Back in time the last 3dfx card I had was a voodoo 2 12mb, after that Nvidia only up to Geforce 4 (4200), then Radeon 9800 xt.

I remember that back in time (as it is today) Nvidia were able to introduce new features (mainly TnL), 3dfx kept being faster on id software games. Honestly I can't remember which one of those were better as quality graphically speaking, nvidia began to support the 32 bits earlier?

Anyway back in time I was a nvidia supporter, I thought nvidia was actually better feature oriented and yeah...

When Nvidia bought 3dfx we celebrated with this:

another fanboy's meme:

Thinking nowadays, probably if 3dfx would have kept existing we would have 3 contenders now, instead of Nvidia and Amd (former ATI), who knows...

Same as obsoleting hardware today but 10x faster. Not many people had been using 3dfx for more than a few years anyway.

I was in the industry at the time and was certainly shocked by the speed of the collapse, but not surprised. I'd had a Voodoo 1 and 2, but when it came time to pick my next graphics card at home the TNT2 appeared streets ahead of the Voodoo 3, if not in benchmarks (barely) then at least in terms of features (32bit support, larger textures etc) and first class support for OpenGL and DirectX - 3dfx appeared to treat these API's as second class citizens to Glide. Needless to say I went for the TNT2 and later GF2. 3dfx clearly made dubious business decisions, and were again late to market with another by then inferior product (V4/5) which lead to their demise. If nothing else it served as a warning to us that we couldn't afford to be late with any of our products.

But then it also felt like the end of an era was happening. Many of the big names of preceeding years were effectively out by the end of 2000, including S3 and 3dfx. Whilst we were in the game with Kyro (using PowerVR tech) we were very much targeting the low to mid range where the volume was, and wouldn't be challenging the high-end dominated by Nvidia and ATI... probably, not that we ever got to find out. We lasted almost another 18 months after 3dfx's demise but ultimately we were out too, and so was PowerVR (at least from the discreet card business). That pretty much left just the 3 main players we still have today.

Shagittarius wrote on 2024-05-11, 15:12:

My complete 3D upgrade path as far as i can remember was:

Diamond Monster 2 > Voodoo 3 2000 > Geforce 2 Ultra > Geforce 3 Ultra > Radeon 9800 Pro > Radeon X800XTPE > Geforce 8800 GTX > Geforce 280 > Geforce 580 > Geforce 690 > Geforce 1080 > Geforce 2090 > Geforce 3090 > Geforce 4090

I think that's my complete history.

glad you fit the 8800 GTX in ur purchase timeline. one of my fave cards.

hornet1990 wrote on 2024-05-11, 21:20:

I was in the industry at the time and was certainly shocked by the speed of the collapse, but not surprised. I'd had a Voodoo 1 and 2, but when it came time to pick my next graphics card at home the TNT2 appeared streets ahead of the Voodoo 3, if not in benchmarks (barely) then at least in terms of features (32bit support, larger textures etc) and first class support for OpenGL and DirectX - 3dfx appeared to treat these API's as second class citizens to Glide. Needless to say I went for the TNT2 and later GF2. 3dfx clearly made dubious business decisions, and were again late to market with another by then inferior product (V4/5) which lead to their demise. If nothing else it served as a warning to us that we couldn't afford to be late with any of our products.

But then it also felt like the end of an era was happening. Many of the big names of preceeding years were effectively out by the end of 2000, including S3 and 3dfx. Whilst we were in the game with Kyro (using PowerVR tech) we were very much targeting the low to mid range where the volume was, and wouldn't be challenging the high-end dominated by Nvidia and ATI... probably, not that we ever got to find out. We lasted almost another 18 months after 3dfx's demise but ultimately we were out too, and so was PowerVR (at least from the discreet card business). That pretty much left just the 3 main players we still have today.

i take it you worked for NEC during this time?

hornet was with STMicro. NEC had pulled out earlier (an earlier powervr2 card could've been possible ~Q4 98 if they hadn't)

