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What exactly happened to 3dfx??

E

earthscore

Gawd
Joined
Aug 7, 2004
Messages
542
Didn't they make nice cards? Why did they go out of business? I'm on a 8/16 mb 3dfx voodoo 3000 and it still runs cs, so what happened to the company?
 
It went under because they were a small company compared to Nvidia or ATI. They just didn't have the money to compete with the big boys. They had absolutely no OEM deals. They didn't imcorporate things like T&L and tried using 2 chips vs 1 chip. 2 chips cost more than 1 chip obviously and costed more. Losing a lot of money. Nvidia bought 3dfx. Now incorporated into their current line of cards.
 
I think they still used 4x AGP. People said that because they didn't use a bridge. if I remember correctly.
 
simple fact is they used multiple gpus to acheive the same performance of ati/nivida products and couldnt make a profit...
 
and Nvidia came out with geforce 2 gts shortly their after. Basically killing the Voodoo 5 series.
 
LOL

I'm glad 3dfx died. Their bogus multi-texturing patent, excuses instead of innovation (who needs T&L/32-bit-color/AGP/etc) and even buying STB backfired (nvidia's biggest OEM customer at the time).
 
Most of what killed 3dfx was their chips themselves. They never developed any GPU that was 32-bit. Even the Voodoo 5 was a 16-bit core chip, they just slapped two of them on a PCB.

The second difference is that 3dfx clock locked the GPU and memory at the same speeds on nearly all their cards until the Voodoo 4 and 5 series.

Another shot in the foot was their defiance against OpenGL support. 3dfx never officially supported that standard instead focusing on Glide. Unreal players will remember no doubt how much smoother it ran on a Voodoo based card than on a TNT.

It was a culmination of several factors but boils down to:
16-bit chips, poor scalability, higher cost in production, lack of OpenGL accelleration.

Come to think of it, how many of you even remember Glide?
 
I don't I wish they stuck around. They just did things differently. If I remember correctly 3dfx cards had better picture quality and smoothness to them. Never ever studdered nor did they ever gave me any problems with games because of drivers.
 
The_Mage18 said:
Most of what killed 3dfx was their chips themselves. They never developed any GPU that was 32-bit. Even the Voodoo 5 was a 16-bit core chip, they just slapped two of them on a PCB.

The second difference is that 3dfx clock locked the GPU and memory at the same speeds on nearly all their cards until the Voodoo 4 and 5 series.

Another shot in the foot was their defiance against OpenGL support. 3dfx never officially supported that standard instead focusing on Glide. Unreal players will remember no doubt how much smoother it ran on a Voodoo based card than on a TNT.

It was a culmination of several factors but boils down to:
16-bit chips, poor scalability, higher cost in production, lack of OpenGL accelleration.

Come to think of it, how many of you even remember Glide?
Click to expand...

voodoo 5 was 32bit.
 
My impression was that they built a very proprietary architecture/api product. Nothing was as smooth as glide running on 3dfx hardware, but game developers didn't want to make games for just one card (ok well some did).

In the end all the lawsuite drained them and they couldn't get products to market fast enough to compete with nvidia.
 
bad management, as in "made for harvard business school case" bad management
 
Marvelous said:
voodoo 5 was 32bit.
Click to expand...

I stand corrected, I thought it was still 16-bit. Of course one could argue they pulled an Intel and stated their two 16-bit chips were equivalent to a 32-bit chip. ;)

Seriously, I thought it was 16-bit, my bad.
 
wow.. seeing a lot of misinformation here so im going to clear it up best as i can.

first off the voodoo 4 and voodoo 5 were cabable of 32 bit color . i owned a voodoo 4 btw.. got it on sale for 100 when its retail was 200.

2nd History

this link was simply horrible. http://www.videocard-forum.com/nvidia/Whatever_happened_to_3DFX_422528.html

VERY flawed.

he i s my brief history im not going to cover everything in exact order since i dont feel like looking it up... im just going to cover the major problems.

