The Fall of Voodoo

The reason for the fall of 3Dfx? wasn't it OpenGL takeover of rendering and it being an open source? and 3Dfx wanting to still charge devs for their method?
 
cbroseinak said:
The reason for the fall of 3Dfx? wasn't it OpenGL takeover of rendering and it being an open source? and 3Dfx wanting to still charge devs for their method?
Click to expand...


I still haven't read the article, but from what I remember at the time it was mostly caused by them being greedy and trying to vertically integrate.

They wanted a bigger piece of the pie, so they bought video card maker STB in order to sell their own video cards rather than just GPU's.

When they started phasing out their other board partners they shrunk their distribution network at the same time as they had so much money tied up in STB that they had less to spend on R&D and fell behind Nvidia and ATI in the GPU development race.

This resulted in constant delays and trying to slap more GPU's on a single board to make up for disappointing GPU performance and eventually bankruptcy.
 
Loose Nut said:
The fall of 3DFX ? they were too good, and Nvidia pulled a Disney ( if you can't make something better, buy the competition )
Click to expand...
By the time 3DFX was aquired by nvidia, The voodoo cards were way behind in features/performance.

AFAIK, nvidia didn't even use any of 3dfx technologies they bought. Heck they didn't even keep the name.
 
Stoly said:
By the time 3DFX was aquired by nvidia, The voodoo cards were way behind in features/performance.

AFAIK, nvidia didn't even use any of 3dfx technologies they bought. Heck they didn't even keep the name.
Click to expand...


I think they got some patents out of it, Notably for SLI. They used their own implementation though, which was very different than the one used by 3Dfx
 
Good article. Did not tell us anything we did not already know though. My first PC was in 1998 and had a Riva TNT. Couple of my friends came over to see for themselves how it performed. At the time many were convinced you must have a 3dfx card to play 3D games.

About a year ago I was amusing myself playing with old hardware. Switching between GeForce2 and VooDoo4 cards (lower right below) in the exact same retro system. Two cards which competed with each other in year 2000. Used two separate 20gb HDDs to avoid having to change drivers.

Colors seem to pop more in Glide, yet Direct3D seems to do better shading. More significantly, the GF2 gives much better frame rates and benchmarks scores. No surprise there.

One cannot deny the nostalgic factor 3dfx invokes. No doubt why those cards sell for such high prices these days.
 

Attachments

  • agp2.jpg
    agp2.jpg
    220.1 KB · Views: 25
I had forgotten that the first Voodoo boards were add in boards, where you needed a Pci 2D card as well. There were the days (or not) but the games were great for their time.
 
Susquehannock said:
One cannot deny the nostalgic factor 3dfx invokes. No doubt why those cards sell for such high prices these days.
Click to expand...

They do? I think have a couple of functional Voodoo2 3000 cards and a Voodoo 5 in my basement. (If I haven't tossed them already, can't remember) Maybe I should try to sell them...

The funny part is, I don't even remember owning a Voodoo card after my Voodoo1, so I'm not sure where these came from. There was a period of time in college when I was building and running game servers and people would just drop off their old PC hardware outside my door for me to build more servers with Might have been from then...
 
Last edited:
I remember, at the DFW lan party of 2001, it was announced 3DFX was bought out by Nvidia.

Politics had invaded even graphics cards, and there were Nvidia fanboy FOOLS running around how cool it was that there would be no more Voodoo cards.

My only response was "Do you not know how competition drives prices down?"

And now... 17 years later? What do we have? People rich &/or stupid enough to pay 800 dollars for a GFX card they don't need.
 
Zarathustra[H] said:
They do? I think have a couple of functional Voodoo2 3000 cards and a Voodoo 5 in my basement. (If I haven't tossed them already, can't remember) Maybe I should try to sell them...

The funny part is, I don't even remember owning a Voodoo card after my Voodoo1, so Immnot sure where these came from. There was a period of time in college when I was building and running game servers and proper would just drop off their old PC hardware outside my door for me to build more degrees with. Might have been from then...
Click to expand...
VooDoo5 are most sought. Not unusual for them to sell at $200 on FeeBay.

Seems to be a lot of demand for AGP era hardware. Upper end cards are fetching good prices now. Often 3-4 times more than their PCIe counterparts.
 
cbroseinak said:
The reason for the fall of 3Dfx? wasn't it OpenGL takeover of rendering and it being an open source? and 3Dfx wanting to still charge devs for their method?
Click to expand...


There were many reasons. With the voodoo 3 vs nvidia (TNT I think?) The v3 was faster, but the TNT had better image quality. 32 bit colour vs v3's 16bit. Still, it was enough for people to buy them.

But then the voodoo 4/5 was heavily delayed. The competition had time to surpass what 3dfx had coming. When it finally did release, it was overpriced and slower. Not many people wanted it.