I was initially blown away by the Voodoo2, seeing Quake2, Incoming and Need for Speed 2 rendered so fast and with such colour depth. I bought one as soon as I had saved up enough. However, it's image quality shortcomings soon became apparent, the passthrough cable blurred text when working in Windows and the dithering algorithm for it's 16bit colour output left a lot to be desired. 3Dfx seemed really hesitant to move to 32 bit colour for some reason, they didn't think it important when they released the Voodoo3. The TNT2 came out a few months later and had 32bit rendering at about the same speed as the Voodoo2. I sold the Voodoo2, bought the TNT2 and never looked back. I remember Toms Hardware's review of the GeForce 256, it was huge at the time and he predicted the demise of 3Dfx in that review. There was a massive backlash by the 3Dfx fanclub, but he was right, a year or two later, 3Dfx went out of business.

Even now if I still had a Voodoo2, I wouldn't put it in any of my retro machines, that dithering is something that can't be unseen, even the i740 had a much better dithering algorithm, but it wasn't as fast as the Voodoo2. Yup, I didn't really care about 3Dfx's demise.

winuser3162 wrote on 2024-05-10, 19:56:

what was it like owning a voodoo around the turn of the millennium and watching 3dfx get pushed to the wayside?

For me it was like not even realizing what was going on. I wasn't following the hardware scene, wasn't connected to tech communities, and so to me it was as simple as that: When I built a PC in 2000, I went for a Voodoo card as was recommended. When I built a PC in 2004, I went for an nVidia card as was recommended.

I didn't realize that I just lived through a period where some tech company "died" and the torch passed on to a different company. And if I had realized, so what? It's not like such things are not expected to happen every once in a while.

I bought my Voodoo 3 in 1999 and I loved it. Some of my most hardcore gaming was done on that card. I used it until I eventually got a GeForce2MX400, and to be honest Voodoo 4 and Voodoo 5 were never products I particularly cared for. I did not 'watch the death of 3dfx' so to speak, basically 3dfx died without me even noticing. I was browsing the web one day and I saw news about 3dfx being bought by nVidia. I felt sad for a while, then a year later I bought a GeForce 2 MX400, and honestly by that time I no longer cared.

winuser3162 wrote on 2024-05-10, 19:56:

ive heard people say many times that after the voodoo 3, no one really cared about 3dfx anymore as other companies at the time had been gaining an edge on 3dfx. what was it like owning a voodoo around the turn of the millennium and watching 3dfx get pushed to the wayside?

I was there. The thing you need to realize is just how rapidly the scene evolved at that time. I remember the voodoo banshee being hot shit for a while, then the TNT happened. The TNT basically ended 3dfx for all but the most hardcore who could afford v2sli. And that was still 1998! When TNT2 landed the next year it was already over for 3dfx. From the first meaningful 3d accelerated game (quake) in 1996 with the voodoo1 to virtual irrelevance by 1999 shows how quickly things changed. You don't have to go all the way to the year 2000. I actually recall seeing ads for the voodoo4/5 in the early 2000s and remember thinking to myself "oh yeah remember that company called 3dfx?". Like they were basically a forgotten brand even before nvidia bought them. It was all geforce by then. You also need to understand is we were NOT nostalgic about stuff back then! People couldn't chuck out there DOS PCs fast enough. ISA? Eww. I wanna TNT and a SBLive! thank-you very much. Gravis ultrasound? In the bin. 3dfx? Ma I wanna geforce. And I wanna play half life. Literally no one was thinking about the 3dfx that could have been. There was just too much other stuff to think about and play. And then socketA came out with athlon/duron/sempron cpus ... the number of budget builds around that time combining semprons with gf2mx and sblive! Value was astronomical. Counter strike, baldurs gate, bf1942, cod, moh, efcw.

