1998 3dfx merges with Videologic

[Angilion]

Still have my boxed Voodoo 5 5500 AGP RIP 3DFX.

By far the most striking jump in hardware I've had was a Voodoo card, one of the first ones out. Orchid Righteous 3D, I think. Or maybe something Monster 3D. Anyway, Voodoo had just been released and had almost no support from games. Maybe no games at all at that point. Maybe just Quake. The card was seriously expensive by the standards of the time and it came on top of the full cost of a PC because it only did 3D. The only software I had that supported the card was a demo that came on a disc with the card, a pass through a wizard's tower.

It was stunning. Software rendering on a 486 was so far behind it that it seemed like a new thing rather than an improvement on an existing thing. I gawped at it, phoned a friend and gibbered at him about it. He came round, gawped at it, asked where I bought it and went straight there to buy one. He didn't ask how much it cost. I'm not sure that I knew, even after buying it. It was such a new and amazing thing that the cost became less of a consideration.

3dfx failed to keep up with development and made some odd business decisions, but they started the whole thing of hardware 3D for home PCs. It takes a lot to start a new market with new hardware that has a high cost and no support, but that's what they did by making something truly remarkable. I can't imagine any new piece of hardware today that would be so dramatically better than previously existing products.

I'm sure they must have had a reason for shutting out third party card manufacturers, but I can't imagine what it was. "Please buy our competitors' products instead of ours" doesn't seem like a good idea to me. They could have imposed that at the start, when they didn't have any competitors, but by then it was a strange decision.

 

[paradigm]

I don't think anything could have saved 3Dfx, the mismanagement and slow progress with new architectures killed it off, not the lack of interest from investors. All additional funding would have achieved is a prolonging of the death march.

Once the GeForce 256 hit, it was game over, Rampage was over a year away even if it had come to the light of day, and by that time the GeForce 2 would have been with us. Too little too late unfortunately.

This is coming from someone who currently owns 8 3Dfx cards.

 

[Lil old me]

It may have postponed the inevitable, but 3dfx was making far too many leveraged acquisitions and releasing hardware that, whilst impressive, was absurdly expensive for consumers. Then they went down the route of cutting out AIB partners and by extension a large part of their revenue stream.

Poor management can't be overcome.

You could swap out 3dfx with Nvidia in this given their behaviour during the Ampere launch. A sign of things to come?!

 

[Greebo]

By far the most striking jump in hardware I've had was a Voodoo card, one of the first ones out. Orchid Righteous 3D, I think. Or maybe something Monster 3D. Anyway, Voodoo had just been released and had almost no support from games. Maybe no games at all at that point. Maybe just Quake. The card was seriously expensive by the standards of the time and it came on top of the full cost of a PC because it only did 3D. The only software I had that supported the card was a demo that came on a disc with the card, a pass through a wizard's tower.

It was stunning. Software rendering on a 486 was so far behind it that it seemed like a new thing rather than an improvement on an existing thing. I gawped at it, phoned a friend and gibbered at him about it. He came round, gawped at it, asked where I bought it and went straight there to buy one. He didn't ask how much it cost. I'm not sure that I knew, even after buying it. It was such a new and amazing thing that the cost became less of a consideration.

3dfx failed to keep up with development and made some odd business decisions, but they started the whole thing of hardware 3D for home PCs. It takes a lot to start a new market with new hardware that has a high cost and no support, but that's what they did by making something truly remarkable. I can't imagine any new piece of hardware today that would be so dramatically better than previously existing products.

I'm sure they must have had a reason for shutting out third party card manufacturers, but I can't imagine what it was. "Please buy our competitors' products instead of ours" doesn't seem like a good idea to me. They could have imposed that at the start, when they didn't have any competitors, but by then it was a strange decision.

SImilar memories here. Once you had seen it, you went and bought one, it didnt matter how much it cost. There was no going back.

 

[robgmun]

For me it's peak was the 3Dfx Voodoo 3, after that the competition caught up with slightly faster but cheaper cards.

At the time it seemed from my point of view that their biggest mistake was not licencing out other companies from making their own versions of their cards. If they did I'm sure they would have lasted a few more years at least.

 

[paradigm]

It seemed from my point of view that their biggest mistake was not licencing out other companies from making their own versions of their cards. If they did I'm sure they would have lasted a few more years at least.

They did the opposite. AIB partners were building 3Dfx Voodoo, Voodoo II and Voodoo Banshee cards (technically RUSH as well, but RUSH was pants), then 3Dfx bought out STB for the sole purpose of building and controlling the quality of their product. Voodoo 3 onward were in-house built cards only, and in all honesty the quality of the Mexican build STB boards were inferior to some of the big players building the older Voodoo II cards (Creative, Guillemot, Diamond, etc).

 

[malachi]

Miss the days of seeing the spinning 3DFX logo when you fired up a game

They went the same way as Commodore, again due to bad management.

