
Fall of Voodoo - discreditable
https://tedium.co/2018/02/14/3dfx-history-failure/
======
rayiner
The 3dfx timeline gives you an idea of how much the computer field has slowed
down and consolidated. Voodoo was released in 1996, into a market with half a
dozen competitors. Voodoo 2 in 1998, the same year as the first viable NVIDIA
card (Riva TNT). NVIDIA released the GeForce 256 in 1999, cementing its
dominance. 3dfx released its last card in 2000, just four years after its
first. NVIDIA is now still dominant, _18 years_ after establishing dominance
with the GeForce.

Think back on how much consumer computing changed from 1996 to 2000. Four
years back from the present, in contrast, is the Haswell-based Macbook Pro and
iPhone 5s (a perfectly fine setup today).

~~~
djsumdog
Most of the other companies are still there though. PowerVR still makes 3D
chips, but only for the embedded market (e.g. Android phones). Matrox gave up
on 3D and now only makes specialized cards for 8 and 16+ monitor displays
(airports, kiosks). IIRC, even Trident switched to embedded graphics.

The thing that bothers me is that if you want a PCI-E card on a consumer
system, you only have nVidia/AMD. Intel only does embedded now with none of
their offerings on a card (like the only i740). There is no Ryzen 7 with an
APU, so if you're building a small developer box, you have to buy a discrete
graphics card and can't rely on embedded (unless you want to drop to the Ryzen
5, which was just released with an APU).

There are rumors that Intel might be getting back into this space. If anyone
could try to compete with the big two, it's probably them.

~~~
mattnewport
I'm not sure what rumors you've heard but what's not a rumor is that Intel is
releasing CPUs with integrated AMD GPUs:
[https://www.anandtech.com/show/12207/intel-with-radeon-rx-
ve...](https://www.anandtech.com/show/12207/intel-with-radeon-rx-vega-
graphics-core-i78809g-with-31-ghz-base-100w-target-tdp-overclockable)

That suggests Intel isn't going to be competitive in the graphics space in the
near future

~~~
LordHog
I believe you might be thinking Intel hiring Raja Koduri this past November.
It seems Raja Koduri will be heading up new products in the graphics arena,
but that is at least two or three years into the future.
[https://www.pcper.com/reviews/Processors/Intel-Kaby-Lake-
G-L...](https://www.pcper.com/reviews/Processors/Intel-Kaby-Lake-G-
Launches-8th-Gen-CPUs-Radeon-Vega-M-Graphics)

------
pablo-massa
I remember those days vividly.

I was just getting to know the world of computers, I think it was the year 97,
I had 13 years old and my first PC, Pentium 200mhz with Windows 95, I thought
the games were fabulous! Quake 1, Duke Nukem, Carmageddon, Moto Racer.

But one day I bought the Diamond Monster 2 with a Voodoo 2 chip and 12MB Ram
(3DFX accelerator card), I put that thing on my PC and it was like traveling
to the future, the games looked amazing and I had a performance boost.

I think the game that impressed me most at the time was Need For Speed 2
Special Edition, before the card I had it installed and played, but the
"Special Edition" was for being compatible with 3DFX and adding additional
features, in addition to the smoothed textures, in a track mosquitoes were
sticking to the screen, I do not remember what other special features.

Moto Racer, Descent Freespace and Tomb Raider 2 come to my mind now as others
that I feel huge visual gap between regular graphics and 3DFX.

Then came Quake 3 Arena in 1999 and it blew my mind, I think that in 2000/2001
I upgrade to a Pentium 4 and maintain the legendary Diamond Monster 2 because
it was still kicking ass. Awesome card, it has a place in my heart.

~~~
paulbennett
> I think the game that impressed me most at the time was Need For Speed 2
> Special Edition, before the card I had it installed and played, but the
> "Special Edition" was for being compatible with 3DFX and adding additional
> features, in addition to the smoothed textures, in a track mosquitoes were
> sticking to the screen, I do not remember what other special features.

I _think_ NFS2SE had transparent glass if you had a 3DFX card, or maybe that
was NFS3, I remember wishing I had one either way!

~~~
Nition
I remember playing Need for Speed: High Stakes with a 4MB Permedia 2 card, and
the game was clearly supposed to have alpha-transparent textures on some
lights, but my card couldn't handle it and I got opaque textures with big
black borders around all the streetlight lens flares etc.

The worst was the Dolphin Cove track where beautiful shafts of sunlight were
meant to lazily filter through the tree canopy onto the road. On my screen,
they appeared as fully opaque walls blocking any view of the track ahead.

------
jwilk
It feels weird that the article uses the term "GPU". This term wasn't widely
used back then. IIRC, the Voodoo cards were called "3D accelerators".