Short answer? We had moved on.

kolderman wrote on 2024-05-13, 16:06:

winuser3162 wrote on 2024-05-10, 19:56:

ive heard people say many times that after the voodoo 3, no one really cared about 3dfx anymore as other companies at the time had been gaining an edge on 3dfx. what was it like owning a voodoo around the turn of the millennium and watching 3dfx get pushed to the wayside?

I was there. The thing you need to realize is just how rapidly the scene evolved at that time. I remember the voodoo banshee being hot shit for a while, then the TNT happened. The TNT basically ended 3dfx for all but the most hardcore who could afford v2sli. And that was still 1998! When TNT2 landed the next year it was already over for 3dfx. From the first meaningful 3d accelerated game (quake) in 1996 with the voodoo1 to virtual irrelevance by 1999 shows how quickly things changed. You don't have to go all the way to the year 2000. I actually recall seeing ads for the voodoo4/5 in the early 2000s and remember thinking to myself "oh yeah remember that company called 3dfx?". Like they were basically a forgotten brand even before nvidia bought them. It was all geforce by then. You also need to understand is we were NOT nostalgic about stuff back then! People couldn't chuck out there DOS PCs fast enough. ISA? Eww. I wanna TNT and a SBLive! thank-you very much. Gravis ultrasound? In the bin. 3dfx? Ma I wanna geforce. And I wanna play half life. Literally no one was thinking about the 3dfx that could have been. There was just too much other stuff to think about and play. And then socketA came out with athlon/duron/sempron cpus ... the number of budget builds around that time combining semprons with gf2mx and sblive! Value was astronomical. Counter strike, baldurs gate, bf1942, cod, moh, efcw.

Short answer? We had moved on.

god forbit 27 years later everyone including me is rushing right back to those dumpsters to grab any piece of retro computing they can!

In my main PCs I went from socket 7 with on-board Mach64 -> on-board Intel -> MX440 -> FX5200 -> Ti4800SE -> 6600 -> 7800GS+ -> 7950GX2 -> GTX 560Ti which I still use.

Actually were two PCs in that bunch but that hardly matters: point is I never had 3dfx in my main PC despite faffing with computers and upgrades/builds since 1994.

With the on-board Intel I came across DOS sound problems so started retaining an older PC for 95/98 with older hardware... and that's when I bought my first Voodoo (a Banshee) probably because of remembering something about 3dfx cards and quake which was one of my all-time favourites. Then when I found Diablo 2 looked better on 3dfx that was a major reason to retain a 3dfx system. With Vortex2 of course. And the PCI-centric nature of that meant that another old PC was needed for slower games and ISA sound cards, cue memories of Gravis hype.

I didn't notice 3dfx going bust at the time.

With the TNT/TNT2, there was a real challenge to 3dfx by Nvidia, and there were glowing reviews. At that point, you do realize there were still many 3dfx titles being played, and then the general inertia favored 3dfx at that time. The Voodoo Banshee / 3 was an okay increment to the product line people desired. So the glowing reviews for the TNT line were not enough for me, even when they were decent speedy performers, the general graphics compatibility and concerns about quality did persist. This was not enough to motivate me then. The Geforce changed things.

So the problem here is 3dfx perhaps did not heed the warning of the Riva TNT that they had some true competition and thought they had time to lock down the market. Nvidia made the right moves and by 2000, 3dfx was a goner.

My recollection is that the Voodoo 3 was well regarded as a solid choice for price, performance, features and compatibility.
By the time the Voodoo4/5 were on the scene all that had changed.

Nvidia's relentless product cycle and 3dfx's own mistakes meant that 3dfx were clearly behind on price, features, and performance.
Worst, 3dfx marketing were staring to claim that image quality was more important then speed, having claimed the exact opposite when pushing the V3. No one cared about thier frame buffer effects. It was all a bit cringe.

The new cards were huge and there was talk of the voodoo volts, the external power supply, which seemed preposterous. It wasn't a huge surprise when it all collapsed, although it was sad. I hoped Nvidia would take on Glide, but no one cared about that anymore.

