3dfx Interactive was an American technology company headquartered in

San Jose, California San Jose, officially San José (; ; ), is a major city in the U.S. state of California that is the cultural, financial, and political center of Silicon Valley and largest city in Northern California by both population and area. With a 2020 popu ...

, founded in 1994, that specialized in the manufacturing of 3D

graphics processing unit A graphics processing unit (GPU) is a specialized electronic circuit designed to manipulate and alter memory to accelerate the creation of images in a frame buffer intended for output to a display device. GPUs are used in embedded systems, m ...

s, and later,

video cards A graphics card (also called a video card, display card, graphics adapter, VGA card/VGA, video adapter, display adapter, or mistakenly GPU) is an expansion card which generates a feed of output images to a display device, such as a computer mo ...

. It was a pioneer in the field from the late 1990s until 2000. The company's original product was the Voodoo Graphics, an

add-in card In computing, an expansion card (also called an expansion board, adapter card, peripheral card or accessory card) is a printed circuit board that can be inserted into an electrical connector, or expansion slot (also referred to as a bus s ...

that implemented hardware acceleration of 3D graphics. The hardware accelerated only 3D rendering, relying on the PC's current video card for 2D support. Despite this limitation, the Voodoo Graphics product and its follow-up, Voodoo2, were popular. It became standard for 3D games to offer support for the company's

Glide API Glide is a 3D graphics API developed by 3dfx Interactive for their ''Voodoo Graphics'' 3D accelerator cards. Although it originally started as a proprietary API, it was later open sourced by 3dfx. It was dedicated to rendering performance, supp ...

. The success of the company's products led to renewed interest in 3D gaming, and by the second half of the 1990s, products combining a 2D output with reasonable 3D performance were appearing. This was accelerated by the introduction of Microsoft's Direct3D, which provided a single high-performance API that could be implemented on these cards, seriously eroding the value of Glide. While 3dfx continued to offer high-performance options, the value proposition was no longer compelling. 3dfx rapidly declined in the late 1990s and most of the company's assets were acquired by

Nvidia Corporation Nvidia CorporationOfficially written as NVIDIA and stylized in its logo as VIDIA with the lowercase "n" the same height as the uppercase "VIDIA"; formerly stylized as VIDIA with a large italicized lowercase "n" on products from the mid 1990s to ...

on December 15, 2000, mostly for

intellectual property rights Intellectual property (IP) is a category of property that includes intangible creations of the human intellect. There are many types of intellectual property, and some countries recognize more than others. The best-known types are patents, cop ...

. The acquisition was accounted for as a purchase by Nvidia and was completed by the first quarter of their fiscal year of 2002. 3dfx ceased supporting their products on February 15, 2001, and filed for bankruptcy on October 15, 2002.

Company history

Early products

First chips

The company was founded on August 24, 1994, as 3D/fx, Inc. Ross Smith, Gary Tarolli and Scott Sellers, all former employees of

Silicon Graphics Silicon Graphics, Inc. (stylized as SiliconGraphics before 1999, later rebranded SGI, historically known as Silicon Graphics Computer Systems or SGCS) was an American high-performance computing manufacturer, producing computer hardware and sof ...

Inc. They were soon joined by Gordie Campbell of TechFarm. 3dfx released its first product, the Voodoo Graphics 3D chip, to manufacturing on November 6, 1995. The chip is a

VGA Video Graphics Array (VGA) is a video display controller and accompanying de facto graphics standard, first introduced with the IBM PS/2 line of computers in 1987, which became ubiquitous in the PC industry within three years. The term can no ...

3D accelerator that features rendering methods such as point-sampled

texture mapping Texture mapping is a method for mapping a texture on a computer-generated graphic. Texture here can be high frequency detail, surface texture, or color. History The original technique was pioneered by Edwin Catmull in 1974. Texture mappi ...

, Z- and

double buffering In computer science, multiple buffering is the use of more than one buffer to hold a block of data, so that a "reader" will see a complete (though perhaps old) version of the data, rather than a partially updated version of the data being creat ...

Gouraud shading Gouraud shading, named after Henri Gouraud, is an interpolation method used in computer graphics to produce continuous shading of surfaces represented by polygon meshes. In practice, Gouraud shading is most often used to achieve continuous li ...

, subpixel correction,

alpha compositing In computer graphics, alpha compositing or alpha blending is the process of combining one image with a background to create the appearance of partial or full transparency. It is often useful to render picture elements (pixels) in separate pas ...

, and

anti-aliasing Anti-aliasing may refer to any of a number of techniques to combat the problems of aliasing in a sampled signal such as a digital image or digital audio recording. Specific topics in anti-aliasing include: * Anti-aliasing filter, a filter used be ...

. Alongside the chip came 3dfx's

, designed to take full advantage of the Voodoo Graphics' features. The company stated that Glide's creation was because it found that no existing APIs at the time could fully utilize the chip's capabilities. The

DirectX Microsoft DirectX is a collection of application programming interfaces (APIs) for handling tasks related to multimedia, especially game programming and video, on Microsoft platforms. Originally, the names of these APIs all began with "Direct", ...

