Founded in San Jose, California in 1994 past a trio of former Silicon Graphics employees, 3Dfx got its start making hardware for arcade machines. The company's first-gen Voodoo chipset powered arcade hits like San Francisco Rush, ICE Abode Run Derby and Wayne Gretzky'south 3D Hockey. But by the second one-half of 1996, memory prices had dipped significantly which turned 3Dfx's attention to the consumer PC market place.

3Dfx's Voodoo graphics consisted of a 3D-but add-in card that required a VGA cable pass-through from a separate 2d card to the Voodoo, which and so connected to the brandish. The cards were sold by a large number of companies. Orchid Technologies was outset to market with the $299 Orchid Righteous 3D, a board noted for having mechanical relays that "clicked" when the chipset was in employ. That card was followed past Diamond Multimedia'southward Monster 3D, the Canopus Pure3D, Colormaster Voodoomania, Quantum3D Obsidian, Miro Hiscore, Skywell Magic3D, among others.

Voodoo Graphics revolutionized personal computer graphics well-nigh overnight and rendered many other designs obsolete, including a vast swathe of 2D-just graphics producers. The 3D landscape in 1996 favored S3 with effectually 50% of the market place. That was to change soon, however. It was estimated that 3Dfx accounted for eighty-85% of the 3D accelerator market place during the heyday of Voodoo'southward reign.

Eventually near of 3Dfx'due south competition came from companies that were already established in the marketplace producing 2D graphics, and were significant to produce combo cards capable of 2D and 3D. While these products didn't lucifer the epitome quality or performance of Voodoo, their lower toll points and ease of use made them a hit with many OEMs. Demand and public's involvement was there for the taking.

At the time, 3Dfx appeared to be in a unique position where it didn't make graphics cards direct, but sold its chipset to third-party OEMs to utilize in their own branded cards. The company thought this was an outcome which would endeavor to accost later in its life, but more on that in a bit.

3Dfx's answer to the combo card came a yr later on with the launch of the Voodoo Rush, which paired its original Voodoo accelerator with a second graphics fleck on the same board. The Blitz carried the same specifications as a standalone Voodoo but considering it had to share memory bandwidth with the 2D chip, performance suffered. 3Dfx attempted to remedy this with later revisions featuring more retentiveness and higher clock speeds but information technology was all for nothing. The Voodoo Rush was discontinued less than a year later launch.

On a personal annotation...

The December 1995 upshot of GamePro mag featured a piece on DigiPen, a school in Vancouver that teaches video game programming. News of this "Applied Calculator Graphics" schoolhouse couldn't have come up at a better time as my computer teacher had just issued an consignment regarding our dream job and how it might relate to engineering science. I knew correct then and there what I was destined to do.

I'd been into video games for as long as I can remember. For a brief period in the mid-80s, my aunt endemic and operated a video rental store. It was the sort of shop yous'd find in any small boondocks before Blockbuster monopolized the industry, with a respectable option of movies and – almost importantly for u.s.a. kids – Nintendo games. This but further solidified my interest in gaming.

I was fully enveloped by the belatedly 90s, having laid claim to nearly every major console on the market. Nary a week would get by that I didn't receive at to the lowest degree a few issues of the latest gaming mag in the mail. Heck, I even circled release dates on my calendar and counted down the days until launch in hostage.

So in that location I was, an impressionable xiii-twelvemonth-quondam in estimator class with his entire life already charted out. I'd finish grade school, become accustomed into DigiPen, graduate with some sort of degree and start living the dream of making video games.

In hindsight, that'southward probably how information technology would have played out had my other interest – the personal computer – not intervened.

I got my first computer in 1998 and information technology literally changed the entire trajectory of my life. I was even so into gaming, mind you, but the focus immediately shifted from consoles to the PC and it didn't have long to realize that my AMD K6-2 CPU with 3DNow! instruction gear up needed some aid in the graphics department.

Enter 3Dfx Interactive.

The pinnacle of 3Dfx'due south relatively short run – and where my story intersects with them – came in 1998 with the launch of the wildly successful Voodoo2. Built on a 350 nm manufacturing process, the Voodoo2 upped the dues with faster core and retentiveness clock speeds of 90 MHz, respectively, up from fifty MHz on the get-go-gen Voodoo. There was simply nothing that could compete with it, permit alone when a game had implemented the proprietary Glide API (earlier Direct3D and OpenGL were seen every bit standard).

3Dfx also added a 2d texture mapping unit of measurement in Voodoo2, which allowed two textures to be fatigued in a single pass without a performance hit. They went dorsum to beingness a pure 3D accelerator, and the work put in resonated with gamers.

3Dfx'due south Voodoo and Voodoo2 chipsets are widely credited with jump-starting 3D gaming. Some even consider this period to exist the golden era for PC gaming with titles like Quake, Quake 2, Demand for Speed II: SE, Virtua Fighter 2, Resident Evil, Tomb Raider, Diablo II, Unreal, and Rainbow Half-dozen all effectively making neat utilise of the Glide API.

As Shamus Young then eloquently put information technology, "it was after the stone age of DOS, but before the four horsemen of bugs, DRM, graphics fixation, and console-itis came in and made a mess of things." For a deeper dive on this subject, check out our compilation of some of the best 3Dfx Glide games always created.

The Voodoo2 was likewise noteworthy in that it introduced SLI (Scan-Line Interleave), a process in which two Voodoo 2 cards could be linked together and run simultaneously to theoretically double the graphics processing functioning. SLI allowed for college resolutions, up to 1,024 10 768, but compatibility bug and the sheer price associated with buying two high-end graphics cards kept the feature squarely in the arena of enthusiasts and hardcore gamers.

