The Last Days at 3dfx

sand writes "FiringSquad has a detailed account of what happened in the final days at 3dfx. Every 3dfx product that was released or upcoming is discussed by a former 3dfx employee with inside knowledge on what caused the product delays (including an employee who forgot to fly to Asia to pickup the first Voodoo5 chips). He also discusses money mismanagement and the STB merger. It's a very enlightening article for anyone who's interested in 3D graphics and what goes on inside these companies."

Comments

Businesses come and go

[ites]

There is no rule that says that business have to survive.
3dfx changed the graphics scene at a time when this was worth doing,
but today there is little need for faster graphics.
It's natural and normal that the market moves and the companies move with the market.
When a company is so focussed on a single segment, they usually go broke during such changes.
Sad, but presumably their excellent people will find good work elsewhere.

Re:Businesses come and go

[lunenburg]

There is no rule that says that business have to survive.

Tell that to the RIAA, and be sure to have paramedics around when they go into convulsive fits of laughter.

Re:Businesses come and go

[ites]

This is true.
The concept that a business stopping is 'bad' is perhaps a consequence of stock markets.
In fact it's quite natural that businesses stop being relevant and thus cease trading.
It's a shame when they actually go broke, it would be smarter to liquidate before that
and split the proceedings amongst the shareholders.
But this almost never happens, because we have come to believe that a business must succeed or die, never just quit while the going is good.

Re:Businesses come and go

[PainKilleR-CE]

but today there is little need for faster graphics.

The need for faster and better graphics is exactly why 3dfx died. nVidia caught up and passed them while they were making mistakes like telling people they didn't want or need 32bit colour in 3D games or making 2d/3d cards that didn't hold up to their 3d-only boards.

Re:Businesses come and go

[mrleemrlee]

The notion that the death of a business is no big thing ignores the human element and several economic facts.

First of all, the death of a business creates all kinds of collateral damage, from employees who lose their jobs to creditors and shareholders who never get paid. When the going is good, wealth is created, which creates benefits not only for the company, its shareholders and its employees, but also for its vendors, the municipality it resides in, and surrounding businesses where employees shop (this is known as the "multiplier effect," if you've studied economics). Many, many people and entities gain from a healthy business.

Second, the idea that a business should "quit while the going is good" is ridiculous on its face. Businesses are started to create wealth. They are best at creating wealth "when the going is good." It makes no sense to start a business at all if you're planning to close up shop when you start to be successful. "We just made our first profit! Time to liquidate!" Sure ...

Businesses certainly can quite easily become irrelevant, but when that happens, there are real costs associated with that, to many consituencies. A business dying is quite far from a neutral event.

Re:Businesses come and go

[nelsonal]

Economists would say the time to quit is when the net benefits of quitting equal the net benefits of staying in business. Unfortunately, most businesses are run by managment teams who are employed by the business, so thier incentives are different from the owners of the business. Which is why you occasionally see hostile takeovers to sell of the assets of the business.

Re:Businesses come and go

[Anonymous Coward]

"but today there is little need for faster graphics"

You're kidding, right?

Re:Businesses come and go

[WNight]

You need to get out of business when the sale value of your assets is greater than your total profit in the future.

Sometimes you can't predict this, short term market swings can make or break you. But if your company makes buggy whips maybe you should consider closing shop when the car starts to get big, instead of waiting until your lack of orders has forced you to borrow money and mortgage your assets just to stay in business a little longer.

Really, a big business is no different than a sole proprietorship consulting firm. If I start to run out of jobs I'd better find new work, or quit running my own business and find a full-time job. It's easy to see this, so why is it hard to see that a big company facing the same lack of future profits would break up, selling assets and returning money to the investors letting them do something else with it, instead of burning every penny pretending they're healthy until the day they lock the doors?

Re:Businesses come and go

[iamethan]

Remember the movie Other People's Money?

What happened to the buggy whip companies? Even the company that made the best buggy whip eventually went out of business if they didn't change with the times to follow the market.

Re:Businesses come and go

[Anonymous Coward]

mod this shit back down.

just a dumb statement, from a to z.

LOL

[headchimp]

Just love getting the skinny on failed companies. Wish people from other companies would come out and do the same.

Re:LOL

[Anonymous Coward]

Then go to F*d company - plenty of skinny.

A company I used to work out was just closed, and was discussed there...

Re:LOL

[headchimp]

Been there before, thanks for the direct link, I get off on other people's misery, makes mine less painful.

Re:LOL

[mbogosian]

Just love getting the skinny on failed companies. Wish people from other companies would come out and do the same.

If you're really that interested, check out http://fuckedcompany.com/. You have to wade through a lot of garbage (they don't have the notion of Karma with their blogs (I hate that term)), but you get an almost-as-it-happens look at recently failing companies.

It's one of those sites which are propbably more entertaining to those who watch the nightly news for the explosions rather than the weather....

Re:LOL

[Anonymous Coward]

*cough* Bit Brothers *cough* vapourware *cough* *cough* never released *cough*

3dfx became a religion

[Anonymous Coward]

3dfx became a religion. I bought an nVidia RIVA 128 and was ridiculed for buying from an unknown firm. That Glide was available for a few graphic cards only was neglected by 3dfx-zealots.

Re:3dfx became a religion

[Czernobog]

Seeing as this is slahdot could you please explain to me what is so bad about 3dfx becoming a religion, when GNU/OSS/Linux and the like have reached a level of fanaticism amongst the developers and users that is hardly matched by any other social/technologic/scientific/religious movement?

In other words, what makes you think that OSS is more valid a subject of religious following, than a company making products, that up to a point in time reached new heights in performance in previously unexplored ways?

NVIDIA's G4? ATI's 9600? HA! I'm still using my V3 3000.

Re:3dfx became a religion

[Anonymous Coward]

Errr... Apparently no-one noted my mistake. :D

"That Glide was available for a few graphic cards only was neglected by 3dfx-zealots."

should have been

"That Glide was available for very few games cards only was neglected by 3dfx-zealots.",

of course. :D

Apparently people understood what I meant anyhow. :D

Re:3dfx became a religion

[UberLame]

Of course, the ideal setup at that time would have been both a Riva128 and Voodoo card.