3.0 was deemed to be lacking, and the

OpenGL OpenGL (Open Graphics Library) is a cross-language, cross-platform application programming interface (API) for rendering 2D and 3D vector graphics. The API is typically used to interact with a graphics processing unit (GPU), to achieve hardwa ...

was regarded as suitable only for

CAD/CAM CAD/CAM refers to the integration of Computer-aided design (CAD) and Computer-aided manufacturing (CAM). Both of these require powerful computers. ''CAD'' software helps designers and draftsmen; ''CAM'' "reduces manpower costs" in the manufactur ...

workstations. The first graphics card to use the chip was

Orchid Technology Orchid Technology was a privately held company founded by Le Nhon Bui in 1982. History 1982 to 1984 The company's original flagship product was its PCNet card, a 1 megabit-per-second LAN (networking) card for IBM PCs and clones. Notably, the acro ...

's Righteous 3D, released on October 7, 1996. The company manufactured only the chips and some

reference Reference is a relationship between objects in which one object designates, or acts as a means by which to connect to or link to, another object. The first object in this relation is said to ''refer to'' the second object. It is called a ''name'' ...

boards, and initially did not sell any product to consumers; rather, it acted as an

OEM An original equipment manufacturer (OEM) is generally perceived as a company that produces non-aftermarket parts and equipment that may be marketed by another manufacturer. It is a common industry term recognized and used by many professional or ...

supplier for graphics card companies, which designed, manufactured, marketed, and sold their own graphics cards including the Voodoo chipset. 3dfx gained initial fame in the arcade market. The first arcade machine that 3dfx Voodoo Graphics hardware was used in was a 1996 baseball game featuring a bat controller with motion sensing technology called ''ICE Home Run Derby''. Later that year it was featured in more popular titles, such as

Atari Atari () is a brand name that has been owned by several entities since its inception in 1972. It is currently owned by French publisher Atari SA through a subsidiary named Atari Interactive. The original Atari, Inc. (1972–1992), Atari, Inc., ...

's '' San Francisco Rush'' and ''

Wayne Gretzky's 3D Hockey ''Wayne Gretzky's 3D Hockey'' is a video game developed and published by Atari Games for the arcade in 1996. A port for the Nintendo 64 console was released almost simultaneously with the arcade version, on November 11, 1996, making it the first ...

''. 3dfx also developed

MiniGL MiniGL is an incomplete implementation of the OpenGL specification which implements enough of the API to allow 3D video games in the late 1990s to run with hardware acceleration on contemporary graphics cards, which otherwise provided their own ...

after

id Software id Software LLC () is an American video game developer based in Richardson, Texas. It was founded on February 1, 1991, by four members of the computer company Softdisk: game programmer, programmers John Carmack and John Romero, game designer T ...

John Carmack John D. Carmack II (born August 20, 1970) is an American computer programmer and video game developer. He co-founded the video game company id Software and was the lead programmer of its 1990s games ''Commander Keen'', ''Wolfenstein 3D'', ''Doo ...

released a 1997 version of '' Quake'' that used the OpenGL API. The MiniGL translated OpenGL commands into Glide, and gave 3dfx the advantage as the sole consumer chip company to deliver a functional graphics library driver until 1998.

Entry to the consumer market

Towards the end of 1996, the cost of

EDO DRAM Dynamic random-access memory (dynamic RAM or DRAM) is a type of random-access semiconductor memory that stores each bit of data in a memory cell, usually consisting of a tiny capacitor and a transistor, both typically based on metal-oxide ...

dropped significantly and 3dfx was able to enter the consumer PC hardware market with aggressive pricing compared to the few previous 3D graphics solutions for computers. Prior to affordable 3D hardware, games such as ''

Doom Doom is another name for damnation. Doom may also refer to: People * Doom (professional wrestling), the tag team of Ron Simmons and Butch Reed * Daniel Doom (born 1934), Belgian cyclist * Debbie Doom (born 1963), American softball pitcher * ...

'' and '' Quake'' had compelled video game players to move from their

80386 The Intel 386, originally released as 80386 and later renamed i386, is a 32-bit microprocessor introduced in 1985. The first versions had 275,000 transistors80486s, and then to the

Pentium Pentium is a brand used for a series of x86 architecture-compatible microprocessors produced by Intel. The original Pentium processor from which the brand took its name was first released on March 22, 1993. After that, the Pentium II and Pe ...

. By the end of 1997, the Voodoo Graphics was by far the most widely adopted 3D accelerator among both consumers and software developers. The Voodoo's primary competition was from PowerVR and Rendition. PowerVR produced a similar 3D-only add-on card with capable 3D support, although it was not comparable to Voodoo Graphics in either image quality or performance. 3dfx saw intense competition in the market from cards that offered the combination of 2D and 3D acceleration. While these cards, such as

Matrox Mystique The Mystique and Mystique 220 were 2D, 3D, and video accelerator cards for personal computers designed by Matrox, using the VGA connector. The original Mystique was introduced in 1996, with the slightly upgraded Mystique 220 having been released i ...