The voodoo 2 was a killer card.. and although some will say it was stupid a full 30% of voodoo 2 owners bought into SLI (SLI = 2 cards running together) it was very expensive but the absolute shit.

enter the voodoo rush and voodoo banshee - both pos which ate valuable resources , time, cash,and the banshee at best was a stop gap product. these delayed the rampage chip.

voodoo 3 is introduced to fight the tnt2 line. it lacks 32 bit color. its a huge success but at the same time a lot of mindshare is lot to nvidia. while the v3 is a nice card the tnt2's have 32 bit color and generally are faster, although do not look as good to some people. The card was a bit of a disapointment though.

mean while nvidia is just simply putting the smack down w/ the geforce line.

then 3dfx makes the stupid mistake of buying STB, and then telling all of their partner to go away. They take on a factory to manufacure chips... while it could lead to higher profits it a huge risk and it did not pay off.

sometime in here a lot of 3dfx engineers leave , 3dfx needs new employees.

3dfx sometime in here bought Gigapixel for a stock swap . Gigapixel was supposed to bring some revolutionary tech to 3dfx involving hidden surface removal if i remember right and some low power stuff. It also brough much needed employees.

The rampage chip is still late.

The Napalm chip (aka voodoo 4 and 5) is behing hyped and its released. it has 32 bit color and the voodoo 5 has dual graphics cards on one chip. A lot of problems plagued the chip from an engineer forgetting to pick up a critical shipment from asia which delayed the chip 2 weeks to the voodoo 5 being in-compatable w/ some intel mobo's to a batch of defective voodoo 5's behing shipped out and then recalled , thus putting the voodoo 5 behind 2 weeks. it was horribly late and by then the geforce 2 ultras were out and soon after the geforce 3's.

the company was bleeding money out... the red was shooting out like a fire hydrant.

they were nearing litigation against nvidia for some patent stuff and it looked like it was going to go to court. 3dfx probably woul dnot be able to make it through the procededings since nvidia could draw it out and simply appeal it. 3dfx was about to go under from lack of cash.

The voodoo 5 6000 (it was a voodoo 5 w/ 4 processor and an unheard of 128 megs of ram.. about the equivilanrt of if you could get a graphcis card now days w/ say a gig of ram on it, at least thats my feeling , it was over kill and beautiful..

only 100 or so are rumored to be in existance... they had a lot of problems w/ teh drivers and power for them. overall they were damn cool.. but a waste of cash and resources since they took WAY to long. if 3dfx were able to get them out and dev. them fast then it woudl ahve been a great marketing tool and a nitch product for the utter insane.. much like the 500 or 600 dollar graphics cards we see now days.)

the rampage chip actually taped out during the last week at 3dfx ,

nvidia announced that 3dfx had agreeded to sell the assets, patents and invetory to nvidia for 70 million in cash and 1 milliion shares of common stock , given 3dfx cease business and 2nd .. pay off all debts.

the cash was quickly spent and to this day nvidia has yet to pay the shares (its 2 million now since nvidia stock split).

untill 3dfx pays off its debts nvidia will not have to pay the 2 million shares of stock . and its doubtful they ever will pay off all the debt.

they have been dead for 4 years now and havent done it yet.

i guess it could happen ....

the 3dfx stock trades under TDFXQ.OB if i remmber right..
now even a penny last i checked.

hope it helps... the time line is somewhat out of order.. im sure the voodoo rush is in the wrong spot.. i think it comes b4 the voodoo 2..

but its generally correct and its just my observations .
austin
 
I work In Fort Collins Colorado and Nvidia has a division here. One of my very good freinds is the Open GL General Manager. He taught phyisics and math is college and later came to work for Nvidia. He has on his desk at his office a desktop running a Vodoo 5 6000 quad processor. MAN that card is huge and COOL!!!! But now all it does is work for him for his everyday stuff like email and ect, nothing more then a show piece. I would be willing to bet that anymore of that card that is in existance is either in the hands of Nvidia employees like my freind or walked away with earlyer 3dfx personel. Maybe the next time I go see him I can try to (probably not though) bring a digital camera maybe I can snap some photos and post em.