Glide games, of course, would use the voodoo. Don't install the 3dFX directx driver and force those games to use the Riva (since the riva, at the time, was faster for directx games), and set opengl to run on the riva (if you use applications, if using games, it's up to you).

On a side note, blender still runs quite nicely on a P166mmx with a riva 128. I can't say the same for anything when the video card is a voodoo.

But I still love my 3 voodoo cards (a voodoo 3 and 2 voodoo 2s for SLI mode).

Re:3dfx became a religion

[Anonymous Coward]

"That Glide was available for very few games cards only was neglected by 3dfx-zealots.",

should have been

"That Glide was available for very few games was neglected by 3dfx-zealots.", :(

No, I'm not drunk... Just a poor proof-reader.

Re:3dfx became a religion

[Azureash]

Dammit, use both hands when you type! Your crank can wait until you tab back to goatse.cx.

Re:3dfx became a religion

[Anonymous Coward]

Haven't you noticed?

They changed it to Microsoft-IIS/5.0, running on Linux!!! Check it out here!

Re:3dfx became a religion

[Anonymous Coward]

yeah, i had a riva128 for the 2d and then once unreal came out got myself a voodoo2.

Unreal looked so sweet back then.

Re:3dfx became a religion

[Anonymous Coward]

"GNU/OSS/Linux and the like have reached a level of fanaticism amongst the developers and users that is hardly matched by any other social/technologic/scientific/religious movement?"

Ever heard of universities?
Or capitalism?
Or America?

Competition

[e8johan]

This is what competition is all about. When a company cannot deliver the best product to the best price they don't get any income. If you don't have and income and spend alot without being able to overtake your competators, you will enventually run out of money. It is not fun, but reality in a market economy.

Eventually we will see this when it comes to ATI and nVidia, or they will find a niche market to survive in. The big profit will go to the one making the best product at the best price.

Note - I do not critisize market economy, without it we would probably not have hardware accelerated 3D for home computers at all!

Re:Competition

[Anonymous Coward]

You know, ATI has been around for a f'ing long time. They haven't done squat. Just enough to survive, yes, but their drivers have always sucked and their hardware is only so-so to decent.

Matrox is in the same position but they focused way too much on 2D performance and have never caught up with modern 3D cards.

nVidia seems to have the best future. I think either they will stay on top or some nobody company (maybe ex-SGI employee founded company or something) will pop up and take the top place.

Re:Competition

[evilviper]

Eventually we will see this when it comes to ATI and nVidia, or they will find a niche market to survive in. The big profit will go to the one making the best product at the best price.

I doubt that either ATI or nVidia is going to replace the other. They've each managed to keep pace with the other along the lines of both performance and price. So, unless one of them is operating too close to their margins at present, I don't see why they can't continue to compete for a good long time.

Re:Competition

[jayayeem]

Both ATI and nVidia can survive because the both support the microsoft DirectX APIs. 3dfx could not survive because they did not support them, or supported them only as an afterthought to their own Glide. All Windows users have DirectX... a few had Glide. As the performance edge disappeared, so did the reason to support Glide.

Re:Competition

[e8johan]

I'll reply to all replies here.

DirectX or not, competing and overtaking each other over and over again - still, one will win in the end.
As for DirectX, if you support it, but don't deliver performance, your dead.
Compete for a long time, yes, but I did not specify a time limit

I'm just saying that you have to deliver a good product to a good price, and anyone who can't deliver the best product to the best price (ratio, best does not mean cheapest) will lose in the long run.

Re:Competition

[Violet Null]

competing and overtaking each other over and over again - still, one will win in the end....Compete for a long time, yes, but I did not specify a time limit

And in the long run we're all dead. And the universe suffers a (pick one) Big Crunch / heat death.

But if you're talking about _meaningful_ time frames...

Re:Competition

[dpilot]

You've missed the point. There is not supposed to be a Final Winner, or else we all lose. As soon as there is a Final Winner, competition dies. At any one generation, the Winner gets better profits and the right to compete on the next generation. But you want there to be a runner-up who will viably go on to the next generation, as well.

We have let Microsoft color our thinking too much, fill us with envy, and convince us that this is The Business Model.

Re:Competition

[jayayeem]

Price/performance ratio is not the only level of competition for graphics cards. It does happen to be the criteria I'd use if I were in the market.

Some buyers (office managers) will buy based on raw price.

Others (gamers) will buy on raw performance.

One company may eventually fill all three niches (and any others I may have missed) but I don't think it is the inevitable outcome.

As for DirectX, it is the minimum point of entry to the graphics market today. If you don't support it, and support it in the segment you compete at, you are dead. One reason 3dfx died, IMHO, is that it tried to compete at the high end, but its Direct X support was decidedly low end.

I'd read the article if it weren't blocked by my proxy.

Re:Competition

[Viking Coder]

When a company cannot deliver the best product to the best price they don't get any income. ... The big profit will go to the one making the best product at the best price. (emphasis added)

No, profits will go to anyone who figures out how to release a product that satisfies some customers. Your belief that you can somehow release the "best product" while simultaneously achieving the "best price" is silly. Generally, price goes up with quality, because there are costs associated with improving quality, and they get passed on to the consumer as increased price.

There's a curve that you're talking about - to get a higher quality product, you generally have to pay more. If products exist at different points along that curve, it is entirely possible for the companies that produce them to co-exist.

I could easily see ATI and nVidia fighting for a long time. Just as AMD and Intel. And Sony and Nintendo. And GM and Ford. And McDonalds and Burger King. Consumers win, in this scenario, because they're more likely to find a product that satisfies them - as long as there's no collusion.

Re:Competition

[npietraniec]

I don't think you understand economics. Nothing says that there has to be a winner where someday all graphics cards will come from. To believe that in some great "ending" there will just be a bunch of monopolies out there is a pretty wrong way to look at things.

Re:Competition

[Anonymous Coward]

"This is what competition is all about. When a company cannot deliver the best product to the best price they don't get any income. If you don't have and income and spend alot without being able to overtake your competators, you will enventually run out of money. It is not fun, but reality in a market economy."

Maybe my posts would get modded higher if I stated such blatantly obvious facts like this more often. :)

Re:Competition

[Anonymous Coward]

If I refuse to believe your fundamentalist atheism does that mean I go to heaven?

What happens if I disbelieve your disbelief?