S3 ViRGE The S3 ViRGE (Video and Rendering Graphics Engine) graphics chipset was one of the first 2D/ 3D accelerators designed for the mass market. Introduced in 1995 by then graphics powerhouse S3, Inc., the ViRGE was S3's first foray into 3D-graphics. ...

and ATI 3D Rage, offered inferior 3D acceleration, their lower cost and simplicity often appealed to OEM system builders. Rendition's Vérité V1000 was an integrated (3D+VGA) single-chip solution, but it did not have comparable 3D performance, and its 2D capabilities were considered merely adequate relative to other 2D cards of the time.

Dreamcast

In 1997, 3dfx was working with entertainment company

Sega is a Japanese multinational corporation, multinational video game and entertainment company headquartered in Shinagawa, Tokyo. Its international branches, Sega of America and Sega Europe, are headquartered in Irvine, California and London, r ...

to develop a new

video game console A video game console is an electronic device that Input/output, outputs a video signal or image to display a video game that can be played with a game controller. These may be home video game console, home consoles, which are generally placed i ...

hardware platform. Sega solicited two competing designs: a unit code-named "Katana", developed in Japan using

NEC is a Japanese multinational information technology and electronics corporation, headquartered in Minato, Tokyo. The company was known as the Nippon Electric Company, Limited, before rebranding in 1983 as NEC. It provides IT and network soluti ...

and

Imagination Technologies Imagination Technologies Limited is a British semiconductor and software design company owned by Canyon Bridge Capital Partners, a private equity fund based in Beijing that is ultimately owned by the Chinese government. With its global headquar ...

(then

VideoLogic Imagination Technologies Limited is a British semiconductor and Computer software, software design company owned by Canyon Bridge Capital Partners, a private equity fund based in Beijing that is ultimately owned by the Chinese government. With ...

) technology, and "Blackbelt", a system designed in the United States using 3dfx technology. However, on July 22, 1997, 3dfx announced that Sega was terminating the development contract. Sega chose to use NEC's PowerVR chipset for its game console, though it still planned to purchase the rights to 3dfx's technology in order to prevent competitors from acquiring it. 3dfx said Sega has still not given a reason as to why it terminated the contract or why it chose NEC's accelerator chipset over 3dfx's. According to Dale Ford, senior analyst at Dataquest, a market research firm based in San Jose, California, a number of factors could have influenced Sega's decision to move to NEC, including NEC's proven track record of supplying chipsets for the Nintendo 64 and the demonstrated ability to be able to handle a major influx of capacity if the company decided to ramp up production on a moment's notice. "This is a highly competitive market with price wars happening all the time and it would appear that after evaluating a number of choices—and the ramifications each choice brings—Sega went with a decision that it thought was best for the company's longevity," said Mr. Ford. "Sega has to make a significant move to stay competitive and they need to make it soon. Now whether this move is to roll out another home console platform or move strictly to the PC gaming space is unknown." Sega quickly quashed 3dfx's "Blackbelt" and used the NEC-based "Katana" as the model for the product that would be marketed and sold as the

Dreamcast The is a home video game console released by Sega on November 27, 1998, in Japan; September 9, 1999, in North America; and October 14, 1999, in Europe. It was the first sixth-generation video game console, preceding Sony's PlayStation 2, N ...

. 3dfx sued Sega for breach of contract, accusing Sega of starting the deal in bad faith in order to take 3dfx technology. The case was settled out of court.

New chips, competition, and downfall

Development of Rampage

In early 1998, 3dfx embarked on a new development project. The Rampage development project was new technology for use in a new graphics card that would take approximately two years to develop, and would supposedly be several years ahead of the competition once it debuted. The company hired hardware and software teams in

Austin, Texas Austin is the capital city of the U.S. state of Texas, as well as the county seat, seat and largest city of Travis County, Texas, Travis County, with portions extending into Hays County, Texas, Hays and Williamson County, Texas, Williamson co ...

to develop 2D and 3D Windows

device driver In computing, a device driver is a computer program that operates or controls a particular type of device that is attached to a computer or automaton. A driver provides a software interface to hardware devices, enabling operating systems and ot ...

s for Rampage in the summer of 1998. The hardware team in Austin initially focused on Rampage, but then worked on

transform and lighting Transform, clipping, and lighting (T&L or TCL) is a term used in computer graphics. Overview Transformation is the task of producing a two-dimensional view of a three-dimensional scene. Clipping means only drawing the parts of the scene that w ...

(T&L) engines and on MPEG decoder technology.

