DNow! patch for Quake2 which yielded yet another 10 FPS....good times.
AdmiralAsshat 2y ago
The ad campaign from which the quote "So powerful, it's kind of ridiculous" came: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1NWUqIhB04I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1NWUqIhB04I
up2isomorphism 2y ago
My memory is that during late 90s, whenever a game supports glide, 3dfx card will always render smoother and with noticeably better texture than NVIDIA and ATI cards, even benchmark will give you similar numbers. So we constantly envy the roommates with a voodoo card.
mpalfrey 2y ago
I still am a bit of a 3dfx fanboy. Ended up emailing 3dfx at one stage and got sent a load of posters and case stickers (remember those?). I had a Voodoo Banshee which was a fairly decent card (not quite as good as a Voodoo 2, but better than a Voodoo Rush as a combined 2D/3D card). Paired to a Pentium P133 - very overkill on the GPU. Ended up using the same card on a AMD K6-2 500 in the end which was a bit more evenly matched. Then ended up buying a cheap Voodoo 5 5500 after they went under (only paid £50 for it). Sadly both of them went in a dumpster a long time ago. Wish I'd kept them both. I ended up moving to nVidia cards for a while, then had an ATi Radeon. Nowadays I just run a Macbook Air for my personal machine - life got in the way of much gaming!
phkahler 2y ago
>> This tale brings up many “what ifs.” What if 3dfx had gotten the SEGA Dreamcast contract? Would both companies have been better off? What if 3dfx had continued simply doing chips and not gotten into the board business? Would 3dfx then have brought its products to market more quickly? What if Atari had continued with its rasterizer chip from 1983s I,Robot? They also had their "mathbox" for geometry transformations since the late 1970's. They were well equipped technically to enter the broader 3D graphics market in some way but that never happened.
- christkv 2y ago
  From what i understand the chips they were offering SEGA was technically inferior to the Power VR ones.
cdaringe 2y ago
Sometime in the late late 00s, i put my voodoo card on Craigslist. I got pinged immediately, told me he’d pay double if i reserved it for him. The cards were precious for keeping some arcade game cabinets running, and with the company no more, my used card was a lifeline. I wanna say it was a golf game like golden tee? I was delighted to make the sale and happy to charge him the original (not double) price
- pak9rabid 2y ago
  Yep, my Golden Tee 2005 cabinet uses a Voodoo3 2000 or 3000 (can't remember which off the top of my head).
  - 1oooqooq 2y ago
    I'm honestly impressed people have golf game cabinets at home. never saw anyone playing those on the arcades.
tgtweak 2y ago
I remember upgrading to a creative labs 3dfx voodoo banshee and it was actually stunning - I don't think there has been a generational leap quite as apparent as seeing everything before and after that upgrade. I think I had a matrox card before that and it wasn't even that old. This was on a Celeron 400... I don't think we'll see a generational leap like that in the future. Glide was nuts on games that supported it - it was night and day. It took several generations of hardware for directX to surpass openGL.
strictnein 2y ago
Just to add my experience to the pile: when I went to college I was able to convince my parents to get me a custom PC from a company called GamePC. Among the specs in 1998: 400Mhz Pentium 2 128MB Nvidia Riva TNT 3DFX Voodoo2 CDRW (4x4x24 I think) Syquest SparQ (Awesome, but had major issues) Internal Zip Drive Just a ridiculous system for the time. Quake 2 and Starsiege Tribes were really popular in our dorm and that system was just perfect for it. Also popular was burning lots of pirated games, so we'd order CDRs in bulk from this really random site overseas. High quality "gold" CDRs and they were far more reliable than any of the ones you'd find in stores in the US for about half the cost. Halfway through my freshman year I decided to swap the motherboard and CPU for a crazy motherboard/CPU combo. There was a brief moment where Intel Celerons didn't really prevent you from using them in a dual CPU setup, so I had two 366mhz Celerons overclocked to ~433mhz (sometimes up to 533mhz, but that was less stable) and started playing around with OSs like Linux and BeOS to actually take advantage of them. edit: corrected the amount of memory /end reminiscing about a simpler time
- tgtweak 2y ago
  Tribes was the game I remember that showcased the card best - you had a legitimate competitive advantage if you were running this card. (also, shazbot)
  - foxyv 2y ago
    Nothing like eating a disc to the face while you are lagging in mid-air on a dialup connection. <3
    - tgtweak 2y ago
      There was a moniker for the few people with high speed back then - LPB - low ping bastards. All those fortunate enough to live in a city with adsl or cable high speed in the early days (or gaming at work or university on the T1)
      - goykasi 2y ago
luke727 2y ago
Obligatory https://vgamuseum.ru/wp-content/gallery/bitching-fast/bitchin.jpg https://vgamuseum.ru/wp-content/gallery/bitching-fast/bitchi...
jweir 2y ago
> While at SGI, Tarolli, Sellers, and Smith had all had some exposure to SGI’s Reality Engine, and with video games (especially the PlayStation) moving toward 3D graphics, all three saw the potential for consumer 3D acceleration. Were they exposed to early versions of the Playstation? It wasn't publicly released until after 3dFX was formed. While working at Virgin games in 92 we did see some demos of 3D gaming, but I can't recall who the manufacturer was.
- tgtweak 2y ago
  Playstation was in development and was released in japan almost a year before 3dfx released their first card. It's reasonable to draw that someone could have had experience working on the playstation graphics system prior to moving over and creating 3dfx. The fact they were building a prototype system for Sega as well means they were likely involved in that space before. SGI also licensed the CPU to sony for the playstation and back then the CPU would have done most of the graphics workload for the playstation - similar to an APU today with even less segregation between gpu and cpu. https://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/text/2014/05/102746834-05-01-acc.pdf https://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/text/20... very good background on the founders up to and at the creation of 3dfx... some really interesting stuff in there.
alberth 2y ago
I had a Diamond Viper V770 Ultra TNT2, I feel like that was a turning point in the 3dfx vs NVIDIA battle (and the subsequent GeForce marks NVIDIA industrial lead). https://www.anandtech.com/show/307 https://www.anandtech.com/show/307
- emeril 2y ago
  I had that too - it was the last gaming card I ever had, then I became an adult who didn't like games for better or worse
1970-01-01 2y ago
They didn't mention dual monitor and S-Video output. Having a second display was novel at the time. Using your television as another monitor, even more so.
- actionfromafar 2y ago
  Those SVCD rips looked really good on a television.
jonplackett 2y ago
I remember so desperately wanting a 3DFX card and not being able to afford one (I was 13). So the next best thing I could do was create a fake boot up image that just flashed up showing that the PC had a 3DFX card and their logo. It made me happy
- sejje 2y ago
  I saved like 14 months to buy a cd-rw drive. It was a nice Sony, I think 12x/4x. I paid like $400-some dollars for it around 1998 or 1999. My computer couldn't keep the buffer filled unless I ceased all other activity, killed backgrounded programs, etc. I made a lot of coasters.
  - jonplackett 2y ago
    Haha I remember that pain now too. A long forgotten memory. Thank you!
the_af 2y ago
Probably what I'm about to say is unfair because it happened during the last days of 3dfx, but I remember how disappointed my friends and I were when one of us bought a Banshee and tried to run some games. It ran like crap. Everything we tried ran between "very bad" and "average", certainly not the "wow" we were led to believe from marketing. Then we tried something we had high hopes for: Trespasser, the Jurassic Park game (it would later come to be called the "arm simulator", but we didn't know this back then). Trespasser ran appallingly bad with the Banshee. It sucked, plain and simple, almost a slide show rather than a game. We were sorely disappointed... with the Banshee. It turned out much later that Trespasser was a very badly optimized game, and it had been an unfair test of the Banshee because the engine ran poorly on any 3D accelerator on the market. But the Banshee's reputation was forever ruined for us. We still joke about this.