Re:Competition

[Com2Kid]

Matrox is in the same position but they focused way too much on 2D performance and have never caught up with modern 3D cards.


Catch up? Why in the world would Matrox want to "catch up"?

While I think that Matrox could benefit from releasing an amazing new 2D card of some sort, some type of integrated Video In and TV encoder that is of some insanely high quality, and jack up their RAMDACs a few notches, besides that, err,

They own at 2D. You want to do Desktop [graphics/publishing/CAD/CAM] work of any sort? You get a Matrox.

Oh, and drivers.

They own. And they work to boot.

Re:Competition

[e8johan]

Yes, there will not be a Final Winner. But someone will be the best at doing 3D graphics for home PCs.
Lets argure that nVidia will win that fight, nothing then prevents ATI from integrating their solution into the chipset (or something else), thus eliminating the need of a PCI 3D graphics solution and regaining market shares.
What I am arguing is that if you can't compete, you will eventually lose if you can't target another audiense (look at cars, a BMW and a Fiat have different target groups with the same type of product).

Re:Competition

[Greyjack]

I am a fundamentalist Atheist. Not only do I disbelieve, I insist that you disbelieve in the same way that I do.

Uh, wouldn't that make you an Evangelical Atheist, rather?

Re:Competition

[Toraz Chryx]

Catch up? Why in the world would Matrox want to "catch up"?
AutoCAD users.. for one thing..
some people need good 2d AND good 3d...

Re:Competition

[dpilot]

I've been really happy to see the recent see-saw between nVidia and ATI. Nor do I see why we have to have one become best, and remain so. Your BMW and Fiat analogy is great, but neglects the existence of Audi and Chevy, not to mention Ford, Saab, Volvo, etc.

As far as I can tell, we're the ONLY market so badly dominated. The next closest thing might be soft drinks, with the Pepsi/Coke duopoly. But we have Microsoft and Intel, and until ATI's comeback, it looked like nVidia was going to be IT on PC graphics. (Actually, I think the Pepsi/Coke dupoloy has a worse stranglehold on their industry than Microsoft/Intel on ours.)

Re:Competition

[bjohnson]

Not really.

Look at the IT industry.

Go to a computer store. There's shelf after shelf after shelf of Wintel software. Maybe a couple of RedHat boxes, two kernels back. One shrinkwrap-less, grungy, taped up box of Mac preschool kids software with a big sticker on it proclaiming it's 'Compatible with System 7!!' :-/

If you go to a grocery store, you typically have a lot of brands of cola to choose from. Of course there's Pepsi and Coke. But there's RC, and usually two or more local and store brands as well.

Moreover, inspired by the beer industry, there's a thriving market in 'microbrewed' soft drinks, too. You get a lot of choice in the soda aisle. A lot more than you get in the computer aisle.

P&C spend all the advertising bucks, but the other brands sell pretty well in spite of it.

Now if you look at some of the extortion ^h^h^h^h 'Gracious support of our education system' contracts that schools are signing with soda distributors, that's where yuou have a monopoly, and get kids expelled from school for wearing pepsi shirts on the Coke Corporate Masters visitation day...

Re:Competition

[Com2Kid]

AutoCAD users.. for one thing..
some people need good 2d AND good 3d...


You are talking about professional level 3d cards.

That is outside of this discussion, Nvidia's offerings in this category are rather, err, dismal (The Quatro line is known more for its high price then its high performance), and the Raedon line of chips never has been intended to compete in this category.

Though many others in this stories comment section have commented on the difference between professional and consumer level 3D cards. Basically the difference is the quality of the final render, Professional cards are happy targeting 20 or 30FPS with no rendering errors. Consumer level cards go for the triple digit frame per second numbers even at the expense of visual quality or mathematical accuracy.

CAD/CAM users like Matrox. When dealing with lots of little lines on a screen, it is easier on the eyes if each line is nice and crisp and clear. :)

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

What happened at 3DFX

[Anonymous Coward]

1) Sell high-end video cards which only a relatively small percentage of computer users will buy while everyone else buys the competitions' cards
2) ????
3) Profit!

rejecting the gpl?

[Mattygfunk]

For obvious reasons our source would like to remain anonymous....

Grrrrr closed source.

-----
sexy sexy wallpaper mmmmmmmmmmmm

3dfx

[entrails_770]

3dfx were good bar the v3 3500 their drivers were good and the hardware was good i had v2,banshee,v3 and still have a v5 5500 in my kids pc.It was a sad day when they died.But they always seemed to be behind the game after they started making thier own cards..

Investors gets the raw end of this...

[Anonymous Coward]

They did truely sell out. The people who bought their shares were left with nothing. And once again the CEOs and all the big-urns gets a fat bonus with a big grin on their faces as they make this oh-so-tough-decision. It was so very pathethic to get the letter for 3dfx.

Re:Investors gets the raw end of this...

[Pii]

Well said.

(This post provided by a formerly proud TDFX shareholder, and recipient of said letter... *grumble**grumble*)

Re:Investors gets the raw end of this...

[Anonymous Coward]

When did you get out? I think I netted $18 on my block of shares.

Re:Investors gets the raw end of this...

[Pii]

I rode it all the way down...

I was not a big investor, by any stretch of the imagination.

By the time I was going to unload, the entertainment value of crashing exceeded the amount of money I would have been able to recoup.

I took a few deep drags off the oxygen mask that had convieniently dropped from the ceiling as we lost cabin pressure, and coasted into the drink like a trooper.

It was such a shame. There they sat, king of the mountain, having essentially created the market for high end PC graphics... When I bought their stock, I never imagined there would come a time when Voodoo wasn't synonymous with 3D.

Then, one day in early '99, I saw the news that NVidia would be powering the Xbox, and I knew that there would be no rebound for 3dfx.

They didn't innovate enough

[91degrees]

They should have added useful features and clever thinking that circumvented the problems that plagued the other companies. AGP Texture bandwidth could have been solved by texture compression, but S3 ended up doing that. 32 bit colour was implemented by everyone except 3DFX. They could have saved a lot fo bandwidth if they'd have come up with better Z buffer algorithms, but PowerVR did that. They could have added programmable graphics, but that was left to ATI. They could have put T&L on the card, but that was left to Nvidia.