Acquisition of STB

3dfx announced in January 1999 that their Banshee cards had sold about one million units. While Nvidia had yet to launch a product in the add-in board market that sold as well as 3dfx's Voodoo line, the company was gaining steady ground in the OEM market. The Nvidia RIVA TNT was a similar, highly integrated product that had two major advantages in greater 3D speed and 32-bit 3D color support. 3dfx, by contrast, had very limited OEM sales, as the Banshee was adopted only in small numbers by OEMs. 3dfx executed a major strategy change just prior to the launch of Voodoo3 by purchasing STB Systems for US $141 million on December 14, 1998. STB Systems was one of the larger graphics card manufacturers at the time; the intent was for 3dfx to start manufacturing, marketing, and selling its own graphics cards, rather than functioning only as an

supplier. Purchase of STB was intended to give 3dfx access to that company's considerable OEM resources and sales channels, but the intended benefits of the acquisition never materialized. The two corporations were vastly different entities, with different cultures and structures, and they never integrated smoothly. STB prior to the 3dfx acquisition also approached Nvidia as a potential partner to acquire the company. At the time, STB was Nvidia's largest customer and was only minimally engaged with 3dfx. 3dfx management mistakenly believed that acquiring STB would ensure OEM design wins with their products and that product limitations would be overcome with STB's knowledge in supporting the OEM sales/design win cycles. Nvidia decided not to acquire STB and to continue to support many brands of graphics board manufacturers. After STB was acquired by 3dfx, Nvidia focused on being a virtual graphics card manufacturer for the OEMs and strengthened its position in selling finished reference designs ready for market to the OEMs. STB's manufacturing facility in Juarez, Mexico was not able to compete from either a cost or quality point of view when compared to the burgeoning

original design manufacturer An original design manufacturer is a company that designs and manufactures a product that is eventually rebranded by another firm for sale. Such companies allow the firm that owns or licenses the brand to produce products while having to engage in ...

s (ODMs) and Contract electronic manufacturers (CEMs) that were delivering solutions in Asia for Nvidia. Prior to the STB merger finalizing, some of 3dfx's OEMs warned the company that any product from Juarez will not be deemed fit to ship with their systems, however 3dfx management believed these problems could be addressed over time. Those customers generally became Nvidia customers and no longer chose to ship 3dfx products. The acquisition of STB was one of the main contributors to 3dfx's downfall; the Voodoo 3 became the first 3dfx chip to be developed in-house rather than by third-party manufacturers, which were a significant source of revenue for the company. These third-party manufacturers turned into competitors and began sourcing graphics chips from Nvidia. This also further alienated 3dfx's remaining OEM customers, as they had a single source for 3dfx products and could not choose an OEM to provide cost flexibility. With the purchase of STB, 3dfx created two cards targeting the low-end market, the Velocity 100, which has 8 MB of

SDRAM Synchronous dynamic random-access memory (synchronous dynamic RAM or SDRAM) is any DRAM where the operation of its external pin interface is coordinated by an externally supplied clock signal. DRAM integrated circuits (ICs) produced from the ...

, and the Velocity 200, which has 16 MB of

SGRAM Synchronous dynamic random-access memory (synchronous dynamic RAM or SDRAM) is any DRAM where the operation of its external pin interface is coordinated by an externally supplied clock signal. DRAM integrated circuits (ICs) produced from the ea ...

. The cards both used a chipset based on the Voodoo3 2000, and it was claimed that they were "underclocked". However, it was revealed by testing that the Velocity 100 chipset has the same clock speed as a typical Voodoo3 2000—at 143 MHz—and that, while one of its two TMUs is disabled in OpenGL and Glide applications for memory management, it can be re-enabled to increase those applications' performance, and '' AnandTech'' found no side effects of enabling the component. As 3dfx focused more on the retail graphics card space, further inroads into the OEM space were limited. A significant requirement of the OEM business was the ability to consistently produce new products on the six-month product refresh cycle the computer manufacturers required; 3dfx did not have the methodology nor the mindset to focus on this business model. In the end, 3dfx opted to be a retail distribution company manufacturing their own branded products.

Delays

The company's final product was code-named Napalm. Originally, this was just a Voodoo3 modified to support newer technologies and higher clock speeds, with performance estimated to be around the level of the

RIVA TNT2 The RIVA TNT2 is a graphics processing unit manufactured by Nvidia starting in early 1999. The chip is codenamed "NV5" because it is the 5th graphics chip design by Nvidia, succeeding the RIVA TNT (NV4). RIVA is an acronym for ''Real-time Intera ...