~~~
k__
Yes.

I even remember the need of two cards. A GPU and a 3D accelerator.

~~~
clw8
The classic combo of Matrox for 2D and 3Dfx for 3D. Surprisingly Matrox still
exists.

~~~
djsumdog
Yep, but their cards aren't really consumer. They only do expensive
specialized card for multi-monitor output (think serving up 8+ screens at a
train station).

------
teddyh
LGR on YouTube did a nice episode about this a while back:

 _LGR Tech Tales - 3Dfx & Voodoo's Self-Destruction_

 _This episode covers the founding, voodoo-powered rise, and ridiculously
powerful fall of 3Dfx Interactive. Join me in LGR Tech Tales, looking at
stories of technological inspiration, failure, and everything in-between!_

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rrn-
QYdT4F8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rrn-QYdT4F8)

------
rasz
You might also like watching Computer History Museums "3dfx Oral History Panel
with Ross Smith, Scott Sellers, Gary Tarolli, and Gordon Campbell"
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3MghYhf-
GhU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3MghYhf-GhU)

Ross Smith, Scott Sellers and Gary Tarolli were 3dfx founders, they left
Silicon Graphics to do this startup.

------
alberth
Access to information (e.g. the Internet) has been a game changer for buying
"3D acceleration" as it was called back then.

I remember fondly in the late 90s just walking into a Best Buy (maybe Circuit
City) and buying a GPU off the shelf.

I had no benchmark data like today. I bought based on whether or not I liked
the packaging and how much video RAM did it have. Because I really didn't have
much more data to go off of.

I subsequently bout the Diamond Viper 770, linked below.

[https://www.anandtech.com/show/307](https://www.anandtech.com/show/307)

Times have really changed.

~~~
Narishma
There were plenty of magazines doing those benchmarks back then, you certainly
didn't need the Internet to make good buying decisions.

~~~
zumu
There was also the internet. Consider this article from Tom's Hardware circa
1998
[http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/nvidia,87-8.html](http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/nvidia,87-8.html)

------
ksec
Few things worth pointing out that is missing from the article.

1\. Direct X, and arguably Microsoft, trying to dethrone Glide, made a huge
impact. Although that was later in the time line when 3Dfx was going downhill
anyway.

2\. Too late to the "Graphics" Card market. After Voodoo 2 it took them too
long ( Long in that state of time, when everything was moving fast ) to
release a 2D/3D Graphics Card. Voodoo Banshee wasn't good enough compared to
RivaTNT.

3\. Prices, Voodoo was quite a bit more expensive then others.

God, reading this article makes me feel old. Lots of memories coming back.
Reading about benchmarks between all these Graphics Card. Internet was still
in its early days back then. Most of the information were from Monthly
magazine I got from WH Smith, PC Gamers used to do these test. Lot of cool
games coming from those CD Demo disk. There is S3 Savage 3D, ATI Rage, Matrox,
3D Labs which was the Semi Professional Graphics Card company back then, which
is now under Creative, aka Sound Blaster's company. Even Intel has i740. And
PowerVR. Nvidia went from the underdog, and Geforce changes everything. I
remember the early days how every new product from different company would
hype their spec, like S3 is going to change the world etc. Then we soon learn
all the paper spec didn't matter, if the drivers wasn't giving it the full
potential. One of the reason why PowerVR didn't do well on desktop. ( Actually
this is still the case in Mobile Phones.... )

GPU today isn't exciting anymore, at least in terms of Grpahics, not compute.
We are limited by Technology node, and lots of drivers optimization to get AAA
games to work better.

Gaming at the time was very geeky. Who would have thought today we have
something called E-Sport, and it seems everyone is a gamer. Somewhere along
the line I ditched PC gaming and went to console. I miss PC gaming, mainly
because I bought a Mac, and despite what Apple say, they really don't gave a
crap about gaming on Mac. Sigh

I miss 3Dfx, I miss Voodoo.

Good Old Times.

P.S - And somehow this song pops up in my head

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=swVoXHVW-
jI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=swVoXHVW-jI)

~~~
Zardoz84
i740 I had it. Was a piece of crap that rendered with a lot of bugs. Also I
have, after, a card with Trident 3d chip. Later I grabbed a Creative GeForce 2
MX DDR. I managed to ran Doom 3 over it at a barely playable 20 FPS using some
paths to allow Doom 3 ran over Voodoo 2 (mainly resizing textures ...)

------
ivankolev
Still fondly remember my passively-cooled! Voodoo 3, their rendering stack was
top quality. Nvidia was the feeble newcomer. Times change fast...