3DFX failed because they didn't innovate

Re:They didn't innovate enough

[ites]

Technology does not solve social issues
and here it looks like 3dfx did not deliver the technology,
but IMHO the problem came because their product became a commodity item.
Frankly, the market for high-end graphics came and went.
Cheap on-board chips work well for 95% of users.
In such a market, only a couple of suppliers can remain
and it will be those with the lowest margins and costs,
not those with the best technology (which means creative people and higher margins).

Re:They didn't innovate enough

[hummer357]

Still,

I wonder what nvidia's going to do with the 3dfx and gigapixel technologies...

h357

Re:They didn't innovate enough

[CoolVibe]

3DFX failed because they didn't innovate

No, it failed because of braindead and utterly stupid upper management. Most companies die that way.

It's always the management that screws it up. Remember that. Read Dilbert. Understand it. Make it your corporate religion. Prevent falling on your face. Oh, and don't forget: laugh.

Re:They didn't innovate enough

[Anonymous Coward]

NV30, which should be available around Christmastime (most probably after), is rumored to be the first Nvidia product that makes use of 3dfx's/Gigapixel's IP.

Re:They didn't innovate enough

[Anonymous Coward]

They should have not wasted money sueing other companies for producing graphics cards on the grounds that they apparantly infringed their patents, even though their case was laughable, and all other manufacturers used similar techniques. Being American doesn't help you if you`re trying to flog your kit to non-american companies. Japanese companies, for example, are notoriously unbothered by flag waving.

Re:They didn't innovate enough

[miffo.swe]

They failed because of stupid managment. Innovation has nothing to do with success. Look at Microsoft and how they are a successful company that hasnt innovated anything but clippy (may there never be a part II) and Microsoft BOB.

Re:They didn't innovate enough

[Junks Jerzey]

3DFX failed because they didn't innovate

That's silly. 3dfx innovated like crazy:

* First high performance consumer level 3D card for PCs.
* First multitexturing in a PC card.
* First trilinear filtering in a PC card.
* Glide API, back when Direct3D and OpenGL were poorly supported on the PC.
* Higher precision color blending with 16 bits per pixel. Operations occurred internally at 22-bits, I think.
* Able to connect multiple Voodoo 2's together for--what was then--unheard of performance.

Let's not rewrite history to fit your own ideas, okay?

Re:They didn't innovate enough

[Tim Browse]

I wonder what nvidia's going to do with the 3dfx and gigapixel technologies...

The words 'sock' and 'drawer' spring irresistibly to mind.

Tim

Re:They didn't innovate enough

[mlong]

That's silly. 3dfx innovated like crazy:

And then they sat on their hands for a year while all their competitors lept past them.

Re:They didn't innovate enough

[Sparks23]

There were other problems, too.

3Dfx started out with amazing innovations, and also really trying to work hard with the video game companies. Speaking as a former video game programmer here, I can attest to this part; back in about '98, they were the company who really made it easy to work with their cards. Direct3D was a pain to work with and most of the other cards had lousy drivers...but 3Dfx was really working hard with us to make sure we could support them well.

Then by about 2000, 3Dfx was sitting on their laurels. They weren't really making efforts to push any significant new technologies on game companies, or trying to make the companies support those. Direct3D was much more usable as a technology, and other cards were out there...plus, Nvidia and a few other companies were doing what 3Dfx used to, and really working with the game companies.

I think basically the most telling factor was that on all the personal machines at the game development house I was at, you started to see the Voodoo cards being dumped in favor of high-end Matrox or Nvidia cards. (Admittedly, the fact that Matrox and Nvidia were giving us bunches of reference cards specifically to try and get us sold on 'em didn't hurt.)

Nvidia and Matrox kept pushing the envelope...but 3Dfx was too used to having a huge market lead. It was like the tortoise and the hare...3Dfx raced ahead of the pack with amazing innovations early on, and then sat down to rest, secure in the knowledge that they had a lead. And slept through the rest of the race. :(

Re:They didn't innovate enough

[Anonymous Coward]

I think that was a choice they made, because if you'll recall, 3dfx's stance went something like:

FILLRATE IS EVERYTHING

Re:They didn't innovate enough

[xmnemonic]

There was also...
-first usage of an accumulation buffer ("T-buffer") on a consumer video card, creating the anti-aliasing craze that we have today
-very fast memory architecture courtesy of Gigapixel subsidiary, said to influence the creation of LMA in the Geforce cards

Don't forget the Rampage (Geforce 3 killer, taped out days before 3dfx was bought by nvidia, some pictures of it in a lab are floating around on the net) which would have had some features that are only now being explored, such as:

-ability to accelerate Photoshop filters (potential for 3dlabs new "P10" architecture)
-maximum memory capacity of 256MB
-4 way onboard SLI, i.e. scalable multiple chip architecture
-~12GB/s memory bandwidth, compared to Geforce 3's ~7

Re:They didn't innovate enough

[Some Dumbass...]

AGP Texture bandwidth could have been solved by texture compression, but S3 ended up doing that. 32 bit colour was implemented by everyone except 3DFX. They could have saved a lot fo bandwidth if they'd have come up with better Z buffer algorithms, but PowerVR did that. They could have added programmable graphics, but that was left to ATI. They could have put T&L on the card, but that was left to Nvidia.

3DFX failed because they didn't innovate.

This analysis doesn't quite work.

First, you left out Matrox, who were never innovators but who are still around.

Second, you listed S3 as an innovator, but they're dead, which shouldn't happen if innovation leads to survival, right?

Finally, 3dfx made at least one major innovation later in their existence: the multi-core graphics card. Okay, so they and ATI may have both done this simultaneously (with the VooDoo 5500 and Rage Fury MAXX, respectively). Still, both companies must have been working on multi-core cards simultaneously for the release dates for their multi-chip products to be so close together.

Re:They didn't innovate enough

[rodgerd]

It's interesting that the writer starts out slamming the CEO for not understanding technology and implies that his decisions to try to follow the market for single-board solutions was to blame for the company's demise, but it becomes clear the core problems is the technical teams were incompetant - unable to execute. Chipsets that never worked, DACs that had the colour round the wrong way, boards that were out of spec for AGP support, you name it.