- pak9rabid 2y ago
  The Banshee kind of sucked. Voodoo2 12 MB was king in those days.
nine_k 2y ago
There is a great instrumental chiptune heavy metal track dedicated to 3DFX: https://masterbootrecord.bandcamp.com/track/irq-10-3dfx https://masterbootrecord.bandcamp.com/track/irq-10-3dfx
kensai 2y ago
The IPO S-1 from 1997. Very promising back then. :p https://secfilings.nasdaq.com/filingFrameset.asp?FilingID=466884&View=html https://secfilings.nasdaq.com/filingFrameset.asp?FilingID=46...
- Lammy 2y ago
  > Voodoo Graphics technology is also the graphics architecture for the 3D media processor chipset that the Company is developing for license to Sega Enterprises, Ltd. ("Sega") for use in Sega's next generation consumer home game console. Love how there are 605 instances of the word “Sega” in this. Related: https://segaretro.org/Press_release:_1997-07-22:_3Dfx_Interactive_Announces_That_Sega_Enterprises_Ltd._Has_Terminated_the_Contract_for_3D_Graphics_Processor https://segaretro.org/Press_release:_1997-07-22:_3Dfx_Intera... https://segaretro.org/History_of_the_Sega_Dreamcast/Development#.22Dural.22_and_.22Black_Belt.22 https://segaretro.org/History_of_the_Sega_Dreamcast/Developm...
afro88 2y ago
I remember pining for a 3dfx card, and seeing a second hand Rush based card for sale. 13 year old me bought it. Boy was I disappointed :) I learnt a good lesson that day. Ended up getting a GeForce a couple of years later. Still wanted a Voodoo 3, but they were a little too expensive.
dpcx 2y ago
I remember getting a Voodoo5 AGP, not knowing at the time that AGP and PCI were different. I couldn't use it for the first couple of months that I had it, and then upgraded the motherboard to one that could. I remember originally running a Gigabyte GA-6BXD with Dual Pentium IIIs, but I don't remember what I upgraded to that let me run the Voodoo5. The V5 was the largest card I'd ever seen that wasn't a motherboard, and it ran every game I wanted to play for years!
reassembled 2y ago
I recently decided that I wanted to relive the PII/3dfx glory days went a little bit overboard buying up parts on eBay. I ended up with an Abit BH6, PIII-800, 768MB RAM, dual Voodoo2 cards and an Asus 3800 TNT2.
sirjaz 2y ago
I remember those days, everything ran locally or through a fat client. You really used the hardware you had. I wish and pray we get back there
LarsDu88 2y ago
It kind of boggles my mind how short the lifespan of these companies were during periods of great technological advancement. 3dfx is founded in August 1994. The Sony Playstation came out in Japan in December of 1994. It's heyday is roughly 1996-2000, less than 4 years. Then it goes bankrupt in 2002, just 8 years after its founding. Within that time period we go from games like Sonic the Hedgehog 3 (released 1994), to Grand Theft Auto III (released October 2001). Just a massive amount of technological shift in a span of 6-7 years. Feels like something is similar going on with AI right now. Compare the image generating DALL-E1 released in January 2021 to Google's Veo 2 released in January 2025. Just insane progress in 4 years.
- 1oooqooq 2y ago
  normally companies that exploded in value at ipo brought lots of competition short term. i guess that's a thing of the past after quantitative easing scams and the latter capital shift. why fund a competitor if your capital is already riding there? not many people at the roulette anymore.
  - LarsDu88 2y ago
    Apparently 3dfx had a contract with Sega for making the Dreamcast GPU, but IPO'd in 1997. As part of the IPO they disclosed the terms of the contract, and the next gen console at Sega was a closely guarded secret at the time to avoid cannibalizing Sega Saturn sales (which were abysmal). The contract with 3dfx was canceled leading to a lawsuit. Then Sega of America CEO disclosed they were abandoning the Saturn for the next gen console. The console did not release in Japan until November 1998 and in America until September 1999. The CEO of Sega of America Bernie Stolar was fired just days before the release, partially due to these shenanigans, and the Dreamcast as a whole was such a failure it nearly killed the company.
LargoLasskhyfv 2y ago
A blast from the past. Vodoo 3 3000 16MB AGP with blue IBM Ramdac. AMD AthlonXP 1600(PR) absolutely stable OC'd to 1800(PR), later on 2100 because undervolting to 1.38V!1!! 3x 512MB (1.5GB!!!) NEC Virtual Channel Memory (VCM) 133MHz SD-RAM DIMMs Some SCSIs dangling from a NCR/Symbios Logic controller Some VIA Board I can't exactly recall, except that it supported that NEC VCM and the NCR/Symbios Logic from its BIOS, and ran really well. A 21" Hitachi Superscan Elite/Supreme? (With all rectangular buttons, including power, not right on the front bezel, but down below that,slightly recessed) doing 1600x1200 at up to 85Hz, without annoying Trinitron wires! :) Mostly running NetBSD (otherwise FBSD & Gentoo), whose XFree86 or early Xorg made full use of the Voodoo for 2D-accelleration, absolutely fluid 'desktop' (mostly KDE3) :) Supercrisp picture thanks to the IBM-Ramdac. Such Flashback. Much Instagasm
486sx33 2y ago
I had a pentium 2 - 233 with a voodoo banshee and it will killer for gaming !
ghssds 2y ago
Could a Minecraft-like game run on a 3dfx card? Or is it out of question performance wise?
- BirAdam 2y ago
  Too little vram.
aledalgrande 2y ago
Oh man 3dfx and Matrox, so much nostalgia. I didn't have the money for any of those so they will always stay a legend for me. I think my dad's 586 had an S3 on it. In those times, the only way to find games walkthroughs and cheat codes was through physical magazines and word of mouth. Internet was $$$.
redgrange 2y ago
I wonder how much that 1 million shares of common nvda stock would be worth now.
pjmlp 2y ago
Ah, back in the day I really wanted a Voodoo and being able to play with Glide, instead I was forced to return it to the shop, and get it replaced with a Riva TNT, because the PCI version on the motherboard could talk to the Voodoo. Quite sad day for me, even if in hindsight it was for the better, given how everything went afterwards. It felt that I got the lesser product, only because of a little motherboard issue.
DrNosferatu 2y ago
Puzzling how they failed so fast. Why?
- BirAdam 2y ago
  Author here. I should have been more clear about this in the article, but it was a combination of two different factors. First, the company alienated OEMs by making their own cards. Second, the cards they made were close in price to ATI and Nvidia offerings while being slightly less powerful. To make it worse, they were struggling to produce, and so while they had some interesting hardware in the works, they couldn't get it to market quickly enough. Nvidia did sprinkle 3dfx's technologies across their products where it made sense, and many of the 3dfx folks continued at Nvidia for some time.
  - DrNosferatu 2y ago
    Nice article - thanks! I remember at the time things were moving somehow chaotically. Also puzzling why 3dfx didn’t start to support DirectX in parallel with Glide.
  - jmorrison 2y ago
    Both SGI (who had no hardware texture mapping at the time) and 3dfx were explored at the time DARPA SIMNET was being developed. Delta Graphics (Mike Cyrus' and Jay Beck's company - of the Cyrus-Beck line clipping algorithm fame), which did have hardware Z-buffer texture-mapping, were the incumbents, and was fielded. Gary Tarroli personally visited BBN for a chat, but I wasn't involved in that. If Abort-Retry-Fail is interested in the history of SIMNET (in addition to the first hardware texture-mapping fielded, first AI NPC, etc.), there is a lot of info available. Email me and I can provide the info.
Exuma 2y ago
Ah... the memory of PC Gamer
bityard 2y ago
Sometimes I still don't know how I convinced my parents to buy me certain things. We lived in an extremely rural area and were not at all "well-to-do" but we always had a computer in the house. In my teenage years, this was a Packard Bell Pentium 100. All in the space of a year or so, I somehow managed to convince them to buy me a Canopus Pure3D video card (3dfx Voodoo but with 4 MB texture memory), a big ergonomic keyboard, a Sidewinder joypad, and Tomb Raider. The Pure3D was the real winner here, it took Quake from "meh" on the average PC to flat-out amazing. Even on dialup, I got quite a lot of mileage out of that setup.
Nexxxeh 2y ago
>...Aureal Semiconductor Inc on the 9th of September in 1995. This company would also go bankrupt and later be acquired by Creative. The brutal story of Creative v Aureal is interesting. The grossly oversimplified version being Creative ripped them off, sued them into bankruptcy, and then bought them cheap in a bankruptcy sale thus avoiding any real penalties for it, getting all their IP, and destroying the only real competition.

