4 ms·

3dfx Oral History Panel [video]

33 points by da02 12y ago

brownbat 12y ago
Tech moves fast. Sure, Moore's Law yadda yadda, but sometimes it's hard to get a sense of what that really means. For me, what's astounding is thinking back on all these business wars in tech in the 90s that seemed so crucial at the time. Half a decade later, one or both sides were absorbed, dead, or irrelevant.
- psgbg 12y ago
  Yeah. Palm's vs Pocket PC's. Nokia vs the world. Sega vs Nintendo. Not many wars where decided by technology itself but other things. Nokia trusted his middle-end low-end market share then android and iPhone came out. Palm lost it's way when the smartphones came out. Sega lost because bad decisions. Nintendo also had bad decision but now is staying behind because the ferocity of the fight between Microsoft and Sony. Kodak had amazing products but it's perfectionist way to do things let them lagging behind. Kodak and Nokia are really sad stories because both had amazing products but didn't understood the changes around them. (yeah both more recent examples) Microsoft won their previous wars because understood the previous reality "feature complete but mediocre solutions". I mean, what the people need want but no more just the essential part. So they dethrone Lotus, Wordperfect etc.
  - agumonkey 12y ago
    About Kodak failure to imagine a world without analog technology : http://petapixel.com/2010/08/05/the-worlds-first-digital-camera-by-kodak-and-steve-sasson/ http://petapixel.com/2010/08/05/the-worlds-first-digital-cam... Very surprising.
    - dagw 12y ago
      Kodak also demoed the first professional DSLR in 1988, and released the first commercially available DSLR in 1991. In fact Kodak, with their series of Nikon based DSLRs, basically owned the professional digital photography market throughout the 90's.
      - maxerickson 12y ago
        This surprised me and I ended up at this nicely informative page: http://eocamera.jemcgarvey.com/ http://eocamera.jemcgarvey.com/ By way of these: http://www.dpreview.com/forums/post/4382994 http://www.dpreview.com/forums/post/4382994 http://www.digicamhistory.com/1988.html http://www.digicamhistory.com/1988.html
    - psgbg 12y ago
      I don't think they failed to imagine a world without analog technology. They failed to produce a painless transition. The had amazing technologies. I had digital cameras of samsung, Sony and Kodak and the Kodak product was the one I loved more. Sony and Samsung were stupidly weak to sand, bad battery consumption and some other minor quirks. The Kodak camera was ugly as hell but it worked (thinking some parallel to Nokia products). Kodak thought "our brand is what people buy so if we offer people will buy". Fujifilm nailed it. Created a diversified products, put a hand to their patents in plastics chemicals and other things and started to sell technology. So they diversified. Kodak released products over engineered at slow peace. They still biding in analog products, meanwhile their digital products never took off. Kodak was the mayor patent holder in its time in optical, chemical, plastic and other things. But they were a GIANT biding in sell products and never understood their clients. They never understood their technology value and never understood what the market wanted. One day they stopped to sell and Kodak went out of business.
beloch 12y ago
I remember buying the Diamond Monster 3D based on 3DFX's voodoo 1 chipset. The hardware was a total hack job! It didn't do desktop 2D graphics at all, so you still needed a separate card for that. To avoid forcing users to swap plugs on their monitor every time they fired up a 3D application, the Voodoo included a pass-through plug. Yup. You took a short VGA patch cable and plugged the output of your 2D card right into the 3DFX card, and then your monitor into the 3DFX card! Next, games had to be written specifically to take advantage of the 3DFX API (Glide), so gaming support was far from universal. If something as unrefined as the original vooddo was released today it would probably be scoffed at. However, it's also worth noting what a huge leap forward in quality the original voodoo card offered. The original quake was ported to GL so that it could work on the voodoo, and it was a revelation. Many games were subsequently released with wildly different software and Glide (3DFX's API) rendering modes. The original "Grand Theft Auto" in particular looked vastly better under Glide than under software. Before long, game developers started requiring Glide hardware support rather than trying to build software rendered versions of their game. The voodoo cards were such a big leap forward for gaming that they were universally adopted in spite of their problems. After 3DFX folded and the voodoo series fell into obsolescence, it was difficult to play an entire generation of glide-only games for quite some time. Fortunately, despite the fact that Glide was proprietary, a host of different people made glide wrappers, and we can now enjoy Glide optimized games from the comfort of a standard DOSBOX install!
- wtallis 12y ago
  NVidia's G-Sync is almost as kludgy as Voodoo Graphics. In theory it can be properly taken advantage of by a well-written preexisting game engine, but there are also a ton of games out there that assume a fixed limit of 60FPS and will see no more benefit than if Direct3D were to start doing triple buffering. And the idea of ripping a PCB and power supply out of your monitor and replacing them is definitely as uglier than a VGA patch cable. Fortunately, commercial G-Sync monitors will become available a lot quicker than the 2D-capable Voodoo 3.
  - anon4 12y ago
    > a fixed limit of 60FPS These days it's 30fps: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y1yn5OD5WbM#t=107 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y1yn5OD5WbM#t=107
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
staunch 12y ago
I have one of those 3dfx shirts from 1998. Some employees were handing them out at a Quake tournament I participated in. Good times.
tragic 12y ago
My abiding memory of the first 3dfx cards - apart from total envy - was that you then had a spate of games that went way overboard on the coloured lighting effects, so whatever you were playing had this acid-fried psychedelia look to it. Fortunately, Quake II was able to stick to that famous brown-on-brown palette. Also: 640x480 being unimaginably high-resolution...
- mickeyp 12y ago
  No. 16-bit, as I recall, was the upper limit for Voodoo cards. Resolution wasn't a problem. I played Unreal (the original) at 1600x1200x60hz on my old 17" CRT monitor. I had a Voodoo 3 card back then. I still remember staying up all night playing Deus Ex on that rig. The late 90s truly was the golden age of PC gaming.
  - tragic 12y ago
    I'm talking Voodoo 1 here. ;-) Voodoo2 I think was 800x600, but you could push it up to 1024 if you had two chained up with SLI. Of course, when I first got a Voodoo card, it was plugged into a 15" cheapo CRT which couldn't even handle anything north of 800x600. So it wasn't an enormous problem.
swax 12y ago
I remember well upgrading my computer with a 3dfx voodoo card. Nothing short of revolutionary. It's hard to explain, but imagine going from what was at the time normal - incredibly pixelated, slow gameplay, to crisp, clear, and fast gameplay which up until that point never really existed. Not buying the card wasn't even an option, there was nothing remotely like it at the time.