Re:They didn't innovate enough

[rodgerd]

Oh yeah. It was the stupid upper management that couldn't get designs to tape out successfully. It was the stupid upper management that delivered cards with messed up RGB output and failed to notice it in testing. It was stupid upper management that ignored the AGP spec when designing cards. Of course, how stupid of me!

And here was I thinking that if the chip teams can't even get red signals coming out of the red outputs on a DAC, it might be their fault!

Re:They didn't innovate enough

[Com2Kid]

First, you left out Matrox, who were never innovators but who are still around.


Huh?

Cubic Bump mapping.

Dual Head

Tri-Head

The ability to shove in how ever many G200 cards your motherboard could fit and power a huge ass screen with them.

(IBM loved that last one)

Or how about a DECENT image reduction system? I can have one screen running at 800x600@72 hertz and a second screen running at 640x480@75hz in clone mode and things look great.

Which is rather odd. :-D

One of the first companies to offer video out on a consumer level board. At an affordable price.

Then there is the matching up with their Video Editing packages.

Oh, and then there is the entire KICK ASS IMAGE QUALITY thing.

Through granted that it mostly just a case of doing what others do but doing it better then everybody else does it. :-D

Their drivers also have SOOOO many features in them that I cannot even begin to describe the sheer level of ass-kickingness that they are. They do everything. Period. Including having the functionality of some multi-hundred dollar dedicated programs. Sweet.

Oh, and Matrox also still supports the good old command line, for when the user decides to do something that, err, really messes up the screen. ;)

With my Matrox G400 Dual Head MAX card, I have piped out my secondary display to a VCR, had the VCR signal then piped back into the computer though a TV-Capture card, and then had the secondary display showup in the middle of my desktop on my primary monitor.

Rather freaky to drag things off the side of one monitor and have them appear in the middle of that very same monitor. :-D

Now sure other cards could do this, but with my Matrox card I was able to finely tune the image going to the second output until I had precisly the result that I wanted. (thus why I was running it through the TV-In card, to do an image check)

Re:They didn't innovate enough

[RyuuzakiTetsuya]

I believe obsidian had some wacky 16 way VSA-100 PCI(well, PCI lookin') card.

Plus the V4 and V5 were all about SLI with the weaker VSA-100, then again I don't know how well that thing scaled at all.

i remember back in those days I thought how funny it'd have been if nVidia released an SLI/multichip NV10 board design.

Voodoo cards

[AliasTheRoot]

At the start of the consumer 3d graphics business Voodoo were clearly superior, I still have a Voodoo 1 laying around somewhere, there were problems; the whole passthrough cable thing, the lack of windowed support & 16bit clour were all problematic. As an upgrade Voodoo offered the second revision that could run in SLI mode. It required two PCI slots in addition to your 2d graphics card and was horrendously expensive.

nVidia released the TNT that offered similar performance, in one card (not 3!), did 32 bit colour and was significantly cheaper.

3DFX was never competitive from then on, offering weaker, more expensive products that relied on brand name support.

The widespread adoption of D3D / OpenGL around this time over the proprietary Glide API was the nail in the coffin.

Re:Voodoo cards

[Anonymous Coward]

Voodoo II SLI completely creamed all competition at the time. It took the TNT2 chipsets for there to be a serious competitor.

Re:Voodoo cards

[evilviper]

The widespread adoption of D3D / OpenGL around this time over the proprietary Glide API was the nail in the coffin.

AHHHH! Now why did you have to go and mention Glide? You just brought thousands of bad memories rushing back:

Glide32.dll NOT FOUND.... HAH! you don't get to play this game...

Re:Voodoo cards

[MojoRilla]

I believe that Voodoo's lack of a single card to support 2D and 3D was a serious flaw.

I personally held off from buying a new system several months until a card came out that had both (I still am running that original TNT card).

The idea of running a separate board just for 3D never made much sense from a consumer perspective. Sure, you will get some early adopters, but clearly it wasn't sustainable in the long run. This seems to be an engineering solution to a marketing problem.

Marketer: We need to sell a card that is easy to use.
Engineer: The 2D boards out there already work well, if we integrate them on our 3D boards it will make our boards more expensive. Plus, people will have to throw away perfectly good 2D hardware every time they upgrade.
Marketer: Huh?
.
.
.
Go out of business.

Re:Voodoo cards

[Ilgaz]

Heh, those "Unreal" days. I remember getting mad to 3dfx as a rendition 2100 user.

Someone did a glide wrapper for Rendition and 3dfx sued them etc I remember.

Oh, don'T ask, Voodoo 3000 user now. Thanks to Nvidia (or anyone to blame), I have to rely on 3rd party drivers for getting gamma settings support. On Windows XP.

Re:Voodoo cards

[LtOcelot]

The AC above (currently modded at 0) is correct about a point the +5 rated parent got wrong. The original TNT was competitive with a single Voodoo 2, but not with a pair in SLI. The Voodoo 2 SLI solution remained the pretty much uncontested "hardcore" choice until the next generation appeared.

Re:Voodoo cards

[jweatherley]

But the average consumer doesn't want a freakin Beowulf cluster of graphics cards taking up PCI slots and that is why they bought nVidia boards instead.

Re:Voodoo cards

[demonbug]

nVidia released the TNT that offered similar performance, in one card (not 3!), did 32 bit colour and was significantly cheaper.

Uh, no. The original TNT offered performance similar to a single Voodoo2 (the voodoo2 had the edge framerate wise, but the TNT did offer 32-bit color). Two of them together were MUCH faster than a TNT card, albeit about 4 times as expensive when you factor in the dedicated 2d card. Nvidia didn't really take the performance lead until the TNT2 or even the Geforce.
As for 32-bit vs. 16-bit, I still tend to use 16-bit because even with my Geforce2 I pretty much have a choice of running at 800x600x32 or 1024x768x16 to get decent frame rates (in a lot of games, anyway).

Re:Voodoo cards

[Gekko]

3 Cards is a Beowulf cluster? I had 5 PCI slots on my board at around that time, granted two of them were dual ISA/PCI. I Had a sound card and a modem. Granted 5 PCI slots then was most likely rare, though IIRC you could get a riser card to add PCI slots in.

Re:Voodoo cards

[jweatherley]

Three graphics cards is two cards more than most users want...

Re:Voodoo cards

[Gekko]

Sure its more than they want now. Just like a computer the size of my living room is more than I want now. Then, at the time, if you wanted kick ass graphics that is what you wanted.