The Captin
 
*raises hand also* I remember glide :D Had a Voodoo5500 AGP in my first computer, which my dad's friend custom built for me (he ran a computer shop). I remember specifically asking for a Voodoo (and I specifically remember the techno heart-ache months later after hearing the buy out...*sniff*)

I miss 3dfx...their performance at high resolution slaughtered nvidia back in the day...I played UT99 @ 1600x1200 on my voodoo5500, and loved every second of it. After voodoo support went all to hell, I got ahold of some nvidia card comperable and couldn't stand 800x600 at freakin all.

If you can find any old benches, you'd see nvidia in the lead @ 800x600, but as you cranked up the res, the voodoo would drop a few frames here and there while the nvidia card was the one 'bleeding' out. Oh how I hated nvidia....but now I love them with thier linux support :)

Bah...I remember
 
I think I'm going to build a PC with all old-school parts (3dfx card of course), and get one of those 3dfx logo stickers they're selling on ebay and put it on there or something.

Would be kinda fun for playing older games...
 
Uncle Toxie said:
I still have a VooDoo 3 and an original Diamond Monster 3-D with the first VooDoo chipset. Those were the days................... :)
Click to expand...

pics plz? :D trying to figure out what sort of gfx card i've got in my old 386 "workstation" from '92 and i think it might have been a voodoo.
 
The Voodoo 4 & 5 were 32-bit. It was also a 4xAGP card. I owned one so I should know. Biggest reason was in raw speed the GeForce2 Ultra was a bit faster than the V5. I like the V5 better though becasue of it's AA capabilities. Another reason they went under was becasue they weren't able to get their next-gen chip out in time, which from what I heard, would of decimated nVidia and ATI.
 
I think I have my Canopus Pure 3d II VooDoo 2s in SLI around here somewhere.

Canopus was the best vid card maker to ever exist.
 
Behold: Voodoo 5 6000 in all her glory...

voodoo56000.jpg





Miscellaneous Experimental 3DFX Rampage Photos...

rampage1.jpg


rampage2.jpg





Experimental 3DFX Rampage Running Quake 3 Arena...

rampage4.jpg


rampage5.jpg



Every so often, I'll pull the Diamond Monster 3D (Voodoo 1 4MB) or the Voodoo 3 3000 & Voodoo 5 5500 out and fire them up for some Glide-enabled UT on an old Athlon 800 Slot A. Ahhh memories of better years gone by...
 
That card has a removable graphics chip. They swap an old buggy chip for a new fresh updated chip and put it in the same card. The clamp holds the chip in place on the card without having to solder it on.
 
Whenever I buy a new video card I never feel as satisfied as I did when I slapped in that Voodoo 3 and saw the FPS fly.
 
My first and only 3DFX card was the Voodoo 5500 Macintosh edition that I put in my G4 at the time......I was in school and I needed a Mac. ( Still have one Mac, but I am uber cool with my Powerbook Titanium) I used to play UT and Quake 3 and own fools with a ATI Rage 128, or a Geforce 2. Of course when I built my first PC, it smoked my mac.....they are great for video and graphics, but blow chunks for games.......Want a good laugh, play Halo on a MAC and turn the graphics up.....had to throw that in. I loved the way glide looked compared to open GL back then. Anyhoo, that's my trip down memory lane. BTW, I am typing this on myh powerbook......I do not think that is very [H]ard of myself I must say.......I will go and sit in the corner now. :D
 
i seem to recall that another problem with voodoo3 cards was that they only rendered sprites at up to 16x16 pixels, and not 256x256 like nvidia. or textures, i dont remember. its been a long time, but i can still see the pictures in PC Gamer way back in the day. This was in issue in the original Unreal i do remember. also, i remember that awesome performance of Glide. to this day i still think Rollcage looked way better in Glide than Direct3D. And quake2 looked and ran much better on my k6-233 with voodoo3 2000 pci than on my dad's p2-400 with TNT2 mach64
 
3DFX was the way! If you were an original EQ or Tribes player you NEEDED a 3DFX card. I still have my voodoo 3 3000 somewhere around here I think, god I loved it. May 3DFXrest in piece, they gave us the best during those tough times.
 
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