319 points by kristianp 2y ago

Relevant: This is my lengthy presentation on porting Rogue Squadron 3d from 3dfx glide over to Vulkan. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wcmKy-72_2U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wcmKy-72_2U

panick21_ 2y ago
Interesting, thanks for this.

snide 2y ago

There was a brief period of time where having one of these 3D cards in quake led to a pretty heavy advantage for gamers. I can very clearly remember installing the card and then loading up 2Fort4 in the Team Fortress mod and suddenly being able to see THROUGH THE WATER. Sniper's paradise!

glitchc 2y ago
You also needed a fast connection to minimize latency. 400 ms on dial-up was common.
- atonse 2y ago
  I used to play games like Starsiege (the mech game) on dialup. With our 250ms pings, your brain just learned to compensate for the delay and click that much earlier to shoot. But yeah, those lucky people with their DSL modems and 60ms pings would wipe the floor with us. Nowadays, everyone has a < 10ms ping.
  - mysterydip 2y ago
    I loved playing starsiege back in 2000. I had a wired college campus connection, but shared with so many students, my pings would go anywhere from 50 to 500 depending on time of day. Near-timeouts showed the client side prediction code in action, with mechs sliding around and then freezing in place.
    - atonse 2y ago
      Yeah funny to watch the mechs slide, all the kinds of things the young whippersnappers nowadays will never witness. Plus all the weird behavior with packet loss. You could see each player's ping and PL numbers in the server player list. Those were the days.
  - hypercube33 2y ago
    The torque engine (at least tribes 2) was wild what it was capable of on dial up. 32 or 64 players was okay compared to 8 on quake 2 depending on your latency and connection speed.
    - atonse 2y ago
      I played in Tribes 1 tournaments ... I never had a computer powerful enough for Tribes 2 – it had a very bumpy launch, remember? A lot of C++ exceptions, etc. But Tribes 1 was incredible in how smoothly it handled "larger" servers. It would be so chaotic.
- dwaite 2y ago
  When qtest was released, I was there in the IRC channel and one of the first to play. I remember connecting to someone's machine and just destroying everyone. Afterward I got a message from someone congratulating me, but being incredulous about my ping time being 26ms. I happened to be on the first floor in the first dorm on campus to get wired internet access, and they had an OC3 dedicated to it. Two months earlier there were 16 of us splitting that line, with public IP addresses. (Going back to dial-up after leaving the dorm was.. difficult). So I told him, yeah I kinda have a ridiculous internet connection here at school. He was like, "no, you don't understand - it is my machine. I am playing on the server and your ping time is lower than mine!"
agumonkey 2y ago
There was also a perverse effect on some games. With a graphics card, your gameplay could be altered and you had to unlearn all the reflexes you built on CPU rendering alone. Moto Racer (1997) was like that. The gameplay with a graphics card was completely different, even trajectories (I assume lag made the cpu accept a little bit more rounding errors).
- strictnein 2y ago
  Moto Racer was one of the few games that supported the PowerVR card. I had one and it looked so good. Such a fun game.
somat 2y ago
If I remember correctly to get transparent water the level also had to be re processed through the "vis" program with a transparent water flag set. vis did a precalculation for where a level segment(the partition in binary space partition) could be seen from any other level segment. the end effect was that while glquake did have a option for transparent water, the geometry would not draw on the far side. making the effect useless without a bit of extra work. But I have to admit I have no idea if entities(other players) would draw or not. update: found this https://quakeone.com/forum/quake-help/general-help/4754-vispatching-guide https://quakeone.com/forum/quake-help/general-help/4754-visp... Apparently there is a no_vis option to run without the visible set optimizations.
- Beermotor 2y ago
  Adding: the server and client had to both be running vis patched maps to be able to see other players in the water due to the way entity visibility was calculated server-side. The downside to running vis patched maps on a server is it used slightly more CPU than unpatched maps IIRC. Perhaps someone that ran more servers than I did (I ran two nodes on an Intergraph InterServe with dual P6-200s) could weigh in on what the impact was at scale.
AdmiralAsshat 2y ago
> I can very clearly remember installing the card and then loading up 2Fort4 in the Team Fortress mod and suddenly being able to see THROUGH THE WATER. Searching for "2Fort4" in YouTube yielded some interesting videos for people curious what the original Quake Mod version of the map looked like: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bJh36LuKwVQ&pp=ygUGMkZvcnQ0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bJh36LuKwVQ&pp=ygUGMkZvcnQ0 As someone who still spends at least 3 hours a week playing 2Fort on the current Team Fortress 2, it's fascinating to see how the core of the map is still basically the same after 20 years. EDIT: Another video which goes into more detail about the history of each 2fort version, going back to its original inspiration from a Doom 2 level: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tid9QwAOlng&t=375s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tid9QwAOlng&t=375s
- cogman10 2y ago
  Interesting, didn't realize this design was that old. Feels a little like teapot :). The video also misses that there was a pretty popular 2fort for half life 1.
- tracker1 2y ago
  I spent so much of my early 20's in that map/mod on Q1. I don't think I've had that level of just fun in any game/map/mod since then.
macintux 2y ago
On a very different scale, but I recall playing bzflag decades ago and discovering that I simply could not jump my tank to the second level. My graphics card was so slow that something wasn't working correctly, and no matter how many times I tried from different distances I would almost make it, but not quite.
- stanac 2y ago
  More recent example: In GTA SA in a mission I wasn't able to reach an airplane before it took off unless I lowered the resolution of the game.
taeric 2y ago
This and the overwhelming advantage conveyed from fast internet connections was hard to really appreciate when you were there.
- garciasn 2y ago
  Even having a solid dial-up connection with a ~180-185ms ping was a ridiculous advantage when most HPBs were ~350ms, particularly in clan invitationals for Q1CTF. We were playing as LPBs in the dorm at ~45-60ms and 180ms wasn't that much of a concern, aside from sliding around corners more than expected, but at 350ms you were basically shooting predictively at where you assumed they'd be next, not where they 'were'.
  - yawgmoth 2y ago
    Subspace/Continuum also used lag in its gameplay, with players warping to recently exploded spaceships so they could continue to invade. It was an established technique and had to be defended against. Edit: typo Shout out to any EG players!