If my memory is correct, it was the first card with AA, however. Being first stab at it, it wasn't too good needless to say. The performance hit was very large and these cards didn't have the horsepower to run it to begin with.

3dfx put a lot of money and effort into these things and they were too little too late. This put their next gen, rampage, further down the line. It might have saved them, and looks so from the little bit of prototype benchmarks out there, but they ran out of money before that could happen.

If the 4/5 cards came out earlier they might still be around today, who knows.
 
I never owned a Voodoo card. I bought Rendition v2200, then TNT.

Yeah, 32-bit was such a joke? I was able to run Quake 3 in 32-bit at 640x480 on the TNT. Way better than craptactular 16-bit Voodoo 2.

22-bit rendering looked fine on Quake 3 (but the low-res textures still looked awful). You still had to buy a new Voodoo 3 to support that. All their previous cards were pure 16-bit. And the GeForce 256 basically destroyed the Voodoo 3...at everything, so why pay the money for a new card that sucks?

And you only have at look at games like Battlefield 1942 to see the future was T&L. Those lighting effects were spectacular. Played many hours of that game on my Radeon 8500.

The Voodoo 5's FSAA was extremely expensive to use, and was destroyed by the GeForce 3's MSAA a year later.

That's really all the memories I have of 3DFX. They launched the price of ownership into the sun with Voodoo 2 SLI, and then were surprised when owners didn't buy the same shit in a smaller package. Voodoo 3 2000 = Voodoo 2 SLI.
 
Last edited:
I had a voodoo1, 2 and 4 back in the day - still have some old 3dfx cards lying around including a voodoo2 and a voodoo5 agp card. No idea why I still have them, or even when I got the voodoo5, but I can't bring myself to get rid of them.
 
I had a voodoo 2 back in the day, I recall nvidia buried them when the tnt came along, wow its so long ago, feel old now.
 
I recall where I was when 3dfx was acquired by nvidia. We were brought into a hotel meeting room not far from nv headquarters and introduced to the 3dfx staff who would be joining nvidia after being bought out.
 
Shotglass01 said:
MotoRacer maybe? I played that game SO much I swore I could have ridden a real one. :ROFLMAO:

I had the original Matrox millennium and had bought the Mystique for my then girlfriends computer. Was fun times.
Click to expand...
Ha I still have my Diamond Monster 3D (bought in March or April 1997), Voodoo 3 and Voodoo 5 somewhere. I remember trying all the hacks to gain an extra 1-2 fps in GLQuake playing CTF and TF. I think I got it to run about 32fps when 30fps was considered gravy. This was on a PPro 200 oc'd to 233MHz that ran regular Quake at 50fps at the standard 320x200, which was jaw dropping back then.
 
Zarathustra[H] said:
Well, I've been at companies during mergers and acquisitions. Usually there things are extremely tight lipped until they are made public. Outside of top management or those directly involved with the talks or providing information to be used for them, no one in either company knows anything about it at all.

Those who are involved are sworn to secrecy until made public as leaking significant information that could affect the stock price prior to being made public is in many (most/all?) cases illegal.

The guy could have been full of shit, or he could have been honest and just not aware of top managements ongoing negotiations.
Click to expand...

If i recall the leaks spreading was that 3dfx had an all employee meeting and announced this. That guy replied as above, saying he was an employee and there was no meeting.

Right after he posts, news release time lol. It was awesome, those posts are long gone though :(
 
time where so simple back then, AGP was going to take over the world in a blaze of glory!
 
Those we're awesome for the time

Was thinking of buying one of every card (right up till those 4 chips on one card lastly made) and hanging them on the wall or somehing

That being said, haven't read it yet (will when I have some time on hands)
But does it have any correlation to this picture?
Nokia-Forbes.png
 
I still have the Voodoo 5 5500 AGP I bought new. I almost immediately ripped off the stock coolers and installed nice large Socket 7 coolers so I could easily overlcock it. The stock heatsinks/fans are crap. No idea what happened to the box or other stuff that came with it.

I've also got a V1, a V2 12MB (that needs some soldering work), multiple Voodoo Banshees and multiple Voodoo 3 cards as well as another Voodoo 5 5500 that I purchased for backup in case my other one ever dies.

Right before the 3dfx site went down, I used a program to download their website. Dumb me burned it to a CD which of course got a bad scratch on it on the foil side at some point so some of the files were unreadable when I went to make a backup copy of it a year or so ago.
 
Damn I feel old! I had a Diamond Edge 3D (NV1 chip + Audio Wavetable + Game Port) which was the first 3D card ever and the first Nvidia card that only played SEGA games. It was never porperly supported by developers.

After that I got a Orchid Righteous 3D on pre-order and then eagerly waited for the Quake patch along with Tomb Raider 1....those were really nice times.
 
  • Like
Reactions: DocNo
like this
I vividly recall the birth of the 3D accelerator. The ads for the Matrox Mystique in the back of PC Gamer issues. The S3 Virge. The Rendition Verite.