Re:Voodoo cards

[Anonymous Coward]

Why the hell would anyone still be using a Voodoo 3000? A GeForce 4 4200 is like a hundred dollars for gods sake!

Re:Voodoo cards

[jweatherley]

Then, at the time, if you wanted kick ass graphics that is what you wanted.

That's why my original post was about the average joe. The 1337 brigade are welcome to stuff their slots with hardcore graphics cards - asking even them to buy multiple cards is a tough sell though - hence 3dfx losing market share to nVidia who gave more than adequate prformance from a single card.

I'm all for over the top graphics cards, I've got a GeForce4 Ti4600, but I draw the line at multiple graphics cards for a single display and I'm sure a lot of other users do too. Hell, one nice point about my GeForce is that the single card spans two monitors! Requiring multiple cards to get nVidia beating performance was never going to appeal to 99% of the market.

Re:Voodoo cards

[RyuuzakiTetsuya]

Neither did OEMs.

If anything, that coupled with a variety of factors including stability and driver support is what the OEMs liked. I remember working for a call center around late 99 until mid 2001 that had supported 2 computer OEMs and I ended up working for both( Dell and MicronPC.com ). Surprise surprise, while Dell did ship out 3dfx Voodoo3 cards, they were rarely sold, as most customers didn't even recognize the name, but also sold them more expensive than Diamond and whoever was the Vendor of the Week was selling Riva128s, TNTs and GeForces.

Motherboard integration would also be another sector that nVidia and ATi both latched onto that 3dfx did NOT embrace at all. Until the release of the Intel i810 motherboard, the integrated graphics solution of choice for both dell and micron was the Riva 128zx. It was damn good at what it did for 2d, 3d(At the target market), reliable and cheap enough to produce en masse to be used for most high volume office machines like the Optiplex models, which of course, are just simple workstation machines.

While ATi took hold of the mobile market which until recently, nVidia hasn't even touched. ATi's mobile chips shared similar success in the market it was in at the time, for much longer than nVidia's run.

So while 3Dfx was chasing a niche market, the gaming market, nVidia was making bank by targeting the best audience of all, corporate high volume OEM sales.

Re:Last Days,

[OrangeSpyderMan]

So, you have a banshee in a box that you put under your PC and it'll run UT so well you can hear it? How does that work?

:-)

There was no reason to buy anything but 3dfx

[StupidKatz]

Up until the TNT (TNT2), 3dfx was still king of the hill... It would be like buying a Maxtor drive back in Western Digital's heyday.

You *know* what works, so why buy anything else? On the other hand, that's why I like hardware review sites like anantech and Tom's. You may not want to trust them completely, but they do give you a free peek at hardware capabilities. :)

Re:There was no reason to buy anything but 3dfx

[PainKilleR-CE]

At the time of the Riva128, though, 3dfx didn't have a good 2d board. While the Riva128 wasn't the best 2d board, either, it did do the job for most people and supplied opengl support that worked OK for many games (remember that opengl support didn't come along for Voodoo cards until Quake3 stopped support for the miniGL drivers).

Re:There was no reason to buy anything but 3dfx

[Toraz Chryx]

OpenGL support wasn't in existence for the R128 (outside of a very dodgy beta release) until just before the TNT was released IIRC :/

Re:There was no reason to buy anything but 3dfx

[PainKilleR-CE]

hmm my Viper V330 had OpenGL drivers in the box. That doesn't mean they worked very well, but they were there.

Of course, then I had to have one of those 3d switcher programs installed on my machine all the time to tell the games whether to use my Riva128 or my SLI Voodoo2 cards.

I went through the nVidia product cycles buying a TNT and then a TNT2Ultra before I pulled the Voodoo2 cards from my system. The Voodoo3 came out sometime after the GeForce if I remember correctly, which gives an idea of how bad the situation really was for 3dfx. The SLI Voodoo2 setup was better at some things than the TNT2 Ultra that came out so much later (and far superior to the cards before it), but the Voodoo3 didn't really compete very well with nVidia's cards by the time it came out.

Re:There was no reason to buy anything but 3dfx

[Datafage]

You remember incorrectly. The Voodoo3 came out shortly before the TNT2 Ultra. The Voodoo5 came out somewhat in time with the GeForce2. Note, however, that the TNT2U was pretty much superior to the Voodoo3, and the Voodoo5 was pretty much dead in the water from the beginning with very few games requiring Glide, and the GF2 had superior OpenGL and at least equal Direct3D.

It's a shame

[RailGunner]

It's a shame 3dfx couldn't innovate and keep up, as I liked their products. The first 3d accelerator I bought was a Voodoo2 Banshee, followed by a Voodoo 3 and a Voodoo 5 5500 (bought 1 week before 3dfx collapsed). In all my time using Voodoo cards, I never once had a problem with them. They were fast for their time, and there drivers seemed to be rock solid stable.

It's too bad they couldn't keep up with nVidia and ATI, though I must admit I'm loving my shiny new Radeon 9700 Pro....

Re:It's a shame

[gl4ss]

i bought the original voodoo when it was considered to be 'new'(nobody even knew what it was). and boy was the gfx great, glquake made a huge difference for example..

about the driver support though.. they kept on touting that they would release full opengl drivers instead of the mini-driver for quake, but never did(for original voodoo).

at voodoo1 time's, there really wasn't _any_ alternative to it, all the other cards were just too slow/featurless/lacking good support(glide was great, and even after v2 came out there was little alternative for the fast 3dgame card.).

their inability to move to 2d/3d cards was what killed them imho.

GLIDE

[muzzmac]

I like many others was not concerned with them going. Thier attempt to lock the market in via the proprietray GLIDE API was a blatant move to control the market.

I'm happy to see the tail end of any company that does this.

Thier lawsuit against the guy doing the GLIDE wrapper didn't help improve my opinion of them. :-)

Re:GLIDE

[Waffle Iron]

I like many others was not concerned with them going. Thier attempt to lock the market in via the proprietray GLIDE API was a blatant move to control the market.

We're all really fortunate that we avoided the nightmare of being locked in to a proprietary market controlling API from 3DFX. Luckily, we are in a new enlightened age where most games run on an open, freely shared API fostered by a community of the best minds from every segment of the industry. There's no limit to what can be done with our newfound freedom using APIs like Direct3D...