nickpeterson 2y ago

My first gpu ever was a voodoo 2 8mb. I remember starting up the original unreal and getting it working. Shortly after we got a cable modem. 12 year old me was having a total blast. ;)

glitchc 2y ago

I still have a Diamond Monster Fusion kicking around somewhere in my stash. It was the first GPU I ever bought using my own money.

elif 2y ago

I remember my first like 5 paychecks when I was a teenager scooping ice cream went to a voodoo3 from compUSA. I don't even think it had a fan, and I remember being shocked how small the pci was as id been accustomed to mostly ISA "daughter boards" Wow what a trip down memory lane

tracker1 2y ago
I'm consistently amazed at how massive video cards are today... it really feels like it's often excessive for the sake of being excessive over any real need. I was actually happy to see the depth shrink of the Meshify C case, now I'm disappointed I'm probably going to have to swap the case for a new GPU... it's too hard to find options that fit beyond mid-range, and even then.
- phonon 2y ago
  Those old cards were way under 50 Watts. Even a "low-end" card now like an Intel B580 (list price $250, inflation adjusted equivalent to about $125 in the late 90s.) is 225 W. Cooling and power circuitry are much more critical now.
  - tracker1 2y ago
    Even then... There's no way an RTX 5070 needs the same cooler as a 5080/5090 by any stretch, but many of these cards on the lower-mid range are using the same coolers as on the high end. I doubt they're really needed in terms of that big. I could understand a slightly heavier 2-fan model, which would fit in more cases. Even for overclocking, they don't add much. Then again, I also have a solid case without windows. But there are plenty of SFF builders that would like a more reasonably sized upper mid-range card. I'm not suggesting that single slot is enough... but a 2-slot dual fan design should be suitable/sufficient for a stock-clocked 5070 Ti.

sejje 2y ago

My first Linux experience was trying to get a 3dfx to work. Also no Internet because I hadn't gotten that far. I ran back and forth to Steven's house and searched Altavista for the answers. Good times.

polartx 2y ago
I was an infoseek.com man myself, but we probably still could have been friends.
- sejje 2y ago
  gkrellm, konqueror, irssi, xmms of course i had to dual-boot windows so i could still program in vb6 and be a general shit on AOL
  - pak9rabid 2y ago
    That may have even been in the x11amp days.

dguest 2y ago

Have we crossed the threshold where more "Graphics Processing Units" are sold for ML than for graphics processing? I remember thinking it was funny that gaming ultimately subsidized a lot of the major advances in ML for the last decade. We might be flipping to a point where ML subsidizes gaming.

somenameforme 2y ago
The 'death' of PC computing has been rather exaggerated. Each year hundreds of millions of PCs are still sold, and that's exclusively referring to prepackaged stuff. There's then the increasingly large chunk of people that simply upgrade a frankenputer as necessary. As for gaming Steam has users in the hundreds of millions and continues to regularly grow. And while that is certainly going to encompass most people, I'm sure there are some oddballs out there that game but don't use Steam. So GPUs sold primarily for ML probably still make up a tiny share of the overall market, but I expect they make up a huge chunk of the market for cards like A100. Gaming hasn't been bleeding edge (in terms of requirements) for a very long time and card prices drop quickly, so there's just no point in spending that sort of money on a card for gaming.
- adastra22 2y ago
  GPUs for data centers makes up a vastly larger portion of NVIDIA’s sales.
  - somenameforme 2y ago
    These are very different stats. He was referring to unit sales of GPUs, not $ sales. The A100 is a $8000+ video card and so cards like it are going to dominate in revenue, even if their sales numbers are relatively low. For contrast the most popular card, per the Steam hardware survey, is (inexplicably - probably because of prepackaged kits) the RTX 4060, which is a $300 card.
    - genewitch 2y ago
      4060 was probably the only 4000 series GPU available for a while, too. I have a 3090 for AI and gaming and I haven't seen a reason to "upgrade" yet. In fact, I might try and get a 3090ti instead.

panick21_ 2y ago

When the reveal the information about SEGA the whole leadership team should have been on a plane to Japan the next day, all to apologize bow and scrape. And trying to make your own board in that moment, was just an incredible self own.

rob74 2y ago
> And trying to make your own board in that moment, was just an incredible self own. ATI built their own boards too at the time (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radeon_R100_series#/media/File:Radeon7500agp.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radeon_R100_series#/media/File...), so the strategy of wanting to control more of the value chain doesn't sound that misguided to me. Not sure when ATI stopped doing that - was it after they were acquired by AMD in 2006 or before?
- panick21_ 2y ago
  The problem is, they already had a large group of board providers, it was a big market advantage for them. If you listen to the Computer History Museum interview, many of these providers jumped ship. Also the bought a board provider that wasn't very successful, and their resulting boards weren't very successful either.
- Delk 2y ago
  The same article also has another photo of a Creative-branded card. Other card brands also definitely marketed cards with ATI chips. I remember I had a R200-based card from some third-party manufacturer. ATI and Nvidia also had reference cards but I don't know if those ended up being sold in the mass market or not.
speed_spread 2y ago
The board I can understand, the guys having worked at SGI before and seeing how much more you could extract of the arch by having total control over the hardware (minus the CPU, obv). Essentially building customer-oriented x86 SGI machines, branching out of the gaming market and challenging workstation vendors. A 64 bits Opteron+Voodoo based Windows machine would have been something to behold. But the Sega thing probably torpedoed the funding that would have been required for them to become independent of graphic card vendors. They knew it was a matter of time before their advantage eroded. I think what really did them in was DirectX, they stuck with Glide and allowed NVidia to develop a proper implementation of the new Microsoft thingie which was heavily marketed to developers. Their moat became a prison.