~~~
k__
Hehe, all my friends had Voodoo GPUs back in the days.

A friend of mine even got a Voodoo 5500 and we tried to get Quake 3 Arena so
tuned that we couldn't see any pixels anymore.

I was the first one with a GeForce 2MX, which worked quite well and long
considering it was the budget version of the gf2.

If I look at the performance indexes, the Voodoo 5500 wasn't very much better
than the GF2MX.

~~~
IndrekR
And there was simple resistor resolder hack to make GeForce 2MX think it is
Quadro. It was very useless and very cool at the same time. Few people got
into hardware hacking (read electronics engineering) thanks to this little and
yet very positive soldering experience.

~~~
sevensor
I remember in the same era, carefully shorting a blown fuse on the package of
my Athlon using a graphite pencil, so that I could overclock it. I heated my
apartment with that PC.

------
Gogogogirl
Still remember enjoying Descent. And how I argued with Commodore staff at
conferences on why Amigas didn't move into hardware 3d as it was the clear
future to see.

~~~
dogprez
I love Amigas but seems like their fate was sealed by then. By the release of
Doom in 1993 it was over for sure. Their whole shtick was that they had
special hardware that let them do things PCs couldn't. Doom proved them wrong.

~~~
oldcynic
Pretty much on the money. The hardware guys tried though. Management delayed
and delayed until they'd blown all the money.

In 90-91 ish they had a prototype AAA architecture and the specs were great.
(3000+). PC's had caught up some way.

Instead management pushed a cheap, horrible, slower machine with none of the
features, no SCSI II but CPU driven IDE and AGA in place of AAA. No DSP or
voice recognition. No 16 bit Paula. That was A4000.

Then in 93(?) there was the planned 3D PowerPC reboot as PCs had finally
caught up with AAA! Then they were no more.

Was really depressing going to DevCons and getting all the NDA info in this
period.

~~~
Gogogogirl
It doesn't look like AAA [1] has any 3D?

From what I remember it was more like my Retina Z3 card but better. Had some
discussions at conferences, it seemed Amiga hardware engineers didn't believe
in 3D and were frozen in their graphics mindset of blitter and copper (huge
when I wrote 68k demos in the mid-80s, but meaningless when 3D happened).

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga_Advanced_Architecture_ch...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga_Advanced_Architecture_chipset)

~~~
oldcynic
No it didn't, but it was started in 88 when keeping planar modes and adding
1280x1024 still made some sense keeping compatibility. Adding the DSP would
have made a few new niches. In 93 it was all a bit too late - and they weren't
even ready to ship then.

3D was in Hombre that was the PowerPC. Wildly different and no compatibility,
so heaven knows how that would have played out. Only that was when we were all
starting to play Doom at work :)

Edit: I searched and found this from Dave Haynie - who always seemed pretty
straight talking. Weirdly some of the dates have 10 years added :D The 3D
section and the following on Gould and Ali seems to sum up the train wreck
pretty well. eg:

"When he got to Engineering, he hired a human bus error called Bill Sydnes to
take over. Sydnes, a PC guy, didn’t have the chops to run a computer, much
less a computer design department. He was also an ex-IBMer, and spent much
time trying to turn C= (a fairly slick, west-coast-style design operation),
into the clunky mess that characterized the Dilbert Zones in most major east-
coast-style companies"

[http://www.landley.net/history/mirror/commodore/haynie.html](http://www.landley.net/history/mirror/commodore/haynie.html)

~~~
Gogogogirl
"keeping compatibility."

This killed the Amiga.

------
b3lvedere
I remember those gpu wars. Also had a Voodoo 3000 card which was relatively
cheap but still very fast. It took quite some time to get those games running
optimally though. Playing Quake on it was fantastic.

Specs and scores were all they could talk about. I also remember that very
nice parody: [https://imgur.com/SLG6hp4](https://imgur.com/SLG6hp4)

------
upbeatlinux
I remember my Voodoo3 quite fondly. There was quite a performance boost in
games based on the Quake engine. I also recall their being poor Linux driver
support until 2005 or so.

My Voodoo3 ran right up through CS v1.6 (albeit struggling at times). A new
system I built in 2005 used 2x BFG 6800s in SLI (3dfx tech nvidia inherited).
While impressive I seem to recall their being some variation in nvidia's SLI
spec/implementation. Perhaps 3dfx SLI performance was seemingly better because
of Glide support but my memory escapes me (obviously not an apples to apples
comparison).

FWIW, there was also a huge aftermarket of Voodoo cards on eBay (1999-2004)
and a decent community providing 3rd party driver support.

------
TorKlingberg
The article blames management failure, but I'm not convinced. There's a
general bias to blame management any time a company fails. Of course
management is always responsible, but I don’t think anyone could have saved
say, Kodak.

In this case, Nvidia and ATI were already making 3D accelerators for the
professional 3D rendering market. All they had to do was to make stripped down
cards that wouldn't cannibalize their high margin business, and sell them in
volume for a price gamers could bear.

Maybe 3Dfx could have made a moat out of GLide, but OpenGL already existed and
Microsoft was working on Direct3D.