I got my first 3D accelerator in early 1998 after a friend's constant bragging about how awesome GLQuake is on his computer housing a Voodoo.

I opted for the much cheaper Verite V2200, but returned it in a matter of days out of frustration for the shitty performance and worse compatibility, then brought home an Intergraph Intense 3D 6MB Voodoo Rush.

The first time I saw that magical spinning 3Dfx logo splash screen just prior to the game launching, I was all smiles. Then that smile turned into my jaw hitting the floor after GLQuake was finished loading for the first time. "This? This is what I've been missing?! Holy shit!" I said to myself.

I ended up playing GLQuake until around 3 in the morning. Took a nap. Then back to work by 6. I didn't care, because I was totally wired that day. And it was a Friday, at that. I'd try to catch up on sleep come Sunday night.

I didn't upgrade until the 3Dfx branded 12MB Voodoo2 hit the market. I bought two of them for $125 each, and paired them with an old Trident 9440 4MB I had laying around. That 3D performance was bliss, coming from a V-Rush.

Not long afterwards, I replaced the 9440 with a 32MB TnT2 Ultra. It was only when I snagged a deal on a GF2 Pro (maybe an Ultra...don't remember) 64MB that I upgraded.

After that came a GF4 Ti 4200 8X.
Then a GF FX 5700 Ultra.
Twin 6600GTs followed that.
Dual eVGA 7800GT CO succeeded them.
A single 8800GT came next.
Then a GTX 275.
Then a GTX 570.
Then dual 780s.
And now I'm up to my current 980Ti.

And PC gaming has been kick ass every step of the way...
 
Susquehannock said:
Good article. Did not tell us anything we did not already know though. My first PC was in 1998 and had a Riva TNT. Couple of my friends came over to see for themselves how it performed. At the time many were convinced you must have a 3dfx card to play 3D games.

About a year ago I was amusing myself playing with old hardware. Switching between GeForce2 and VooDoo4 cards (lower right below) in the exact same retro system. Two cards which competed with each other in year 2000. Used two separate 20gb HDDs to avoid having to change drivers.

Colors seem to pop more in Glide, yet Direct3D seems to do better shading. More significantly, the GF2 gives much better frame rates and benchmarks scores. No surprise there.

One cannot deny the nostalgic factor 3dfx invokes. No doubt why those cards sell for such high prices these days.
Click to expand...

I recall doing the pepsi challenge between a Geforce2 GTS and a Voodoo3 back in the day. I liked the GF2 better (since I owned it) :D:D
 
Slade said:
I recall where I was when 3dfx was acquired by nvidia. We were brought into a hotel meeting room not far from nv headquarters and introduced to the 3dfx staff who would be joining nvidia after being bought out.
Click to expand...

Yeah about the only thing nvidia got of value from 3dFX was the enginering staff.
 
Bad management decisions. Buying STB was a giant mistake for 3dfx, but it wasn't the only nail in the coffin. Just a large one. I knew people at STB/3dfx and their stories of management ineptitude come straight out of the Commodore management business school for idiots.

Sega didn't help with their Dreamcast / PowerVR BS. Not sure how that avoided the courts.... but I think 3dfx was all but done before it would have mattered anyway.

I'd love to see the tech make a comeback, but maybe not the company. Will never happen though, Nvidia bought them outright, they own the name, IP, tech, everything.
 
Yeah, I paid $179 bux for a VOODOO 3000 AGP! My goodness, the voodoo powers brainwashed me into lightening my wallet! The name was so catchy! VOODOO 3000 AGP! :)
 
Stoly said:
Yeah about the only thing nvidia got of value from 3dFX was the enginering staff.
Click to expand...

Nvidia scored big time. They got all the Gigapixel tech, and the almost completed Rampage tech, while knocking out a serious competitor in the process.
 
I've posted this video before, but it's frankly better than any article. Watch the full thing, it's really interesting.

The big stand out thing to me is really how nothing has changed much from what 3DFX first innovated on over two decades ago now, and how it was basically the innovation of Gary Tarolli that made it all happen.

And yes - It was basically the choice to waste a bunch of time trying to make AIO cards / vertically integrate that killed them. If they would have just stuck with selling a chip and focused on doing what they did best by just putting out a higher performing 3D GPU they likely would have survived.

 
Last edited:
c3k said:
I bought a 3dfx Voodoo 2 in a mall in Portland, Oregon. (No sales tax.) Ice rink in the mall. Forget the name of the shop, but the salesman (young guy) told me how envious he was that I was buying it. It was the 1080 of its day. ;)
Click to expand...

Lloyd Center?
 
I remember my OpenGL and quake 2 it was like drugs, it was hard to put it down. Best gaming days ever.

I had a Number 9 the best 2d card on the market with a voodoo1 and a Princeton graphics 17+. Good grief I miss those days.
 
  • Like
Reactions: DocNo
like this
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top