stuff4ben 2y ago

I loved playing No One Lives Forever 1&2 on my Voodoo 5 5500. That was the height of my PC building days. Now as a wizened old man, I'm stuck with these Apple Macbook Pros/Airs and they do well enough. But I do miss building my own machines...

bee_rider 2y ago
How wizened? If you are close to retiring, maybe you can build a pc and play some games. Keep the brain running, and stay in touch with friends (if they’ll do multiplayer).
ckozlowski 2y ago
This was posted on HN the other day. Enjoy! http://nolfrevival.tk/ http://nolfrevival.tk/
nfriedly 2y ago
FWIW, you can build a fully functional desktop for ~$400 with integrated graphics (that can play most modern games on lower settings), or maybe $600 with a discreet GPU. Less if you go with used parts.

blindriver 2y ago

The first time I lost all my money in the stock market was when I went all in on 3dfx stock against nvidia. Ah, the good ol’days!

guax 2y ago
ouch, I am certain some people did the same for nokia against android/apple :P
- InDubioProRubio 2y ago
  anti-matter-millionaires

nateb2022 2y ago

Previously discussed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35026862 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35026862 (2 years ago, 376 comments, 671 points)

robertlagrant 2y ago

My first 3D card was a Righteous Orchid 3d. It had a mechanical relay in it to switch between 2d and 3d modes, so it made a distinctive click[0] when you loaded Quake3D. Or, too many times, it didn't, and I had to try again. [0] https://riksrandomretro.com/2021/06/07/the-righteous-click https://riksrandomretro.com/2021/06/07/the-righteous-click

BoredPositron 2y ago

I have more memories of my 3dfx Voodoo cards than of any other old hardware. The OpenGL implementation was so buttery smooth that there is simply nothing to compare it to. Quake 2 at 120fps on a 90Hz CRT was just something else entirely. It felt like there was no input latency at all and even with a higher ping of 80-100 in RocketArena it felt smoother than modern shooters on a 144hz panel.

adastra22 2y ago
Funny thing is it was probably 40fps but you remember it feeling like 120fps.
- BoredPositron 2y ago
  The voodoo 4 4500 could push up to 140fps at 800x600. https://www.philscomputerlab.com/3dfx-voodoo-shootout-project.html https://www.philscomputerlab.com/3dfx-voodoo-shootout-projec...
pak9rabid 2y ago
RocketArena players unite! God I spent an ungodly amount of time playing RA3.

trashface 2y ago

It was truly jaw dropping firing up quake 1 for the first time on 3dfx voodoo1. Double the resolution of software and super smooth framerate, and much better quality texture mapping too. I recall tweaking some setting (gl_flashblend?) so that I could see pretty glowing orbs around my rockets (and strategically, also everybody else's rockets).

rob74 2y ago
I was the unfortunate owner of an S3 ViRGE card at the time - the (in)famous "3D decelerator". I managed to get Quake running on it, and it looked nice, but was slower than with software rendering...
- indemnity 2y ago
  Ahhh, what a piece of shit that was! I spent summer lawnmowing money on that thing. When I got a real job next summer, bought an AGP Matrox Millenium G200 and after that the NVIDIA GeForce2, and never strayed from NVDA since!
- vasac 2y ago
  I had an S3 ViRGE too. It really was a decelerator, and the number of games that actually supported it was minuscule. I managed to run GLQuake, but without any textures - just shades of gray - and even that ran at most a couple of frames per second. But there was another game - Terminal Velocity - that actually looked a lot better with hardware rendering, although it was still slower than software rendering. So, I would run it with hardware rendering to enjoy flying and then restart the game with software rendering to actually fight the enemies. :)
matwood 2y ago
It's hard to convey just how revolutionary the original voodoo cards were. There aren't many times in my life where there was a clear line of before and after, but this was one of those times.
- FirmwareBurner 2y ago

basfo 2y ago

I remember how i was amazed when i got my first 3d card, a Voodoo 2. It was like having an arcade at home. The 3dfx logo spining up when you launched a GLide game was something. Unreal in particular was amazing, i remember as a kid just watching the lighting and the water. At that time every light in a game had to be colored, just because it could be done. Small rooms with green, red and blue lights moving all over the place, so 90s. I never had that "Wow" factor again, from there everything felt like incremental instead of revolutionary. How an absolute market leader disapeared in 2 years is incredible. I think i only got the same wow factor the first time i tested a VR headset.

rayiner 2y ago

Crazy illustration of "nothing happens anymore." 3dfx seemed just as dominant in the 1990s as NVIDIA does today. But from founding to selling to asset sell-off, the company lasted just six years. Meanwhile NVIDIA has been king of the hill since the GeForce was released in 1999, which was 25 years ago.

mywittyname 2y ago
AMD overtook Nvidia at times in the gaming space. I'd say that Nvidia has been king of the hill since the introduction of CUDA, since that's what really cemented their position in the tech sector.
- hylaride 2y ago
  Pre-AMD acquisition ATI also often had better hardware specs than NVIDIA, but their drivers were so often buggy and terrible. By the time they'd been fixed the reviews were long since done on the initial release versions. AMD seems to run a better software shop, at least.
reginald78 2y ago
The 90s was an absolutely crazy period for PC hardware. So many flash in the pan companies making a novel devices and then dying entirely as their niche became obsolete. There used to be tons of display board manufacturers and very few of them survived the 3D acceleration introduction.
- tverbeure 2y ago
  You'd buy a computer magazines and it almost felt like the performance of CPUs and GPUs when up month by month.

p0w3n3d 2y ago

I have one question: wasn't the 3dfx a graphics postprocessor? I thought it didn't render the image in higher quality, but it did postprocessing only... Never had opportunity to have voodoo, but later, when got a decent NVIDIA, I played Need for Speed 2, which had demo videos "rendered in 3dfx" with snow etc, and my graphics was crispy and no-snowy. I tried to look up why my NVIDIA does not have those effects, and I learned that they were overlayed over the original image only by 3dfx voodoo...