I actually think 3dfx were doomed from the outset.

Their architecture gave them a massive boost early on and an easy way to scale performance.... to a point.

But to make any radical changes and add features to more fully support what were becoming the defacto 3d gaming APIs (OpenGL and direct3d) seemed to cause them far more design challenges than their competitors.

Everyone else could innovate and try different approaches, some worked (Nvidia), some didn't (tile based rendering)... but 3dfx had an architecture that just didn't lend itself to any radical change. I suspect a lot of this hinges on the fact that it was started by ex SGI employees and the design of the 3DFX is very similar to that you find on contemporary SGI graphics hardware, with discrete raster processors, transform engines and texture units.

SGI segmented their products in the same way as 3dfx did; bolting on an extra raster chip to improve fill rate, another geometry transform chip to bolster 3d calculations, and texture mapping units.

It was all a very scalable, and modular way to do things... But it also meant that if you had to fundamentally change what the hardware could do... Well you had to throw it all away. If you look at, say the difference in features between an Impact board set with texture mapping for an Indigo 2 workstation versus the top end texture mapping board in an Octane, well yeah the Octane has better fill and transform rates... but it didn't actually do anything different... It just did the same thing but faster.

Ultimately, I think they doomed themselves by not being able to adapt to a rapidly changing market. Just being 'fast' with a limited feature set (as per their original aim with glide) was no longer an option.

My recollection is that the Voodoo 3 was well regarded as a solid choice for price, performance, features and compatibility.

Feature wise, it was the weakest card of 1999, surpassed even by S3, with no real future on the horizon. But Glide backlog compatibility plus Unreal Engine games (Unreal Tournament) were still powerful enough to carry 3dfx that year.

The Serpent Rider wrote on 2024-05-13, 22:13:

My recollection is that the Voodoo 3 was well regarded as a solid choice for price, performance, features and compatibility.

Feature wise, it was the weakest card of 1999, surpassed even by S3, with no real future on the horizon. But Glide backlog compatibility plus Unreal Engine games (Unreal Tournament) were still powerful enough to carry 3dfx that year.

I could play Freespace 2 in 1024x768 on it and that was MORE than enough to sell me on a Voodoo 3 in 1999.

The first time I loaded up that game after finishing it twice at 640x480 - my mind was blown.

The Serpent Rider wrote on 2024-05-13, 22:13:

Feature wise, it was the weakest card of 1999, surpassed even by S3, with no real future on the horizon. But Glide backlog compatibility plus Unreal Engine games (Unreal Tournament) were still powerful enough to carry 3dfx that year.

Diablo 2 also ran much better in Glide mode on contemporary systems. And especially on the Voodoo 3, since there was no texture thrashing like on Voodoo 2 cards.

At launch, Diablo 2 was a stutter fest in Direct3D and quite slow in DirectDraw. Later patches improved this somewhat, but it was never as smooth as Glide. For that reason, many people used Glide wrappers to play it well into the 2010s.

I only used the Voodoo card for a Short time. Once I tried the TNT card which had better graphics and color I never went back.
I mostly used the Matrox G450 with Dual heads for dual 20-inch Monitor support.
Running dual high resolution 20-inch Sony Monitors was more important to me than cheap Voodoo graphics.
Obviously it was the limitations of the 3DFX chip that ended the Voodoo card.
Over heating and poor design of PCB and Poor Manufacturing.

Its just a Nostalgia item today.

If someone wants to Save these Voodoo cards from the Recycle bin you need to design a NEW PCB board kit
To rebuild these Voodoo cards.

Joseph_Joestar wrote on 2024-05-14, 08:32:

Diablo 2 also ran much better in Glide mode on contemporary systems. And especially on the Voodoo 3, since there was no texture thrashing like on Voodoo 2 cards.

By the time Diablo 2 was released, 3dfx was hardly interesting for most buyers.