. However, Napalm was delayed, and in the meantime Nvidia brought out their landmark

GeForce 256 The GeForce 256 is the original release in Nvidia's " GeForce" product-line. Announced on August 31, 1999 and released on October 11, 1999, the GeForce 256 improves on its predecessor ( RIVA TNT2) by increasing the number of fixed pixel pipeli ...

chip, which shifted even more of the computational work from the CPU to the graphics chip. Napalm would have been unable to compete with the GeForce, so it was redesigned to support multiple chip configurations, like the Voodoo2 had. The end-product was named VSA-100, with VSA standing for Voodoo Scalable Architecture. 3dfx was finally able to have a product that could defeat the GeForce. However, by the time the VSA-100 based cards made it to the market, the GeForce 2 and ATI Radeon cards had arrived and were offering higher performance for the same price. The only real advantage the Voodoo 5 5500 had over the GeForce 2 GTS or Radeon was its superior

spatial anti-aliasing In digital signal processing, spatial anti-aliasing is a technique for minimizing the distortion artifacts ( aliasing) when representing a high-resolution image at a lower resolution. Anti-aliasing is used in digital photography, computer graphi ...

implementation, and the fact that, relative to its peers, it didn't suffer such a large performance hit when anti-aliasing was enabled. 3dfx was fully aware of the Voodoo 5's speed deficiency, so they touted it as quality over speed, which was a reversal of the Voodoo 3 marketing which emphasized raw performance over features. 5500 sales were respectable but volumes were not at a level to keep 3dfx afloat.

GigaPixel and insolvency

On March 28, 2000, 3dfx bought GigaPixel for US$186 million, in order to help launch its Rampage product to market quicker. GigaPixel had previously almost won the contract to build

Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational technology corporation producing computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services headquartered at the Microsoft Redmond campus located in Redmond, Washing ...

Xbox Xbox is a video gaming brand created and owned by Microsoft. The brand consists of five video game consoles, as well as applications (games), streaming services, an online service by the name of Xbox network, and the development arm by the na ...

console, but lost out to Nvidia. However, in late 2000, not long after the launch of the Voodoo 4, several of 3dfx's creditors decided to initiate

bankruptcy Bankruptcy is a legal process through which people or other entities who cannot repay debts to creditors may seek relief from some or all of their debts. In most jurisdictions, bankruptcy is imposed by a court order, often initiated by the debtor ...

proceedings. 3dfx, as a whole, would have had virtually no chance of successfully contesting these proceedings, and instead opted to sell its assets to Nvidia, effectively ceasing to exist as a company. The resolution and legality of those arrangements (with respect to the purchase, 3dfx's creditors and its bankruptcy proceedings) were still being worked through the courts , nearly nine years after the sale. A majority of the engineering and design team working on Rampage/Sage who remained with the transition, were requested and remained in house to work on what became the

GeForce FX The GeForce FX or "GeForce 5" series (codenamed NV30) is a line of graphics processing units from the manufacturer Nvidia. Overview Nvidia's GeForce FX series is the fifth generation of the GeForce line. With GeForce 3, the company introduced p ...

series. Others accepted employment with ATI to bring their knowledge to the creation of the X series of video cards and the development of

Crossfire A crossfire (also known as interlocking fire) is a military term for the siting of weapons (often automatic weapons such as assault rifles or sub-machine guns) so that their arcs of fire overlap. This tactic came to prominence in World War I. S ...

, their own version of SLI. The prototype Spectre 1000 cards were delivered to software developers mere days before declaring insolvency. The software team developed both device drivers and a binary-compatible soft emulation of the Rampage function set. Thus, there were working Windows NT device drivers within a few days of the power on of the Rampage system on the 2nd week of December, 2000. At the time of Nvidia's acquisition, 3dfx had already been developing the successors to Spectre. "Fear", based on a next-generation Rampage called Fusion, and Sage2. "Mojo" would combine both into a single die, implement

tiled rendering Tiled rendering is the process of subdividing a computer graphics image by a regular grid in optical space and rendering each section of the grid, or ''tile'', separately. The advantage to this design is that the amount of memory and bandwidth is re ...

, and showcase some advanced technologies from the GigaPixel acquisition. The unreleased Spectre 1000 card, based on Rampage, would eventually be leaked and tested. Performance indicated that it would have struggled to compete with Nvidia's already-released GeForce 256, though the proposed Spectre 2000 and Spectre 3000 cards, which featured a combination of Rampage and Sage units, would have led the market until late 2002, with Nvidia's GeForce 4 series. After Nvidia acquired 3dfx's intellectual property, they announced that they would not provide technical support for 3dfx products. As of 2019, drivers and support are still offered by community websites. However, while functional, the drivers do not carry a manufacturer's backing and are considered beta software. For a limited time, Nvidia offered a program under which 3dfx owners could trade in their cards for Nvidia cards of similar performance. On December 15, 2000, 3dfx apologized to the customers with a final press release. In 2003, the

source code In computing, source code, or simply code, is any collection of code, with or without comments, written using a human-readable programming language, usually as plain text. The source code of a program is specially designed to facilitate the wo ...

for 3dfx drivers leaked, resulting in

fan-made Fan labor, also called fan works, are the creative activities engaged in by fans, primarily those of various media properties or musical groups. These activities can include creation of written works (fiction, fan fiction and review literature), ...