vlovich123 2y ago
No it’s definitely a 3D renderer. Glide was a competitor to OpenGL and Direct3D that was proprietary to 3dfx. Don’t remember why the quality was higher.
- tialaramex 2y ago
  Yeah, the earliest models are literally 3D only as discussed in the article, they have separate pass through cable for your existing 2D graphics because even just making a flat 2D window isn't viable directly, Glide really wants to render only textured triangles which is fine for Quake but no good for Windows.
  - jrootabega 2y ago
    I had one of those 3D-only cards on my first computer. I didn't know about the passthrough and got pretty annoyed that my games sucked and never worked with the hardware 3D stack. I don't know if they didn't document it correctly, or if I just missed it. But when some support person finally told me, I was so pumped. I spent a while manually moving the cable to the 3D card when playing a game, until I finally got a passthrough cable.
pavlov 2y ago
The Voodoo was a 3D-only accelerator. It didn’t have a traditional 2D graphics core at all, so you needed another basic video card which plugged into the Voodoo using VGA passthrough. When an accelerated game was launched, the Voodoo took over and replaced the 2D card’s output completely. That’s probably why you remember it being a post-processor. It didn’t apply effects to the 2D signal, but it needed it for all non-accelerated programs. 3dfx also supported more blending modes than most competing cards at the time. That could be why the snow effect didn’t work on your card.

time0ut 2y ago

In early 2000, I cobbled together a gaming PC from used parts that I bought or traded for. It had a K6-2, a Voodoo 2, and 192 MB of RAM. It was amazing and such an upgrade over my family’s Celeron. The big games were TFC, Counter-Strike, Unreal Tournament, and StarCraft. We LAN’d every weekend. It was heaven.

ferguess_k 2y ago

I recall Unreal has an option to switch to use the 3dfx card, and if IIRC, it has some additional features like more colourful lights and such. Unreal was such a beast back in the day that it completes beats Quake 2 and other contemporary FPS even on software rendering. TBH it still looks beautiful even by today's standards, if you ignore the low polygon counts. I'm not a person who cares too much about graphics, even for FPS (I don't really enjoy most of the modern FPS except Wolfenstein, which has interesting gameplay), and I argue that too much graphics eye candies simply decrease the overall quality of the game, but 3dfx definitely was a huge bang back in the day.

ido 2y ago
the performance boost also made a significant difference in how well the game played: i remembered when the voodoo 1 came out i had a 100mhz pentium and running quake (in low resolution) was "fine" but ran at like 20-25fps. With a voodoo that game ran at a smooth 60fps which made it so much more fun for such a fast-paced game (while also running at a higher resolution with smooth textures and improved lighting effects). It made a huge difference on multiple axes.
- ferguess_k 2y ago
  Yup it was really a huge difference. FPS really needs 60 FPS and up. Anything less feels clunky.
  - genewitch 2y ago
    Playing diablo II (R) now on a 2k 165hz display with a card that can run it that fast makes it real pretty. A lot of love went into that game.
- ben7799 2y ago
  The percentage change in resolution you ran the games at was also absolutely mind blowing too. For the most part we went from running the game at 320x200 or 320x240 to 640x480 in that first round of acceleration. I think in terms of % change it is a bigger leap than anything we've really had since, or certainly after 1920x1080. So you suddenly had super smooth graphics, much better looking translucency and effects, and the # of pixels quadupled or more and you could just see everything so much more clearly.

orthoxerox 2y ago

I still remember these massive performance jumps you could get around the turn of the millennium. First it was Pentium 166 MMX (SIMD FP math), then it was 3dfx Voodoo, then it was GeForce 256 (hardware T&L) and AMD Athlon Thunderbird (just blasting past anything Intel could offer).

Sesse__ 2y ago
MMX wasn’t actually that useful. The vectors were only 64 bits wide, you had no float support and the supported operations were kind of uneven... SSE and especially SSE2 were a much bigger leap.
- ido 2y ago
  what gave the pentium mmx the big speed boost (I also remember it being quite significant) was probably the bigger 16kb cache (pentium classic had only 8kb) rather than mmx itself.
  - Sesse__ 2y ago
    Yup. More cache, higher clock speeds, slightly more flexible instruction pairing. Few applications used MMX anyway, I think.
- orthoxerox 2y ago
  I remember upgrading from Cyrix 5x86 to the aforementioned Pentium and suddenly being able to play Carmageddon. I've been thinking it was due to MMX for almost 30 years!
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pak9rabid 2y ago
Quake2 with a K6-2 and Voodoo2 was a kickass combo. At some point iD software released the 3DNow! patch for Quake2 which yielded yet another 10 FPS....good times.

AdmiralAsshat 2y ago

The ad campaign from which the quote "So powerful, it's kind of ridiculous" came: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1NWUqIhB04I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1NWUqIhB04I

up2isomorphism 2y ago

My memory is that during late 90s, whenever a game supports glide, 3dfx card will always render smoother and with noticeably better texture than NVIDIA and ATI cards, even benchmark will give you similar numbers. So we constantly envy the roommates with a voodoo card.

mpalfrey 2y ago

I still am a bit of a 3dfx fanboy. Ended up emailing 3dfx at one stage and got sent a load of posters and case stickers (remember those?). I had a Voodoo Banshee which was a fairly decent card (not quite as good as a Voodoo 2, but better than a Voodoo Rush as a combined 2D/3D card). Paired to a Pentium P133 - very overkill on the GPU. Ended up using the same card on a AMD K6-2 500 in the end which was a bit more evenly matched. Then ended up buying a cheap Voodoo 5 5500 after they went under (only paid £50 for it). Sadly both of them went in a dumpster a long time ago. Wish I'd kept them both. I ended up moving to nVidia cards for a while, then had an ATi Radeon. Nowadays I just run a Macbook Air for my personal machine - life got in the way of much gaming!

phkahler 2y ago

>> This tale brings up many “what ifs.” What if 3dfx had gotten the SEGA Dreamcast contract? Would both companies have been better off? What if 3dfx had continued simply doing chips and not gotten into the board business? Would 3dfx then have brought its products to market more quickly? What if Atari had continued with its rasterizer chip from 1983s I,Robot? They also had their "mathbox" for geometry transformations since the late 1970's. They were well equipped technically to enter the broader 3D graphics market in some way but that never happened.

christkv 2y ago
From what i understand the chips they were offering SEGA was technically inferior to the Power VR ones.

cdaringe 2y ago

Sometime in the late late 00s, i put my voodoo card on Craigslist. I got pinged immediately, told me he’d pay double if i reserved it for him. The cards were precious for keeping some arcade game cabinets running, and with the company no more, my used card was a lifeline. I wanna say it was a golf game like golden tee? I was delighted to make the sale and happy to charge him the original (not double) price

pak9rabid 2y ago
Yep, my Golden Tee 2005 cabinet uses a Voodoo3 2000 or 3000 (can't remember which off the top of my head).
- 1oooqooq 2y ago
  I'm honestly impressed people have golf game cabinets at home. never saw anyone playing those on the arcades.

