3dfx Making a Comeback?

Other than I still think its fake. no website, 3dfx isnt even trademarked anymore, and they have been out of the business for 20+ years. I have a hard time even getting excited by a product from a company that hasnt made a video card since warcraft 3 was new.

Kinda like when atari announced they were making a console lol.
 
They just tweeted again with slightly more details.
LOL: "20 years later, the wait is finally over. Our team will discuss new hardware, goals for the next twelve months, and many exciting announcements this Thursday!"

Today's not Thursday, that's false advertising!
 
LOL: "20 years later, the wait is finally over. Our team will discuss new hardware, goals for the next twelve months, and many exciting announcements this Thursday!"

Today's not Thursday, that's false advertising!
Its the new normal of, making an announcement of an upcoming announcement, where they will announce when more details will be revealed, followed by several more announcement announcements.

its how social media controls peoples thinking. They can do literally nothing and its a win because we're talking about it like its something.
 
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More like 22-bit. But to be honest I never saw the difference between 16 and 32bit color

It would be very apparent today witht he high resolutions we operate at, but back then at 640x480, or 800x600, or even 1024x768, much less so.
 
My PC is having an IRQ conflict just thinking about it.
The funny thing about 3Dfx hardware is that the dedicated 3D cards didn't use IRQs at all. They only consumed a single memory address range, which made them a great solution for any number of late 486 and early Pentium machines with not-quite-there PCI compatibility. It's weird to think about now, but bus mastering used to be tricky business... my Matrox Mystique and Rendition V1000E both gave me issues on old or janky motherboards because they didn't get an IRQ assigned to them.

Anyway I have no idea what this announcement is, or who's behind it, but I guess we'll find out on Thursday. Don't get those hopes up high, kids.
 
"3dfx Interactive is coming back, 20 years later. Prepare for an major announcement regarding our return this Thursday!"

"An major announcement" is not incorrect in Commonwealth English, since the indefinite article takes its spelling from the word it refers to, not the word that follows it.

I did not know they did that differently over there. Never came across it before, despite interacting with Brits semi-regularly.

I'm not surprised, as no such difference exists. No idea where he got that idea.

My guess is that the author of the original quote initially wrote "an announcement", and later inserted "major" without bothering to proofread the revised text. Or something.
 
I'm not surprised, as no such difference exists. No idea where he got that idea.

OK. I've only had to memorize about ten different writing styles but I guess I was wrong this whole time.

No, the Brits have some weird indefinite article rules. It's why they say things like "it's an historic" but also "it's a herb.". They treated aspirated consonants like vowels in that situation, even though what is and isn't aspirated varies, and the affectation carries over to this day.

I'm open to it being a typo or whatever, too, though.
 
Yeah, I recall glide games being really colorful.

It may have just been my teenage eyes and nostalgia, but I remember Glide being way more smooth as well. Far less jaggies and good clean lines. Deus Ex and Everquest at the time looked a million times better on 3dfx glide equipment than on ATI .. atleast with the hardware I had available to me at the time.
 
It may have just been my teenage eyes and nostalgia, but I remember Glide being way more smooth as well. Far less jaggies and good clean lines. Deus Ex and Everquest at the time looked a million times better on 3dfx glide equipment than on ATI .. atleast with the hardware I had available to me at the time.
But that 9700 Pro was right around the corner and man was it sweet for the money. That was the card that made me jump from my Voodoo to ATI.
 
More like 22-bit. But to be honest I never saw the difference between 16 and 32bit color
I'd agree in period games it was imperceptible. On the desktop; day and night. Although it had to be 3dfx vs AMD or Matrox 32 bit. Nvidia cheated at 32 bit colour, and it wasn't really 32 bit colour.
I had a radeon LE and the difference it made compared to my TNT2 Ultra was almost mind blowing on the desktop. In game, it was meh.
 
Colorful, yet still 16bit color :p

Depends on the generation. I believe the SST1 (Voodoo Graphics) was a pure 16 bit design. The Voodoo2 and Voodoo3 internally rendered at 24/32 bit and downsampled to 16 bits. The VSA100 in the Voodoo4/5 was 32 bits. But by the time Glide was up to 32 bit color on the VSA100, it was made redundant because 3dfx implemented the full OpenGL renderer. There were very few games that took advantage of 32 bit Glide, they usually went to OpenGL or Direct 3D.

16 bit color on the Nvidia TNT/TNT2 and the ATI Rage was generally crap because it was RGB565. Color banding was a problem in some games, where you had a sickly green tinge added to the output since more bits of green were stored than red or blue.
 
Considering the voodoo brand at the time of the acquisition, I'm surprised Nvidia didn't take advantage of that at all early on. 3dfx really had the gaming world by the tail. I can still remember being annoyed at how much better glide games looked, even after 3dfx was gone.
It was like dx7 vs DX9.
I would say Nvidia was more concerned about building the GeForce branding even higher, with less competition after the buyout of 3dfx/Voodoo, pretty much destroying 3dfx branding.
 