SLI would get a mulligan years later courtesy of Nvidia. Now known every bit Scalable Link Interface, the idea behind the modern implementation is the same although technology that powers it is quite different than what 3Dfx first introduced.

"... we were doing tests on a very popular game called "GL Quake" and it was running at 120 frames per second, which is merely silly, I mean nobody'southward going to run a game and add at that kind of frame charge per unit or want to, but what it illustrates is the headroom that's available for developers" -- taken from the 3Dfx Interactive Documentary circa 1997

3Dfx would revisit the 2D / 3D combo card idea with the Voodoo Banshee and even submitted a blueprint for Sega's Dreamcast game console, simply was ultimately passed over in favor of a chipset from NEC. Things only went downhill from there equally 3Dfx decided to acquire video card manufacturer STB Systems for $141 million in a bid to brand its own video cards rather than standing to serve every bit an OEM supplier.

In raw 3D performance, the Voodoo 2 had no equal, but the competition was gaining ground fast. Amidst increasing competition from ATI and Nvidia, 3Dfx looked to retain a higher turn a profit line past marketing and selling the boards themselves, something that was previously handled by a lengthy listing of lath partners. That's where the STB acquisition fabricated sense, but the venture proved a behemothic misstep as quality and cost of manufacture from the foundry used by the company could not compete with TSMC (used by Nvidia) or UMC (used past ATI).

Many of 3Dfx'due south former partners formed ties with Nvidia instead.

Image: Aslinger0084

The first of 3Dfx'due south Voodoo3 series arrived in 1999, backed by an all-encompassing television and print advertizing campaign, a new logo – now with a small "d" – and bright box art. The company'south Voodoo3 and subsequent releases were not made available to hardware partners, finer turning third-party manufacturing partners into rivals that had no choice simply to source chipsets from competitors such equally Nvidia.

Various models featuring 3Dfx's Voodoo3 striking the market place, catering to multiple price points. Nvidia returned burn that summer with the GeForce 256, which it billed as the world'due south commencement GPU (graphics processing unit).

The revolution that 3Dfx had ushered in three years earlier was now passing it by.

3Dfx's concluding hurrah came in the form of the VSA-100 graphics processor that was to serve equally the backbone of the visitor's next generation of cards. Simply two, the Voodoo four 4500 and Voodoo 5 5500, would always make it to market.

Simply where 3dfx was once a catchword for raw operation, its strengths around this time laid in its full screen antialiasing image quality. The Voodoo v introduced T-buffer applied science every bit an alternative to GeForce 256's T&50 capabilities (transformation and lighting), past basically taking a few rendered frames and aggregating them into one image. This produced a slightly blurred motion-picture show that, when run in frame sequence, smoothed out the movement of the animation.

3Dfx'southward technology became the forerunner of many image quality enhancements seen today, like soft shadows and reflections, move blur, equally well as depth of field blurring. That nonetheless was not enough to go on them out of fiscal trouble.

Image: TechPowerUp

The Voodoo5 5000, which was to resemble the 5500 merely with one-half the RAM, never launched. Neither did the Voodoo five 6000, a hulking card packing four VSA-100 processors and 128MB of total memory. 3Dfx reportedly made around i,000 prototype cards for testing purposes, but again, none were e'er sold to the public. Some of these fabulous pre-product cards did survive although very few working examples are known to exist today. They're considered amongst the holy grail of gaming hardware. If yous tin can find someone willing to part with theirs, exist expected to pay several thousand dollars.

3Dfx pulled the trigger on a $186 million acquisition of graphics IP provider GigaPixel in March 2000 in an endeavor to assistance get products to market faster but information technology proved to exist also little, besides late.

Before long after the beginning Voodoo4 products hit the marketplace after that year, 3Dfx's creditors initiated defalcation proceedings. With few options, 3Dfx waved the white flag in Dec 2000 and sold most of its assets to Nvidia. Nearly 13 years later, 3Dfx's founders reunited for an oral history on the company hosted by the Computer History museum. It'southward an absolutely lengthy piece although if you lot've come this far, what'southward some other two and a half hours?

And if yous're in the mood for a bit of retro gaming, you'll be happy to larn that 2d-hand Voodoo-based video cards are readily available through outlets like eBay. They're a scrap more expensive than you lot probable would have guessed (nostalgia will toll you), merely they're up for grabs if you're in the market.

On a personal note...

The December 1995 consequence of GamePro magazine featured a slice on DigiPen, a school in Vancouver that teaches video game programming. News of this "Applied Computer Graphics" school couldn't take come at a better fourth dimension as my computer teacher had simply issued an assignment regarding our dream chore and how it might relate to engineering. I knew correct then and there what I was destined to do.

I'd been into video games for as long as I can call up. For a brief menstruation in the mid-80s, my aunt owned and operated a video rental store. It was the sort of shop you'd find in whatsoever small boondocks before Blockbuster monopolized the industry, with a respectable selection of movies and – most importantly for the states kids – Nintendo games. This only further solidified my involvement in gaming.

I was fully enveloped by the late 90s, having laid claim to well-nigh every major console on the market place. Nary a week would go past that I didn't receive at least a few problems of the latest gaming mag in the mail. Heck, I even circled release dates on my calendar and counted down the days until launch in earnest.

And so there I was, an impressionable thirteen-yr-old in computer class with his unabridged life already charted out. I'd finish grade school, get accustomed into DigiPen, graduate with some sort of degree and start living the dream of making video games.

In hindsight, that's probably how information technology would have played out had my other interest – the personal computer – non intervened.

I got my commencement calculator in 1998 and information technology literally changed the entire trajectory of my life. I was yet into gaming, mind you, but the focus immediately shifted from consoles to the PC and it didn't take long to realize that my AMD K6-2 CPU with 3DNow! instruction set needed some help in the graphics section.

Enter 3Dfx Interactive.