, updated drivers and further support. The 3dfx bankruptcy is in the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, appeal, Docket # 11–15189. Following is a clerk's order as filed in the docket: Although 1997 was marked by analysts as a turning point for 3dfx due to the marketing led by the new CEO Greg Ballard, there was criticism of Ballard's understanding of R&D in the graphics industry. Single-card 2D/3D solutions were taking over the market, and although Ballard saw the need and attempted to direct the company there with the Voodoo Banshee and the Voodoo3, both of these cost the company millions in sales and lost market share while diverting vital resources from the Rampage project. Then 3dfx released word in early 1999 that the still-competitive Voodoo2 would support only OpenGL and Glide under Microsoft's Windows 2000 operating system, and not Direct3D. Many games were transitioning to Direct3D at this point, and the announcement caused many PC gamers – the core demographic of 3dfx's market – to switch to Nvidia or ATI offerings for their new machines. Ballard resigned shortly after, in January 2000.

Product development history

Voodoo Graphics PCI

A typical Voodoo Graphics PCI expansion card consisted of a DAC, a

frame buffer A framebuffer (frame buffer, or sometimes framestore) is a portion of random-access memory (RAM) containing a bitmap that drives a video display. It is a memory buffer containing data representing all the pixels in a complete video frame. Mode ...

processor and a

texture mapping unit In computer graphics, a texture mapping unit (TMU) is a component in modern graphics processing units (GPUs). They are able to rotate, resize, and distort a bitmap image to be placed onto an arbitrary plane of a given 3D model as a texture, in a ...

, along with 4 MB of

. The RAM and graphics processors operated at 50

MHz The hertz (symbol: Hz) is the unit of frequency in the International System of Units (SI), equivalent to one event (or cycle) per second. The hertz is an SI derived unit whose expression in terms of SI base units is s−1, meaning that one he ...

. It provided only 3D acceleration and as such the computer also needed a traditional

video controller A graphics card (also called a video card, display card, graphics adapter, VGA card/VGA, video adapter, display adapter, or mistakenly GPU) is an expansion card which generates a feed of output images to a display device, such as a computer moni ...

for conventional 2D software. A pass-through

VGA cable The Video Graphics Array (VGA) connector is a standard connector used for computer video output. Originating with the 1987 IBM PS/2 and its VGA graphics system, the 15-pin connector went on to become ubiquitous on PCs, as well as many monitors ...

daisy-chained the video controller to the Voodoo, which was itself connected to the monitor. The method used to engage the Voodoo's output circuitry varied between cards, with some using mechanical relays while others utilized purely electronic components. The mechanical relays emitted an audible "clicking" sound when they engaged and disengaged.

Voodoo Rush

In August 1997, 3dfx released the Voodoo Rush chipset, combining a Voodoo chip with a 2D chip that lay on the same circuit board, eliminating the need for a separate VGA card. Most cards were built with an Alliance Semiconductor AT25/AT3D 2D component, but there were some built with a

Macronix Macronix International Co., Ltd. (MCIX; often shortened to Macronix) is an integrated device manufacturer in the non-volatile memory (NVM) market. The company manufactures NOR Flash, NAND Flash, and ROM products for the consumer, communication ...

chip and there were initial plans to partner with

Trident A trident is a three- pronged spear. It is used for spear fishing and historically as a polearm. The trident is the weapon of Poseidon, or Neptune, the God of the Sea in classical mythology. The trident may occasionally be held by other marine ...

but no such boards were ever marketed. The Rush had the same specifications as Voodoo Graphics, but did not perform as well because the Rush chipset had to share memory bandwidth with the CRTC of the 2D chip. Furthermore, the Rush chipset was not directly present on the PCI bus but had to be programmed through linked registers of the 2D chip. Like the Voodoo Graphics, there was no

interrupt In digital computers, an interrupt (sometimes referred to as a trap) is a request for the processor to ''interrupt'' currently executing code (when permitted), so that the event can be processed in a timely manner. If the request is accepted, ...

mechanism, so the driver had to poll the Rush in order to determine whether a command had completed or not; the indirection through the 2D component added significant overhead here and tended to back up traffic on the PCI interface. The typical performance hit was around 10% compared to Voodoo Graphics, and even worse in windowed mode. Later, Rush boards were released by

Hercules Hercules (, ) is the Roman equivalent of the Greek divine hero Heracles, son of Jupiter and the mortal Alcmena. In classical mythology, Hercules is famous for his strength and for his numerous far-ranging adventures. The Romans adapted the Gr ...

featuring 8 MiB VRAM and a 10% higher clock speed, in an attempt to close this performance gap. Some manufacturers bundled a PC version of

Atari Games Atari Games Corporation, known as Midway Games West Inc. after 1999, was an American producer of Arcade game, arcade Video game, games. It was formed in 1985 when the coin-operated Arcade game, arcade game division of Atari, Inc. was transfered ...

' racing game '' San Francisco Rush'', the arcade version of which utilised a slightly upgraded Voodoo Graphics chipset with an extra texture mapping unit and additional texture memory. Sales of the Voodoo Rush cards were very poor, and the cards were discontinued within a year. The Voodoo Rush was 3dfx's first commercial failure.