 

[Theophany]

You could swap out 3dfx with Nvidia in this given their behaviour during the Ampere launch. A sign of things to come?!

nVidia has not only the performance advantage but the bulk of its business is datacentres and professional applications. 3dfx didn't have anywhere near as dependable a business model.

 

[paradigm]

nVidia has not only the performance advantage but the bulk of its business is datacentres and professional applications. 3dfx didn't have anywhere near as dependable a business model.

Would have potentially helped if they hadn't spun off Quantum3D as a separate concern focusing on high-end rendering farms. Keeping it under one umbrella would have given them the different market segments and thus a less risky business model.

 

[Hagar]

When 12Mb was a huge amount of video ram. My Voodoo 2 card was used almost exclusively for Doom and Hexen.

 

[paradigm]

My Voodoo 2 card was used almost exclusively for Doom and Hexen.

The Doom engine (which includes Hexen and Heretic) didn't offer anything other than software rendering, a Voodoo 2 would have done nothing for either of those sprite-based games, there's no geometry to render.

 

[Hagar]

The Doom engine (which includes Hexen and Heretic) didn't offer anything other than software rendering, a Voodoo 2 would have done nothing for either of those sprite-based games, there's no geometry to render.

Well that was £100 down the drain then.
Unfortunately Microdirect have gone out of business I would take it back.

 

[Greebo]

The Doom engine (which includes Hexen and Heretic) didn't offer anything other than software rendering, a Voodoo 2 would have done nothing for either of those sprite-based games, there's no geometry to render.

For me it was QUAKE 2, Carmegeddon 2, Tomb Raider, NFS, Resident Evil. All of them were amazing on the voodoo2 and pants on normal cards.

Today it would be like comparing gaming on a built in cpu gfx chip to a 3090.

 

[Chojin]

Really liked my Voodoo 2 12MB card and it did the job for Half Life and Counterstrike Beta. I never upgraded to Voodoo 3 as the 16-bit colour put me off.

 

[Street]

For me it was QUAKE 2, Carmegeddon 2, Tomb Raider, NFS, Resident Evil. All of them were amazing on the voodoo2 and pants on normal cards.

Quake 2 was the game I bought my Voodoo 2 for, it looked amazing compared to the software rendering I was used to and ran so much better! I can't remember how much I paid for it, but I saved for ages and it was worth every penny. I'd still say my Voodoo 2 and SSD upgrades have been the most worthwhile upgrades I've done. Everything else has been slight speed improvements but those have made a real difference to usage.

 

[Gibbo]

I’ll always remember these as I was building PC’s for a retail store and they were so popular.

I remember buying one and being blown away, playing Quake at 800x600 and I then got a second card so I could play at 1024x768 it was just a case of I had to have it, I was earning peanuts at time but I spent all my money on my PC and the 3DFX were big money. Then I was blown away again when I got my Creative GeForce DDR. They were such massive leaps in visuals and performance.

 

[robgmun]

When 12Mb was a huge amount of video ram. My Voodoo 2 card was used almost exclusively for Doom and Hexen.

Either of which used 3D Cards, i presume you meant Doom 3 and Hexen 2? And Quake was the killer app that made 3D Cards sell like hot cakes if i remember correctly

 

[Hagar]

Either of which used 3D Cards, i presume you meant Doom 3 and Hexen 2? And Quake was the killer app that made 3D Cards sell like hot cakes if i remember correctly

I expect it was, early pentium days, P90 or P120 single cores. I do know the card definitely worked.

 

[Gerard]

Once the GeForce 256 hit, it was game over, Rampage was over a year away even if it had come to the light of day, and by that time the GeForce 2 would have been with us. Too little too late unfortunately.

They had working samples of rampage literally days before shutting up shop. This ones in the hands of a private collector:





Another image showing an agp riser setup, the sample at the time had an intermittent connection so a clam was used to get the connection solid.

The spec of the high end rampage on paper at least would have smacked the geforce 2 around a bit to say the least, just a pity it never came to fruition.

1 Rampage chip w/64MB $200 USD
1 Rampage/1 Sage w/64MB $300 USD
2 Rampage/1 Sage w/128MB $500 USD

Note- The flagship product Specter 3000 would have been a killer piece of hardware for the time frame. 2 Rampage chips in SLI mode with Sage combined with DDR ram would have had 10.2 GB/S bandwidth with a fillrate of 1600-2000Mpixels/S.

To give you a point of reference Nvidia didn't have anything matching these performance specs till some Geforce 4 models were released years later.

 

[paradigm]

They had working samples of rampage literally days before shutting up shop. This ones in the hands of a private collector:


Another image showing an agp riser setup, the sample at the time had an intermittent connection so a clam was used to get the connection solid.

The spec of the high end rampage on paper at least would have smacked the geforce 2 around a bit to say the least, just a pity it never came to fruition.

I’m well aware of thedodgegarage