tgtweak 2y ago

I remember upgrading to a creative labs 3dfx voodoo banshee and it was actually stunning - I don't think there has been a generational leap quite as apparent as seeing everything before and after that upgrade. I think I had a matrox card before that and it wasn't even that old. This was on a Celeron 400... I don't think we'll see a generational leap like that in the future. Glide was nuts on games that supported it - it was night and day. It took several generations of hardware for directX to surpass openGL.

strictnein 2y ago

Just to add my experience to the pile: when I went to college I was able to convince my parents to get me a custom PC from a company called GamePC. Among the specs in 1998: 400Mhz Pentium 2 128MB Nvidia Riva TNT 3DFX Voodoo2 CDRW (4x4x24 I think) Syquest SparQ (Awesome, but had major issues) Internal Zip Drive Just a ridiculous system for the time. Quake 2 and Starsiege Tribes were really popular in our dorm and that system was just perfect for it. Also popular was burning lots of pirated games, so we'd order CDRs in bulk from this really random site overseas. High quality "gold" CDRs and they were far more reliable than any of the ones you'd find in stores in the US for about half the cost. Halfway through my freshman year I decided to swap the motherboard and CPU for a crazy motherboard/CPU combo. There was a brief moment where Intel Celerons didn't really prevent you from using them in a dual CPU setup, so I had two 366mhz Celerons overclocked to ~433mhz (sometimes up to 533mhz, but that was less stable) and started playing around with OSs like Linux and BeOS to actually take advantage of them. edit: corrected the amount of memory /end reminiscing about a simpler time

tgtweak 2y ago
Tribes was the game I remember that showcased the card best - you had a legitimate competitive advantage if you were running this card. (also, shazbot)
- foxyv 2y ago
  Nothing like eating a disc to the face while you are lagging in mid-air on a dialup connection. <3
  - tgtweak 2y ago
    There was a moniker for the few people with high speed back then - LPB - low ping bastards. All those fortunate enough to live in a city with adsl or cable high speed in the early days (or gaming at work or university on the T1)
    - goykasi 2y ago

luke727 2y ago

Obligatory https://vgamuseum.ru/wp-content/gallery/bitching-fast/bitchin.jpg https://vgamuseum.ru/wp-content/gallery/bitching-fast/bitchi...

jweir 2y ago

> While at SGI, Tarolli, Sellers, and Smith had all had some exposure to SGI’s Reality Engine, and with video games (especially the PlayStation) moving toward 3D graphics, all three saw the potential for consumer 3D acceleration. Were they exposed to early versions of the Playstation? It wasn't publicly released until after 3dFX was formed. While working at Virgin games in 92 we did see some demos of 3D gaming, but I can't recall who the manufacturer was.

tgtweak 2y ago
Playstation was in development and was released in japan almost a year before 3dfx released their first card. It's reasonable to draw that someone could have had experience working on the playstation graphics system prior to moving over and creating 3dfx. The fact they were building a prototype system for Sega as well means they were likely involved in that space before. SGI also licensed the CPU to sony for the playstation and back then the CPU would have done most of the graphics workload for the playstation - similar to an APU today with even less segregation between gpu and cpu. https://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/text/2014/05/102746834-05-01-acc.pdf https://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/text/20... very good background on the founders up to and at the creation of 3dfx... some really interesting stuff in there.

alberth 2y ago

I had a Diamond Viper V770 Ultra TNT2, I feel like that was a turning point in the 3dfx vs NVIDIA battle (and the subsequent GeForce marks NVIDIA industrial lead). https://www.anandtech.com/show/307 https://www.anandtech.com/show/307

emeril 2y ago
I had that too - it was the last gaming card I ever had, then I became an adult who didn't like games for better or worse

1970-01-01 2y ago

They didn't mention dual monitor and S-Video output. Having a second display was novel at the time. Using your television as another monitor, even more so.

actionfromafar 2y ago
Those SVCD rips looked really good on a television.

jonplackett 2y ago

I remember so desperately wanting a 3DFX card and not being able to afford one (I was 13). So the next best thing I could do was create a fake boot up image that just flashed up showing that the PC had a 3DFX card and their logo. It made me happy

sejje 2y ago
I saved like 14 months to buy a cd-rw drive. It was a nice Sony, I think 12x/4x. I paid like $400-some dollars for it around 1998 or 1999. My computer couldn't keep the buffer filled unless I ceased all other activity, killed backgrounded programs, etc. I made a lot of coasters.
- jonplackett 2y ago
  Haha I remember that pain now too. A long forgotten memory. Thank you!

the_af 2y ago

Probably what I'm about to say is unfair because it happened during the last days of 3dfx, but I remember how disappointed my friends and I were when one of us bought a Banshee and tried to run some games. It ran like crap. Everything we tried ran between "very bad" and "average", certainly not the "wow" we were led to believe from marketing. Then we tried something we had high hopes for: Trespasser, the Jurassic Park game (it would later come to be called the "arm simulator", but we didn't know this back then). Trespasser ran appallingly bad with the Banshee. It sucked, plain and simple, almost a slide show rather than a game. We were sorely disappointed... with the Banshee. It turned out much later that Trespasser was a very badly optimized game, and it had been an unfair test of the Banshee because the engine ran poorly on any 3D accelerator on the market. But the Banshee's reputation was forever ruined for us. We still joke about this.

pak9rabid 2y ago
The Banshee kind of sucked. Voodoo2 12 MB was king in those days.

nine_k 2y ago

There is a great instrumental chiptune heavy metal track dedicated to 3DFX: https://masterbootrecord.bandcamp.com/track/irq-10-3dfx https://masterbootrecord.bandcamp.com/track/irq-10-3dfx

kensai 2y ago

The IPO S-1 from 1997. Very promising back then. :p https://secfilings.nasdaq.com/filingFrameset.asp?FilingID=466884&View=html https://secfilings.nasdaq.com/filingFrameset.asp?FilingID=46...

Lammy 2y ago
> Voodoo Graphics technology is also the graphics architecture for the 3D media processor chipset that the Company is developing for license to Sega Enterprises, Ltd. ("Sega") for use in Sega's next generation consumer home game console. Love how there are 605 instances of the word “Sega” in this. Related: https://segaretro.org/Press_release:_1997-07-22:_3Dfx_Interactive_Announces_That_Sega_Enterprises_Ltd._Has_Terminated_the_Contract_for_3D_Graphics_Processor https://segaretro.org/Press_release:_1997-07-22:_3Dfx_Intera... https://segaretro.org/History_of_the_Sega_Dreamcast/Development#.22Dural.22_and_.22Black_Belt.22 https://segaretro.org/History_of_the_Sega_Dreamcast/Developm...

afro88 2y ago

I remember pining for a 3dfx card, and seeing a second hand Rush based card for sale. 13 year old me bought it. Boy was I disappointed :) I learnt a good lesson that day. Ended up getting a GeForce a couple of years later. Still wanted a Voodoo 3, but they were a little too expensive.