33 points by da02 12y ago

Tech moves fast. Sure, Moore's Law yadda yadda, but sometimes it's hard to get a sense of what that really means. For me, what's astounding is thinking back on all these business wars in tech in the 90s that seemed so crucial at the time. Half a decade later, one or both sides were absorbed, dead, or irrelevant.

psgbg 12y ago
Yeah. Palm's vs Pocket PC's. Nokia vs the world. Sega vs Nintendo. Not many wars where decided by technology itself but other things. Nokia trusted his middle-end low-end market share then android and iPhone came out. Palm lost it's way when the smartphones came out. Sega lost because bad decisions. Nintendo also had bad decision but now is staying behind because the ferocity of the fight between Microsoft and Sony. Kodak had amazing products but it's perfectionist way to do things let them lagging behind. Kodak and Nokia are really sad stories because both had amazing products but didn't understood the changes around them. (yeah both more recent examples) Microsoft won their previous wars because understood the previous reality "feature complete but mediocre solutions". I mean, what the people need want but no more just the essential part. So they dethrone Lotus, Wordperfect etc.
- agumonkey 12y ago
  About Kodak failure to imagine a world without analog technology : http://petapixel.com/2010/08/05/the-worlds-first-digital-camera-by-kodak-and-steve-sasson/ http://petapixel.com/2010/08/05/the-worlds-first-digital-cam... Very surprising.
  - dagw 12y ago
    Kodak also demoed the first professional DSLR in 1988, and released the first commercially available DSLR in 1991. In fact Kodak, with their series of Nikon based DSLRs, basically owned the professional digital photography market throughout the 90's.
    - maxerickson 12y ago
      This surprised me and I ended up at this nicely informative page: http://eocamera.jemcgarvey.com/ http://eocamera.jemcgarvey.com/ By way of these: http://www.dpreview.com/forums/post/4382994 http://www.dpreview.com/forums/post/4382994 http://www.digicamhistory.com/1988.html http://www.digicamhistory.com/1988.html
  - psgbg 12y ago
    I don't think they failed to imagine a world without analog technology. They failed to produce a painless transition. The had amazing technologies. I had digital cameras of samsung, Sony and Kodak and the Kodak product was the one I loved more. Sony and Samsung were stupidly weak to sand, bad battery consumption and some other minor quirks. The Kodak camera was ugly as hell but it worked (thinking some parallel to Nokia products). Kodak thought "our brand is what people buy so if we offer people will buy". Fujifilm nailed it. Created a diversified products, put a hand to their patents in plastics chemicals and other things and started to sell technology. So they diversified. Kodak released products over engineered at slow peace. They still biding in analog products, meanwhile their digital products never took off. Kodak was the mayor patent holder in its time in optical, chemical, plastic and other things. But they were a GIANT biding in sell products and never understood their clients. They never understood their technology value and never understood what the market wanted. One day they stopped to sell and Kodak went out of business.