Voodoo2

The 3dfx Voodoo2, the successor to the Voodoo Graphics chipset released in March 1998, was architecturally similar, but the basic board configuration added a second texturing unit, allowing two textures to be drawn in a single pass. The Voodoo2 required three chips and a separate VGA graphics card, whereas new competing 3D products, such as the ATI Rage Pro, Nvidia

RIVA 128 Released in August 1997 by Nvidia, the RIVA 128, or "NV3", was one of the first consumer graphics processing units to integrate 3D acceleration in addition to traditional 2D and video acceleration. Its name is an acronym for ''Real-time Interactiv ...

, and Rendition Verite 2200, were single-chip products. Despite some shortcomings, such as the card's dithered 16-bit 3D color rendering and 800x600 resolution limitations, no other manufacturers' products could match the smooth framerates that the Voodoo2 produced. It was a landmark (and expensive) achievement in PC 3D-graphics. Its excellent performance, and the mindshare gained from the original Voodoo Graphics, resulted in its success. Many users even preferred Voodoo2's dedicated purpose, because they were free to use the quality 2D card of their choice as a result. Some 2D/3D combined solutions at the time offered quite sub-par 2D quality and speed. The Voodoo2 introduced

Scan-Line Interleave Scan-Line Interleave (SLI) from 3dfx is a method for linking two (or more) video cards or chips together to produce a single output. It is an application of parallel processing for computer graphics, meant to increase the processing power availa ...

(SLI), in which two Voodoo2 boards were connected together, each drawing half the

scan line A scan line (also scanline) is one line, or row, in a raster scanning pattern, such as a line of video on a cathode ray tube (CRT) display of a television set or computer monitor. On CRT screens the horizontal scan lines are visually discernible ...

s of the screen. SLI increased the maximum resolution supported to 1024×768. Because of the high cost and inconvenience of using three separate graphics cards (two Voodoo2 SLI plus the general purpose 2D graphics adapter), the Voodoo2 SLI scheme had minimal effect on total market share and was not a financial success. SLI capability was not offered in subsequent 3dfx board designs, although the technology would be later used to link the VSA-100 chips on the Voodoo 5. The arrival of the Nvidia RIVA TNT with integrated 2D/3D chipset would offer minor challenge to the Voodoo2's supremacy months later.

Banshee

Near the end of 1998, 3dfx released the Banshee, which featured a lower price achieved through higher component integration, and a more complete feature-set including 2D acceleration, to target the mainstream consumer market. A single-chip solution, the Banshee was a combination of a 2D video card and partial (only one

) Voodoo2 3D hardware. Due to the missing second TMU, in 3D scenes which used multiple textures per

polygon In geometry, a polygon () is a plane figure that is described by a finite number of straight line segments connected to form a closed ''polygonal chain'' (or ''polygonal circuit''). The bounded plane region, the bounding circuit, or the two toge ...

, the Voodoo2 was significantly faster. However, in scenes dominated by single-textured polygons, the Banshee could match or exceed the Voodoo2 due to its higher clock speed and resulting greater pixel fillrate. Banshee's 2D acceleration was the first such hardware from 3dfx and it was very capable. It rivaled the fastest 2D cores from

Matrox Matrox Graphics, Inc. is a producer of video card components and equipment for personal computers and workstations. Based in Dorval, Quebec, Canada, it was founded in 1976 by Lorne Trottier and Branko Matić. The name is derived from "Ma" in Mat ...

, Nvidia, and

ATI Ati or ATI may refer to: * Ati people, a Negrito ethnic group in the Philippines **Ati language (Philippines), the language spoken by this people group ** Ati-Atihan festival, an annual celebration held in the Philippines *Ati language (China), a ...

. It consisted of a 128-bit 2D

GUI The GUI ( "UI" by itself is still usually pronounced . or ), graphical user interface, is a form of user interface that allows users to interact with electronic devices through graphical icons and audio indicator such as primary notation, inste ...

engine and a 128-bit VESA VBE 3.0 VGA core. The graphics chip capably accelerated

DirectDraw DirectDraw (ddraw.dll) is an API that used to be a part of Microsoft's DirectX API. DirectDraw is used to accelerate rendering of 2D graphics in applications. DirectDraw also allows applications to run fullscreen or embedded in a window such as m ...

and supported all of the Windows

Graphics Device Interface The Graphics Device Interface (GDI) is a legacy component of Microsoft Windows responsible for representing graphical objects and transmitting them to output devices such as monitors and printers. Windows apps use Windows API to interact with GDI ...

(GDI) in hardware, with all 256

raster Raster may refer to: * Raster graphics, graphical techniques using arrays of pixel values * Raster graphics editor, a computer program * Raster scan, the pattern of image readout, transmission, storage, and reconstruction in television and compu ...

operations and tertiary functions, and hardware polygon acceleration. The 2D core achieved near-theoretical maximum performance with a null driver test in

Windows NT Windows NT is a proprietary graphical operating system An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware, software resources, and provides common services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems sc ...

