Founded in San Jose, California in 1994 by three former Silicon Graphics employees, 3Dfx started out developing arcade machine equipment . The first generation Voodoo chipset has been used in hit machines such as San Francisco Rush, ICE Home Run Derby and Wayne Gretzky's 3D Hockey. But by the second half of 1996, memory prices had dropped significantly, forcing 3Dfx to turn its attention to the consumer PC market.
The 3Dfx Voodoo graphics hardware consisted of an add-on card that only performed 3D calculations. The card needed a VGA cable to transfer data from a separate 2D card to the Voodoo, which was then connected to the display. These cards were sold by many companies. Orchid Technologies was the first to market the Orchid Righteous 3D for $ 299 and was notable for its mechanical relays that clicked when the chipset was running. This map was followed by Diamond Multimedia Monster 3D, Canopus Pure3D, Colormaster Voodoomania, Quantum3D Obsidian, Miro Hiscore, Skywell Magic3D and other products.
Voodoo Graphics revolutionized personal computer graphics by making many products obsolete in almost an instant, including a huge range of 2D-only cards. The 3D hardware market in 1996 was favored by S3, which had approximately 50% of the market. However, the situation was soon to change. At the peak of Voodoo's popularity, it is estimated that 80-85% of the 3D accelerator market was owned by 3Dfx.
Over time, 3Dfx's main competitors were companies that were already putting 2D graphics equipment on the market and intending to create combined maps capable of displaying 2D and 3D. While these products fell short of Voodoo's image quality and performance, their cheapness and ease of use attracted many OEMs. The demand has been created, and the buyers are already interested.
At the same time, 3Dfx was in a unique position - it did not make its own graphics cards, but sold chipsets to third-party OEMs who produced cards under their own brand. The company thought this was a problem and will try to fix it in the future, but we will explain more about this below.
A year later, 3Dfx prepared its response to the release of combo cards with the creation of Voodoo Rush, which combined a Voodoo accelerator with a 2D graphics chip on one board. The Rush had the same parameters as the Voodoo, but had to share the bus with a 2D chip, and performance suffered. 3Dfx tried to solve this problem in newer versions of the card by adding more memory and increasing clock speeds, but the attempt was unsuccessful. Less than a year later, the Voodoo Rush line was completed.
The peak of 3Dfx's relatively short life was in 1998, just when my personal story intersected with it. Then the very successful Voodoo2 was released. It was manufactured using a 350-nanometer process technology, received a faster core and memory clock speed (90 MHz, the first generation Voodoo had 50 MHz). No other card could compete with it, not to mention those cases when the proprietary Glide API was used in games (at that time Direct3D and OpenGL were not yet considered as a standard).
3Dfx also added a second texture unit to Voodoo2, which allowed rendering two textures in one pass without sacrificing performance. The chip has once again become a pure 3D accelerator, and the efforts put into the product have found a response in the hearts of gamers.
Many consider the Voodoo and Voodoo2 chipsets to be the origin of 3D computer gaming. Some are looking at the golden age of PC gaming, with projects like Quake, Quake 2, Need for Speed II: SE, Virtua Fighter 2, Resident Evil, Tomb Raider, Diablo II, Unreal, and Rainbow Six. All of them effectively used the capabilities of the Glide API.
As Seamus Young eloquently said“This was after the Stone Age of DOS, but before the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse came along: bugs, DRM, fixed graphics modes, and the 'consolidation' of games that caused real chaos. For a better dive into this topic, read our article on the best 3Dfx Glide games .
The Voodoo2 was also notable for the addition of SLI (Scan-Line Interleave), a process in which two Voodoo 2 cards could be connected to each other to work simultaneously and, in theory, double the graphics processing performance. SLI allowed for higher resolutions, up to 1024 x 768, but compatibility issues and the high price tag associated with having to buy two powerful cards left this feature for fans and hardcore gamers alike.
Many years later, SLI got a second chance thanks to Nvidia. Now it is known as the Scalable Link Interface, but the idea behind the modern implementation has remained the same, despite the fact that its technologies are very different from those implemented by 3Dfx.
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3Dfx reverted to Voodoo Banshee's 2D / 3D combined card idea and even tried to offer its architecture for the Sega Dreamcast console, but as a result, it was abandoned in favor of the NEC chipset. Since then, the company's business has gone downhill: 3Dfx decided to acquire graphics card maker STB Systems for $ 141 million in an effort to make its own graphics cards rather than serve as an OEM.
In raw 3D performance, the Voodoo 2 was second to none, but the competition was growing rapidly. The pressure from ATI and Nvidia continued to increase, and 3Dfx decided to increase its profits by selling the boards on its own, rather than handing over this work to a long list of partners. In this sense, the acquisition of STB made sense, but this event turned out to be a huge miscalculation, because the factory used by the company could not compete in quality and manufacturing costs with TSMC (which produced boards for Nvidia) and UMC (which worked with ATI).
Many of 3Dfx's former partners have established ties with Nvidia.
The first 3Dfx Voodoo3 series cards appeared in 1999 with the support of a massive television and print advertising campaign, a new logo (now with a lowercase “d”) and striking box designs. Voodoo3 and the following products of the company were no longer available to manufacturing partners, which effectively turned them into competitors with no other choice but to buy chipsets from other companies, for example, from Nvidia.
Various models with 3Dfx Voodoo3 chipset appeared on the market, designed for several price niches. In the summer of that year, Nvidia fought back with the release of the GeForce 256, marketed as the world's first GPU (graphics processing unit).
The revolution that 3Dfx had started three years before was now leaving it behind.
The latest attempt at 3Dfx was the VSA-100 GPU, which was supposed to form the foundation of the company's next generation of cards. Only two of them were brought to the market, Voodoo 4 4500 and Voodoo 5 5500.
Once the name 3dfx was synonymous with raw performance, but now the main strength of the company is image quality with full-screen anti-aliasing. Voodoo 5 introduced the T-buffer technology as an alternative to the GeForce 256's T&L (transformation and lighting) capabilities: in fact, it took several rendered frames and combined them into one image. This created a slightly blurry picture, which, when playing a sequence of frames, smoothed out the movement of the animation.
3Dfx technology is the forerunner of many modern image enhancements such as anti-aliased shadows and reflections, motion blur, and depth of field blur. However, this was not enough to ensure financial stability.
The Voodoo5 5000, which was supposed to be a version of the 5500 with half the amount of RAM, was never released. The same thing happened with the Voodoo 5 6000, a powerful card with four VSA-100 processors and 128MB of memory. 3Dfx produced about a thousand prototypes for testing, but not a single card was sold again. Some of these legendary pre-production maps survived, but only a few working examples are known today . They are considered one of the holy grails of gaming equipment. If you find someone willing to part with such a card, then be prepared to pay several thousand dollars.
In March 2000, 3Dfx decided to buy for $ 186 millionowner of graphics technology GigaPixel, hoping to speed up the release of their products, but it turned out it was too late.
Soon after the first Voodoo4 models were launched on the market in the same year, 3Dfx lenders filed for bankruptcy. With little choice, in December 2000, 3Dfx dropped the white flag and sold most of its assets to Nvidia . Almost 13 years later, the founders of 3Dfx recorded an interview about the company's history for the Computer History Museum.
If you're into retro gaming, then used Voodoo-based cards can still be purchased online such as eBay. They are a little more expensive than one might think (nostalgia costs money), but available to anyone.
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