I would say Nvidia was more concerned about building the GeForce branding even higher, with less competition after the buyout of 3dfx/Voodoo, pretty much destroying 3dfx branding.
That is what they did. But I feel like they would have been more effective at destroying AMD (ATi at the time) if instead, they kept 3dfx and used that as either the "high end" or "low end" brand. It might have been possible to create the illusion of competition, making it harder for ATi to compete.

I suppose after Voodoo 5 massive delays and disappointment the name was doomed to be dragged through some mud. so idk. Just a thought.
 
That is what they did. But I feel like they would have been more effective at destroying AMD (ATi at the time) if instead, they kept 3dfx and used that as either the "high end" or "low end" brand. It might have been possible to create the illusion of competition, making it harder for ATi to compete.

I suppose after Voodoo 5 massive delays and disappointment the name was doomed to be dragged through some mud. so idk. Just a thought.
From what I remember, may not be totally accurate, Nvidia was not necessarily liked for buying out 3dfx (with all the background Patent cases going and still some strong following with 3dfx) -> So for Nvidia to keep the Voodoo branding for their own lower end versions may have been like putting the icepick in the cows eye after it was dead, I would think it would have backfired. Plus 3dfx also contributed to woes of their own branding with delays, competing with AIBs or virtually taking over all the production of cards, many burnt bridges. Will Nvidia sway from their GeForce/RTX branding and into Voodoo branding? It would be fun to see Nvidia experiment if they have some unique products, king of hill type stuff where so many early adopters remember 3dfx as being king and not peasants to address. Or if product line does not conflict with current product trademarks, as in being unique/new in something which I think Voodoo is a good strong marketing name, as for 3dfx, maybe 3drtx :D.
 
Its funny to see everyone here thinking nvidia owns 3dfx. They never bought them completely and the 3dfx stock will still for sale/traded up until what 2014? Nvidia only bout key IP rights and tech. Not 3dfx as a whole.
There real motive was to be able to abtain all the 3dfx hardware engineers.
give me a little time. I actually have the court paperwork on the bankruptcy and other related triles related to 3dfx

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From what I remember, may not be totally accurate, Nvidia was not necessarily liked for buying out 3dfx (with all the background Patent cases going and still some strong following with 3dfx) -> So for Nvidia to keep the Voodoo branding for their own lower end versions may have been like putting the icepick in the cows eye after it was dead, I would think it would have backfired. Plus 3dfx also contributed to woes of their own branding with delays, competing with AIBs or virtually taking over all the production of cards, many burnt bridges. Will Nvidia sway from their GeForce/RTX branding and into Voodoo branding? It would be fun to see Nvidia experiment if they have some unique products, king of hill type stuff where so many early adopters remember 3dfx as being king and not peasants to address. Or if product line does not conflict with current product trademarks, as in being unique/new in something which I think Voodoo is a good strong marketing name, as for 3dfx, maybe 3drtx :D.
I forgot about the patent stuff... funny thing time.

I was mostly referring to at the time. Now it seems ridiculous to try to bring back something so far gone to time. 20 years ago it might have been relevant.

lol'd at the 3drtx;
 
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The Unreal intro was so cool. I never finished the game, but I must have played those first couple of levels a hundred times.
the reflections in Unreal still look better than the screenspace garbage we had for all the 2010's. Fun game, I'll have to revisit it sometime
 
The Unreal intro was so cool. I never finished the game, but I must have played those first couple of levels a hundred times.
Yeah, sadly never finished the game either. Just used it for benchmarking.
 
It's not impossible they make a come back.
Seeing that many cell phones and SBCs have 3d rendering , it's possible. Just don't see how they will rise from a broken stock to the same level they were back in the day.
 
This kind of confirms it's not fake news! The card that half blurred out looks modern (unless it's new old stock V5 6000 in a redesigned PCB?)

I can't tell what output connection that GPU uses from the pic.

Edit: you can see a DVI dongle... so maybe it's just new old stock V6000? But with a redesigned heatspreader?
 
i lightened the photo, its not an adapter. it looks like a DP or hdmi cable* and then the brick connector next to it.
*edit: maybe dvi, its hard to tell but there is no adapter.
edit2 nevermind... i didnt look down...

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It's not impossible they make a come back.
Seeing that many cell phones and SBCs have 3d rendering , it's possible. Just don't see how they will rise from a broken stock to the same level they were back in the day.
Nvidia bought all their IP, it is impossible.
 
The brand was orphaned after Nvidia acquired the meaningful IP and snuffed out an ongoing lawsuit between the two companies in the process. It’s debatable that the GeForce FX line was a sideways nod to the fact that it was the first generation of hardware to incorporate some of 3dfx’s tech that went mostly uncommented on at the time. Any patents 3Dfx had expired long ago and would be charmingly outdated anyway - nobody’s going to war over rotated grid supersampling in 2021.

It’s sort of interesting that someone is dusting off the bones and putting a fresh coat of paint on the brand, but the biggest surprise that could happen here is this company emerging as an early manufacturer of Intel DG2 cards. Don’t hold your breath on that one, that’s just speculation. Let’s at least hope whatever comes out of this is competent.
 
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