Hmm, wait a minute...

Re:GLIDE

[SScorpio]

Sure Direct3D is a closed source API, there is always OpenGL is you want to use only open source APIs

The main problem with Glide was that it has created by one company and only that company's products could support it.

Yeah, Direct3D isn't open for anyone to change, but it is a standard that anyone can create a product that adheres to it. Microsoft also seems to be very attuned to market demands and is keeping good relationships with both nVidia and ATI. These relationships allow Microsoft to know and impliment the new desired features into Direct3D.

These new features can be added to OpenGL via extensions; however, the extensions become proxitory and your end up with different company's extensions doing the same thing but are imcompatible. At least with Direct3D this doesn't happen

Re:GLIDE

[Sycraft-fu]

Actually Glide orignally was a benign move. Back in the day when the Voodoo first was being realised, there weren't any acceptable APIs out there. DirectX was still too primitive to be really taken seriously and OpenGL was just more than the Voodoo could handle quickly. Hence Glide, which was optimised for how the Voodoo hardware worked.

The first Voodoo really was a pretty amazing hack to make it work at all. When 3dfx first demoed their new card on a simulator, they got laughed at, people said they'd never make it real silicon. It was therough a lot of ingenuity and scaling back features that they managed to build a 3d card at a consumer pricepoint. It was expensive, yes, but not the thousands of dollars pro cards cost.

Their big problem later was that they really failed to move forward. Technology progressed to the point where you didn't have to make all the compramises and cards like the TNT and TNT2 proved it. Also, Glide was a relic that they should have tried to phase out since DirectX did come to mature and cards had no trouble with OpenGL.

Re:GLIDE

[quacking duck]

Direct 3D is a "standard" only for Windows. Given a choice between a closed standard that works only on one OS versus a closed standard that works on several platforms, I'll take the latter.

Re:GLIDE

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, Glide predated Direct3D and was one of the reasons that GLQuake (along with a mini-GL layer), under *DOS*, was possible.

Re:GLIDE

[4farscape]

Hey and lets not lose sleeep about DirectX either!!! once again...hummm.

Re:GLIDE

[Zeinfeld]

We're all really fortunate that we avoided the nightmare of being locked in to a proprietary market controlling API from 3DFX. Luckily, we are in a new enlightened age where most games run on an open, freely shared API fostered by a community of the best minds from every segment of the industry. There's no limit to what can be done with our newfound freedom using APIs like Direct3D...

That is precisely the point. Given a choice between having the software standard set by a hardware company and a software company the market has always chosen the software company. It happened on glide and it happened on Windows.

The reason is very simple, the rival hardware companies are not going to allow their business to be subject to a competitor's control of the interface layer. However 'good' Glide was there was no way that it was in the interests of nVidia et. al. to support an interface controlled by 3Dfx. So it made perfect sense for the rival manufacturers to support DirectX.

OpenGL suffered from the same problem since regardless of the number of times SGI claimed that it was an 'open standard' the field was tilted from the start in favor of a rival hardware manufacturer that had a very different interest.

DirectX won because of elementary market dynamics and also because Microsoft presented DirectX as a gaming platform and not as a 3D platform. This was the critical wedge between the game companies and the OpenGL scene. DirectX has features like audio synchronization built into the core. There is simply no comparable standard for audio interfaces - the last attempt I am aware of was Jim Gettys work following on from the X Consortium.

Three or four years ago The Motley Fool chose 3DFx as a pick for the Fool portfolio. I dropped in on the discussion board and saw all sorts of chatter about how glide was going to rule and so competitors to 3DFx wer dead. I could see then that it was not going to happen and so decided to pass on the investment, just as well I did since it quickly became a dog.

Basically the only reason why the market ever opts for hegemony is to save itself from an even less tollerable hegemony with interests directly opposed to the stakeholders. That is why it decided that Microsoft was better than IBM and 3Dfx. Compaq, Gateway and the rest could see that Microsoft was an indirect threat while IBM was a direct one.

Re:GLIDE

[drinkypoo]

When glide was release directx didn't exist at all and they should have just started with "minigl" and skipped the glide thing entirely. Why reinvent the wheel when you can just support a subset of opengl? People can just not use the opengl functions which you don't support, simple as that.

Instead they created another silly proprietary API which we are now paying for in terms of a lack of compatibility. If they had simply used opengl then we would all be able to run all that old 3dfx-accelerated software on our brand spanking new cards. It wouldn't use all of their features, but so what?

Re:GLIDE

[abdulla]

Apparently they also built there OpenGL and Direct3D support around there Glide drivers, this also didn't help them in the long run.

What?

[Anonymous Coward]

"including an employee who forgot to fly to Asia to pickup the first Voodoo5 chips" Because we all know how expensive FedEX is :-)...

Surprising this has not happened with soundcards

[ninjadoug]

Makes me wonder how Creative have managed to stay top of the soundcard pile. They seem to have been making consistently the best cards, (apart from a brief time when Gravis Ultrasound marketed using the Demo scene). No-one has really compared for the non-professional market. In fact I cannot think of any other Tech product where the first company to make something is still regarded the best. (Intel excluded) So from a business perspective maybe innovation is not the key but improvement of existing technolagy. Sad but true

Bad modding

[Anonymous Coward]

That was not offtopic. It's exactly what happened to 3DFX. They went for the high-end, while leaving the mass-market to their competition. Their competition sold far more units, even if at much lower cost, made more money and therefore developed their technology at a faster pace. 3DFX lost out and went bust because of their tactics. How is that offtopic? It's right on the nose.

Re:Bad modding

[Skuld-Chan]

I wish their was a score "stupid" or "idiotic" - it would fit the parent post.

There's Turtle Beach

[Anonymous Coward]

However, they do not appear to be popular, or even widely available, here in Europe. Until extremly recently, every sound card I have ever seen for sale, or installed, or owned myself, has been a Creative card of some description. As it happens, this computer I am using (Company owned) has a Turtle Beach in it, and that is the first time I have ever seen one. At home I currently use the onboard Via 82Cxx Ac'97, because it was there, and it is the first time I have heard on board audio actually sound passable.

