What if 3dfx still existed today?

[scrlk]

A question for the dinosaurs who can remember the days of 3dfx and the Voodoo cards (with the Glide API)!

If 3dfx still existed, would we see more/bigger advances in GPUs today (power, quality ect) due to the extra competition from 3dfx against Nvidia and AMD/ATI or would one of the companies be eventually squeezed out at one point or another?

 

[Rroff]

I can't really see 3dfx existing today, their philosophy just wouldn't work for the way game technology progressed.

Another competitor would definitely have pushed the boundaries tho, look for instance at the things matrox did to try and distinguish themselves from the competiton i.e. bump mapping and S3's texture compression.

 

[TruffleShuffle]

If they did still exist, graphics cards would be HUUUUGE!!!

 

[EVGA_Nick]

Their 590 came out earlier this year

http://www.geforce.com/News/articles/voodoo-revived

 

[Avathar77]

I have always been intrigued by the likes od 3dfx and Ageia!
I had a 3dfx vodoo2 8mb card and still has an Ageia Physx card!

 

[r2d2]

Their 590 came out earlier this year

http://www.geforce.com/News/articles/voodoo-revived

those sold out pretty quick.

233 gpus on one card....

incredible/

 

[bhavv]

233 gpus on one card....

Technically not GPUs as they have no T+L acceleration

 

[scrlk]

I can't really see 3dfx existing today, their philosophy just wouldn't work for the way game technology progressed.

Another competitor would definitely have pushed the boundaries tho, look for instance at the things matrox did to try and distinguish themselves from the competiton i.e. bump mapping and S3's texture compression.

Where do you think we would be if Matrox/3dfx were still going at it now?

 

[techpops]

I thought nvidia absorbed 3dfx so the main staff just went to work for nvidia. Wasn't the geforcefx line a sort of tribute to the company using the fx from the 3dfx name? It was a long time ago, my memory of it all is fuzzy now.

 

[BloodyL]

Such a pity that 3dfx's colour palette was so washed out.
The days of going from software mode to hardware in things like Quake and Unreal Tournament were immense.

 

[Relentless81]

I wish there was a little more competion, what about Matrox too!

Mind you trying to decide on a card is difficult as it is with just the two manufacturers

 

[Psamiad]

Ah the good old days. I remember when every game had lense flare, and it was amazing!

 

[Mik3]

Who still have their voodoo cards? I've got a voodoo 2 and 3 somewhere under my bed

 

[Dutch Guy]

I miss 3dfx and PowerVR, they were both developing techniques to only draw visible stuff on the screen instead of the brute force approach.

 

[Rroff]

Still got an Obsidian Voodoo 1 setup and a Voodoo 3 2000 PCI I used for multi-monitor along side my TNT2 somewhere - I think the VRAM is shot on both of them tho now

 

[Indy500]

I miss 3dfx and PowerVR, they were both developing techniques to only draw visible stuff on the screen instead of the brute force approach.

I think PowerVR's Kyro had the occlusion culling first, then ATI implemented it on the Radeon to even better effect. Nvidia didn't use it until the Geforce 3.

 

[Pottsey]

ATI Radeon is no where near as efficient as PowerVR's method and PowerVR are still going strong with some very interesting tech coming out in 2 years. Bring on hardware ray tracing. Should be a very disruptive technology and a surprise to many people. EDIT: Even today ATI and Nvidia are still very much brute force approach compared to PowerVR's methods. Thats why PowerVR rule the mobile world.

Not sure if 3DFX being around would be a good thing. They did a lot of good at first but towards the end did a lot of harm holding back the market.

 

[techpops]

ATI Radeon is no where near as efficient as PowerVR's method and PowerVR are still going strong with some very interesting tech coming out in 2 years. Bring on hardware ray tracing. Should be a very disruptive technology and a surprise to many people. EDIT: Even today ATI and Nvidia are still very much brute force approach compared to PowerVR's methods. Thats why PowerVR rule the mobile world.

Not sure if 3DFX being around would be a good thing. They did a lot of good at first but towards the end did a lot of harm holding back the market.

I can't really see ray tracing taking off when you can scan line and fake it to look good enough. Ray tracing on its own isn't really enough anymore either. We've kinda moved on visually in what we expect. Global illumination seems to be the holy grail for gaming. but at high enough quality to start to look realistic, that's a crazy amount of processing. When I do GI test renders at 1280x720 on scenes about as complex as an average game, it takes several minutes per frame with a 4 core cpu. Over gpu I've seen some impressive work being done that gets it down to under a minute but still, 30fps is a bit of a dream. Especially when were talking about test quality GI that's very noisy. Really high quality takes hours per frame.

I'm seeing occlusion done better and pre-baking GI but those tricks are no substitute for the real thing being computed on the fly. I think we'll see tesselation/lighting/shadows as the big visual improvers over the next few years and a whole lot of faking going on

 

[Pottsey]

You say global illumination is the holy Gail for gaming well isn't that pretty much what ray tracing is? I don't see that much faking going off. Once we get full ray tracing games will be much cheaper to make and faking it will just not look as good and take longer to produce.

 

[Gerard]

I can't really see 3dfx existing today, their philosophy just wouldn't work for the way game technology progressed.

It would have seeing as their philosophy was changing with rampage. It was basically management that screwed them over by making the enigneers work on stop gap products and spending stupid sums of money on tv adverts, etc.