beloch 12y ago

I remember buying the Diamond Monster 3D based on 3DFX's voodoo 1 chipset. The hardware was a total hack job! It didn't do desktop 2D graphics at all, so you still needed a separate card for that. To avoid forcing users to swap plugs on their monitor every time they fired up a 3D application, the Voodoo included a pass-through plug. Yup. You took a short VGA patch cable and plugged the output of your 2D card right into the 3DFX card, and then your monitor into the 3DFX card! Next, games had to be written specifically to take advantage of the 3DFX API (Glide), so gaming support was far from universal. If something as unrefined as the original vooddo was released today it would probably be scoffed at. However, it's also worth noting what a huge leap forward in quality the original voodoo card offered. The original quake was ported to GL so that it could work on the voodoo, and it was a revelation. Many games were subsequently released with wildly different software and Glide (3DFX's API) rendering modes. The original "Grand Theft Auto" in particular looked vastly better under Glide than under software. Before long, game developers started requiring Glide hardware support rather than trying to build software rendered versions of their game. The voodoo cards were such a big leap forward for gaming that they were universally adopted in spite of their problems. After 3DFX folded and the voodoo series fell into obsolescence, it was difficult to play an entire generation of glide-only games for quite some time. Fortunately, despite the fact that Glide was proprietary, a host of different people made glide wrappers, and we can now enjoy Glide optimized games from the comfort of a standard DOSBOX install!

wtallis 12y ago
NVidia's G-Sync is almost as kludgy as Voodoo Graphics. In theory it can be properly taken advantage of by a well-written preexisting game engine, but there are also a ton of games out there that assume a fixed limit of 60FPS and will see no more benefit than if Direct3D were to start doing triple buffering. And the idea of ripping a PCB and power supply out of your monitor and replacing them is definitely as uglier than a VGA patch cable. Fortunately, commercial G-Sync monitors will become available a lot quicker than the 2D-capable Voodoo 3.
- anon4 12y ago
  > a fixed limit of 60FPS These days it's 30fps: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y1yn5OD5WbM#t=107 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y1yn5OD5WbM#t=107

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

staunch 12y ago

I have one of those 3dfx shirts from 1998. Some employees were handing them out at a Quake tournament I participated in. Good times.

tragic 12y ago

My abiding memory of the first 3dfx cards - apart from total envy - was that you then had a spate of games that went way overboard on the coloured lighting effects, so whatever you were playing had this acid-fried psychedelia look to it. Fortunately, Quake II was able to stick to that famous brown-on-brown palette. Also: 640x480 being unimaginably high-resolution...

mickeyp 12y ago
No. 16-bit, as I recall, was the upper limit for Voodoo cards. Resolution wasn't a problem. I played Unreal (the original) at 1600x1200x60hz on my old 17" CRT monitor. I had a Voodoo 3 card back then. I still remember staying up all night playing Deus Ex on that rig. The late 90s truly was the golden age of PC gaming.
- tragic 12y ago
  I'm talking Voodoo 1 here. ;-) Voodoo2 I think was 800x600, but you could push it up to 1024 if you had two chained up with SLI. Of course, when I first got a Voodoo card, it was plugged into a 15" cheapo CRT which couldn't even handle anything north of 800x600. So it wasn't an enormous problem.

swax 12y ago

I remember well upgrading my computer with a 3dfx voodoo card. Nothing short of revolutionary. It's hard to explain, but imagine going from what was at the time normal - incredibly pixelated, slow gameplay, to crisp, clear, and fast gameplay which up until that point never really existed. Not buying the card wasn't even an option, there was nothing remotely like it at the time.