~~~
chrisan
> but I don’t think anyone could have saved say, Kodak

Why not? What if Kodak management had went hard on digital initially instead
of clinging to film for so long?

~~~
TorKlingberg
Kodak was never an electronics company, or even a camera company. Nikon and
Canon would have eaten their lunch.

~~~
TheOtherHobbes
Kodak literally invented the digital camera, and were significant in both
consumer and professional digital photography in the early 00s.

They missed by not innovating fast enough compared to the competition, not by
ignoring the market.

Unimaginative management was very definitely a problem - although to be fair,
it's easy with hindsight to say they should have started developing digital
much earlier, when in reality consumer digital photography only started to
make commercial sense when computers and public networking became powerful
enough to support it.

That didn't happen until the later 90s. Until then, most computers lacked the
photo quality displays we take for granted now.

~~~
djsumdog
I can remember my oldest digital camera was a Kodak my parents bought me, with
a CF card in it I believe.

------
jonny_eh
Wait, so what went wrong? They took too long to release new product? That's
not surprising to anyone watching at the time. But… why? What went wrong
internally?

~~~
djsumdog
I think it was the failed merger with STB. They should have kept with the
nVidia route of making chips for other companies instead of trying to
integrate the entire pipeline like ATI.

~~~
smacktoward
Yes, this. They tried to go from being a company that just licensed IP to OEMs
(who would do the actual manufacturing and marketing of 3dfx-powered graphics
cards) to being a company that did the manufacturing and marketing themselves,
and in the end couldn't pull that off.

Acquiring one of the more prominent OEMs, STB, was supposed to get them the
expertise they needed to do that rather than having to develop it in-house,
but (as in many acquisitions) absorbing the new company turned out to be more
complicated than originally expected. This resulted in the post-acquisition
products (Voodoo 3/4/5) taking longer to get to market than planned and being
somewhat underwhelming by the time they did arrive, which gave NVidia -- who
kept on licensing their tech, now also to grumpy former 3dfx OEMs who had
found themselves cut out by the STB acquisiton -- the opening they needed to
eat 3dfx's lunch.

~~~
jonny_eh
None of this was in the article, what a shame!

------
fsiefken
I had the Wicked3D H3D voodoo glasses, 3D on 20 inch monitor gave me > 100 FOV
when I put my nose near the screen.

------
pmiller2
My Voodoo 5 5500 was, at the time, and for years afterward, the best consumer
level card I'd seen for OpenGL rendering. I still remember playing Diablo 2 on
it and never lagging, even when insane numbers of mobs were on the screen. RIP

~~~
T-hawk
Diablo 2 doesn't use OpenGL. It does use Glide, the native hardware API for
Voodoo cards. And it looks amazing and silky smooth with Glide compared to the
game's Direct3D mode.

------
overcast
I remember the day clearly when a case of Voodoo 2's showed up in our dorm
room, 1998. Going from software rendered Quake 2, to accelerated was the
beginning of the end for my grades that semester.

------
jugg1es
This making me reminisce so hard. I remember fondly the days where I convinced
my mom that the Voodoo card was for some school thing and was so excited to
slap that baby into the ISA slot of my Pentium 2.

------
cbm-vic-20
TDFX shareholders got screwed when they were "acquired" by nVidia. I suppose
that was a good thing, it made be skeptical of crummy companies during the dot
com days.

------
yesimahuman
I have many fond memories configuring my voodoo card on Linux, reveling in my
high glxgears score and super smooth Tux racer rendering. A simpler time.

------
Tloewald
Off-topic: the PS4's PSVR box is a bit reminiscent of the old Voodoo cards
with their passthrough video.

------
tenken
Voodoo 3dfx 5500 baby ...

------
jlebrech
Could also be titled: when not to pivot