dpcx 2y ago

I remember getting a Voodoo5 AGP, not knowing at the time that AGP and PCI were different. I couldn't use it for the first couple of months that I had it, and then upgraded the motherboard to one that could. I remember originally running a Gigabyte GA-6BXD with Dual Pentium IIIs, but I don't remember what I upgraded to that let me run the Voodoo5. The V5 was the largest card I'd ever seen that wasn't a motherboard, and it ran every game I wanted to play for years!

reassembled 2y ago

I recently decided that I wanted to relive the PII/3dfx glory days went a little bit overboard buying up parts on eBay. I ended up with an Abit BH6, PIII-800, 768MB RAM, dual Voodoo2 cards and an Asus 3800 TNT2.

sirjaz 2y ago

I remember those days, everything ran locally or through a fat client. You really used the hardware you had. I wish and pray we get back there

LarsDu88 2y ago

It kind of boggles my mind how short the lifespan of these companies were during periods of great technological advancement. 3dfx is founded in August 1994. The Sony Playstation came out in Japan in December of 1994. It's heyday is roughly 1996-2000, less than 4 years. Then it goes bankrupt in 2002, just 8 years after its founding. Within that time period we go from games like Sonic the Hedgehog 3 (released 1994), to Grand Theft Auto III (released October 2001). Just a massive amount of technological shift in a span of 6-7 years. Feels like something is similar going on with AI right now. Compare the image generating DALL-E1 released in January 2021 to Google's Veo 2 released in January 2025. Just insane progress in 4 years.

1oooqooq 2y ago
normally companies that exploded in value at ipo brought lots of competition short term. i guess that's a thing of the past after quantitative easing scams and the latter capital shift. why fund a competitor if your capital is already riding there? not many people at the roulette anymore.
- LarsDu88 2y ago
  Apparently 3dfx had a contract with Sega for making the Dreamcast GPU, but IPO'd in 1997. As part of the IPO they disclosed the terms of the contract, and the next gen console at Sega was a closely guarded secret at the time to avoid cannibalizing Sega Saturn sales (which were abysmal). The contract with 3dfx was canceled leading to a lawsuit. Then Sega of America CEO disclosed they were abandoning the Saturn for the next gen console. The console did not release in Japan until November 1998 and in America until September 1999. The CEO of Sega of America Bernie Stolar was fired just days before the release, partially due to these shenanigans, and the Dreamcast as a whole was such a failure it nearly killed the company.

LargoLasskhyfv 2y ago

A blast from the past. Vodoo 3 3000 16MB AGP with blue IBM Ramdac. AMD AthlonXP 1600(PR) absolutely stable OC'd to 1800(PR), later on 2100 because undervolting to 1.38V!1!! 3x 512MB (1.5GB!!!) NEC Virtual Channel Memory (VCM) 133MHz SD-RAM DIMMs Some SCSIs dangling from a NCR/Symbios Logic controller Some VIA Board I can't exactly recall, except that it supported that NEC VCM and the NCR/Symbios Logic from its BIOS, and ran really well. A 21" Hitachi Superscan Elite/Supreme? (With all rectangular buttons, including power, not right on the front bezel, but down below that,slightly recessed) doing 1600x1200 at up to 85Hz, without annoying Trinitron wires! :) Mostly running NetBSD (otherwise FBSD & Gentoo), whose XFree86 or early Xorg made full use of the Voodoo for 2D-accelleration, absolutely fluid 'desktop' (mostly KDE3) :) Supercrisp picture thanks to the IBM-Ramdac. Such Flashback. Much Instagasm

486sx33 2y ago

I had a pentium 2 - 233 with a voodoo banshee and it will killer for gaming !

ghssds 2y ago

Could a Minecraft-like game run on a 3dfx card? Or is it out of question performance wise?

BirAdam 2y ago
Too little vram.

aledalgrande 2y ago

Oh man 3dfx and Matrox, so much nostalgia. I didn't have the money for any of those so they will always stay a legend for me. I think my dad's 586 had an S3 on it. In those times, the only way to find games walkthroughs and cheat codes was through physical magazines and word of mouth. Internet was $$$.

redgrange 2y ago

I wonder how much that 1 million shares of common nvda stock would be worth now.

pjmlp 2y ago

Ah, back in the day I really wanted a Voodoo and being able to play with Glide, instead I was forced to return it to the shop, and get it replaced with a Riva TNT, because the PCI version on the motherboard could talk to the Voodoo. Quite sad day for me, even if in hindsight it was for the better, given how everything went afterwards. It felt that I got the lesser product, only because of a little motherboard issue.

DrNosferatu 2y ago

Puzzling how they failed so fast. Why?

BirAdam 2y ago
Author here. I should have been more clear about this in the article, but it was a combination of two different factors. First, the company alienated OEMs by making their own cards. Second, the cards they made were close in price to ATI and Nvidia offerings while being slightly less powerful. To make it worse, they were struggling to produce, and so while they had some interesting hardware in the works, they couldn't get it to market quickly enough. Nvidia did sprinkle 3dfx's technologies across their products where it made sense, and many of the 3dfx folks continued at Nvidia for some time.
- DrNosferatu 2y ago
  Nice article - thanks! I remember at the time things were moving somehow chaotically. Also puzzling why 3dfx didn’t start to support DirectX in parallel with Glide.
- jmorrison 2y ago
  Both SGI (who had no hardware texture mapping at the time) and 3dfx were explored at the time DARPA SIMNET was being developed. Delta Graphics (Mike Cyrus' and Jay Beck's company - of the Cyrus-Beck line clipping algorithm fame), which did have hardware Z-buffer texture-mapping, were the incumbents, and was fielded. Gary Tarroli personally visited BBN for a chat, but I wasn't involved in that. If Abort-Retry-Fail is interested in the history of SIMNET (in addition to the first hardware texture-mapping fielded, first AI NPC, etc.), there is a lot of info available. Email me and I can provide the info.

Exuma 2y ago

Ah... the memory of PC Gamer

bityard 2y ago

Sometimes I still don't know how I convinced my parents to buy me certain things. We lived in an extremely rural area and were not at all "well-to-do" but we always had a computer in the house. In my teenage years, this was a Packard Bell Pentium 100. All in the space of a year or so, I somehow managed to convince them to buy me a Canopus Pure3D video card (3dfx Voodoo but with 4 MB texture memory), a big ergonomic keyboard, a Sidewinder joypad, and Tomb Raider. The Pure3D was the real winner here, it took Quake from "meh" on the average PC to flat-out amazing. Even on dialup, I got quite a lot of mileage out of that setup.

Nexxxeh 2y ago

>...Aureal Semiconductor Inc on the 9th of September in 1995. This company would also go bankrupt and later be acquired by Creative. The brutal story of Creative v Aureal is interesting. The grossly oversimplified version being Creative ripped them off, sued them into bankruptcy, and then bought them cheap in a bankruptcy sale thus avoiding any real penalties for it, getting all their IP, and destroying the only real competition.