Voodoo3

The Voodoo 3 was hyped as the graphics card that would make 3dfx the undisputed leader, but the actual product was below expectations. Though it was still the fastest as it edged the

by a small margin, the Voodoo3 lacked 32-bit color and large texture support. Though at that time few games supported large textures and 32-bit color, and those that did generally were too demanding to be run at playable framerates, the features "32-bit color support" and "2048×2048 textures" were much more impressive on paper than 16-bit color and 256×256 texture support. The Voodoo3 sold relatively well, but was disappointing compared to the first two models and 3dfx lost the market leadership to Nvidia. As 3dfx attempted to counter the TNT2 threat, it was surprised by Nvidia's

. The GeForce was a single-chip processor with integrated transform, lighting, triangle setup/clipping (hardware T&L), and rendering engines, giving it a significant performance advantage over the Voodoo3. The 3dfx Voodoo3 2000 PCI was the highest-performance 2D/3D card available for the Apple Macintosh at the time of its release, though support from 3dfx was labeled as 'beta' and required a firmware reflash. As game developers switched to

and

, which respectively had become the industry standard and were becoming increasingly popular, 3dfx released its Glide API under the General Public License on December 6, 1999.

Voodoo 5

The Voodoo 5 5000, which had 32 MB of VRAM to the 5500's 64 MB, was never launched, as the smaller

didn't significantly reduce cost over the Voodoo 5 5500. The only other member of the Voodoo 5 line, the Voodoo 4 4500, was as much of a disaster as Voodoo Rush, because it had performance well short of its value-oriented peers combined with a late launch. Voodoo 4 was beaten in almost all areas by the GeForce 2 MX—a low-cost board sold mostly as an OEM part for computer manufacturers—and the Radeon VE. One unusual trait of the Voodoo 4 and 5 was that the Macintosh versions of these cards had both VGA and DVI output jacks, whereas the PC versions had only the VGA connector. Also, the Mac versions of the Voodoo 4 and 5 had a vulnerability in that they did not support hardware-based MPEG2 decode acceleration, which hindered the playback of DVDs on a Mac equipped with a Voodoo graphics card. The

Voodoo 5 6000 The Voodoo 5 was the last and most powerful graphics card line that 3dfx Interactive released. All members of the family were based upon the VSA-100 graphics processor.Lal Shimpi, Anand3dfx Voodoo5 5500 Anandtech, July 11, 2000. Only the single-ch ...

never made it to market, due to a severe bug resulting in data corruption on the AGP bus on certain boards, and was limited to AGP 2x. It was thus incompatible with the new

Pentium 4 Pentium 4 is a series of single-core CPUs for desktops, laptops and entry-level servers manufactured by Intel. The processors were shipped from November 20, 2000 until August 8, 2008. The production of Netburst processors was active from 2000 ...

motherboards. Only a few more than one thousand units of the graphics card were ever produced. Later tests proved that the Voodoo 5 6000 outperformed not only the GeForce 2 GTS and ATI Radeon 7200, but also the faster GeForce 2 Ultra and

Radeon 7500 The Radeon R100 is the first generation of Radeon graphics chips from ATI Technologies. The line features 3D acceleration based upon Direct3D 7.0 and OpenGL 1.3, and all but the entry-level versions offloading host geometry calculations to a h ...

. In some cases it was shown to compete well with the

GeForce 3 The GeForce 3 series (NV20) is the third generation of Nvidia's GeForce graphics processing units (GPUs). Introduced in February 2001, it advanced the GeForce architecture by adding programmable pixel and vertex shaders, multisample anti-ali ...

, trading performance places with the card on various tests. However, the prohibitively high production cost of the card, particularly the 4 chip setup, external power supply and 128 MB of VRAM (which would have made it the first consumer card with that amount of memory), would have likely hampered its competitiveness.

Products

* ¹

Texture mapping unit In computer graphics, a texture mapping unit (TMU) is a component in modern graphics processing units (GPUs). They are able to rotate, resize, and distort a bitmap image to be placed onto an arbitrary plane of a given 3D model as a texture, in a ...

render output unit In computer graphics, the render output unit (ROP) or raster operations pipeline is a hardware component in modern graphics processing units (GPUs) and one of the final steps in the rendering process of modern graphics cards. The pixel pipeline ...

References

External links

* * Greg Ballar
discusses some of the reasons for 3dfx's decline
Stanford University, November 2006

{{DEFAULTSORT:3dfx Interactive Companies based in San Jose, California Computer companies disestablished in 2002 Companies that filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 2002 Defunct companies based in California Defunct computer companies of the United States Defunct computer hardware companies Graphics hardware companies Nvidia Computer companies established in 1994 1994 establishments in California 2002 disestablishments in California