3dfx Interactive

» see 3dfx.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

i never owned a voodoo card. by the time my family had a pc that could run a game like quake or unreal, the geforce era was already in. but voodoo was the hardware brand every donanimhaber thread referenced for half a decade, and 3dfx was the company name you saw at the start of game intros, the way nvidia is now.

3dfx interactive was founded on august 24 1994 by a group of former silicon graphics engineers. the voodoo graphics chipset went to manufacturing in november 1995. the first retail card, orchid's righteous 3d, launched on october 7 1996. it cost around three hundred dollars and required a separate 2d card alongside it (the voodoo had no 2d output of its own), which was strange even at the time.

by late 1997 voodoo had become the most widely adopted 3d accelerator among consumers and game developers. the glide api, the company's proprietary graphics layer, was the de facto standard. voodoo 2 in march 1998 added dual texture units and scan-line interleave for paired-card setups, and the brand reached the kind of market dominance nvidia would later inherit.

three things broke the company. microsoft's direct3d eroded glide as a moat once game developers saw the standardized api as good enough. then in december 1998, 3dfx acquired stb systems for $141 million and pivoted to making its own cards rather than licensing chipsets to oem partners. this alienated the oem partners and surfaced manufacturing problems the company had no expertise in. when the voodoo 3 and voodoo 4/5 lines arrived late and behind nvidia's geforce architecture on every benchmark that mattered, the rest was momentum. nvidia bought the assets on december 15 2000, mostly for the patents and about a hundred engineers. 3dfx filed for bankruptcy on october 15 2002.

~ the case file ~

~ how it landed ~

voodoo arrived at a moment when pc 3d was barely a category. id software had released quake in june 1996, but most players were still running it through a software renderer on a pentium 90 and getting a slideshow. orchid's righteous 3d hit the same market and turned the slideshow into actual framerate. the next two years were a hardware-software flywheel where every new game targeted glide first, and every new glide game made the next voodoo card worth buying.

~ the slide ~

glide was the trap. it gave 3dfx a real performance lead on launch titles but made the company the only target. microsoft launched direct3d in 1996 with a slow start, and by direct3d 7 in 1999 the api was fast enough that game developers no longer needed glide for performance. once nvidia released the geforce 256 in october 1999 with hardware transform-and-lighting, the geometry pipeline was on the gpu and 3dfx had no equivalent answer. rampage, the next-generation architecture, was perpetually unfinished.

~ what got buried with it ~

the voodoo brand has a strange afterlife. nvidia got the engineers and the patents in the 2000 asset sale. the geforce fx and later cards quietly carried 3dfx ideas forward. the glide api itself was reverse-engineered into open source as dgvoodoo, and that is what people use now to run quake or unreal in their original twenty-five-year-old codepaths without a working voodoo card. you can still buy a working voodoo 2 on ebay for thirty to fifty dollars. they are quiet and they boot.

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