Creative have been at the top of the pile for so long that it is difficult to imagine them going the way of 3dfx. However, sound cards are becoming a comodity item, and it seems that they are bailing out of the low end market as quickly as possible. The low end is being eaten up by integrated motherboard chipsets.

Well this has certainly been a bit of a rant without much of a point. Or direction. Oh well.

Glide emulator?

[mccalli]

A lot of games got coded for Glide at that time, making them 3DFX only.

Are there any Glide emulators around, that convert to OpenGL or Direct3D? That would make these games playable and allow them to take advantage of non-Voodoo accelerator cards.

Cheers,
Ian

Re:Glide emulator?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes- google for glide emulator.

Re:Glide emulator?

[mccalli]

Doh! :-)

OK, that search led me to here where a good few are around.

Sentinel Returns can live again...

Cheers,
Ian

3DFX and Real3D

[BobWeiner]

I used to work at a company called Real3D. The company was thoroughly mismanaged -- despite having an excellent engineering group. It's a similar tale to 3DFX, only R3D never quite penetrated the market. Eventually the company folded, all the engineers were laid off, and most of them have gone to work for ATI. Whatever was left of R3D was eventually consumed by Intel.

I remember walking by the manager of engineering 's office -- he was busy day-trading stocks all day. Our marketing department kept trying to add new features to our board (feature-creep-itis), trying to scramble to catch up to the competition. The introduction of new features really pushed back our schedules in a big way.

Poor management and poor marketing are what really killed R3D.

Re:3DFX and Real3D

[Anonymous Coward]

I used to work at a company called Real3D. The company was thoroughly mismanaged....all the engineers were laid off, and most of them have gone to work for ATI.....

Posting anonomously here to protect my buttocks... Once R3D got to that stage it degenerated into trying to extract income from other 3D companies by threatening them with patents. I believe that 3Dfx was one of the companies targetted.

In particular, they claimed to have invented MIP mapping/trilinear filtering when in fact prior art predated the filing date of the patent. It's enough to make you froth at the mouth.

Re:3DFX and Real3D

[Anonymous Coward]

Bad manager. No donut.

Re:3DFX and Real3D

[_ph1ux_]

This happens all the time. Most companies out there have really bad management. I used to work at a VOIP company - www.quicknet.net

They have hands down the worst executive management I have ever seen. They had a truely brilliant engineering team - who were producing some great products - but since the executive team is so incompetant as far as managers go, they lost all their best employees.

They havent totally died yet - but they are not where they should have been in the market due to their really really poor decisions.

so - this is normal. Most of the really big companies all have their share of bad management but they have gotten over the hurdle to where they are big enough to survive off of processes put in place when good management was around. If you look at any large organization you will find a certain percentage of driftwood employees and managers who just float through their jobs by creating pointless things to do.

Re:Surprising this has not happened with soundcard

[Night0wl]

There is also the occasion when something is still on top because no one knows better. If you've owned a mobo based on a via chipset, and a creative card. I bet more often then not you had some issues with it.
I own a Gametheater XP, as well as a Turtle Beach Santa Cruz. Both provide the functionality any offering of Creative can. With a hell of a lot fewer compliance issues.
I'll admit I have been interested in some of Creatives recent releases, they have a few with an interesting break-out box. But it's still just a different set of knobs on the same broken sound card.
I wont purchase another Creative at the present time. I'm quite pleased with Turtle Beach and/or Hercules. But one can't predict the future.

Something I learned in the 90s...

[Anonymous Coward]

Never trust middle aged, white guys that play golf and drive a German car. Every company that I have worked for with one of these guys in charge has failed. The best business I ever worked for was run by a Cuban lesbian and I was stupid enough to quit and go work for some middle aged, white guy. DUMB!!! I wish I was still with the Cuban lesbian's company. But I am sure some middle aged, white guy will eventually buy her out and screw it up.

Plus, any one notice the national news perp walks of the corporate crooks? They are all middle aged, white guys! Bet you money they drive German cars and play golf. I just know it!

Moral of the story, allow hunting on golf courses and require golfers to wear antlers when playing.

Re:Something I learned in the 90s...

[Anonymous Coward]

Let me guess, you're a black, disabled, lesbian, communist?

Re:Surprising this has not happened with soundcard

[jilles]

Well creative bought aureal two years ago (creator of the a3d standard) and thus eliminated their primary competitor in the 3d sound market.

I still have a vortex 2 based card which actually still is a nice card. The only problem is that driver support under win xp/2k and linux is really lousy.

Next week I'll receive my new PC and my voodoo 3 and vortex 2 cards will be retired.

Death by arrogance

[John Ineson]

They day 3DFX bought STB was the beginning of the end. The sheer arrogance of believing they could cut off all their customers and just have the whole business to themselves. That they could compete with both chip *and* board manufacturers, and still come out on top. Sure, they had a head start, but Creative, Diamond, etc, would inevitably throw their considerable support behind another chip company.

The management overplayed their hand, big style, they were bound to lose. They were just way too cocky. Of course you can see that just from the lunch budget.

Re:Death by arrogance

[MarkLR]

It really would not have made much difference it they remained a chip only company like NVIDA or moved to the ATI style if they could not produce the next generation chips. They screwed up when they decided the Banshee didn't need 32 bit color and that multiple chips on one card was the approach to go. Every one connected to 3Dfx's management should be barred from the tech industry forever.

Re:Surprising this has not happened with soundcard

[PainKilleR-CE]

Makes me wonder how Creative have managed to stay top of the soundcard pile. They seem to have been making consistently the best cards, (apart from a brief time when Gravis Ultrasound marketed using the Demo scene). No-one has really compared for the non-professional market.

Both Gravis and Aureal made better sound chips than Creative, and better cards were made from the chips. Both companies lost to Creative the same way, too: Creative brought massive lawsuits with little merit that lasted so long the companies went bankrupt paying the legal fees to defend themselves.

In other words, Creative managed to stay at the top of the soundcard pile by legislating anyone that looked competetive out of existance.

Too much work?

[purrpurrpussy]

Seesm to me (last page of the story) that if they did indeed ahve all these projects running concurrently they would have over-burdeoned their engineers.

There doesn't seem to be enough spread in the sorts of products they where going to fab either. They needed to break out of just pure graphics chips and produce a better range for those on different budgets. It's all well and good shooting for the high end BUT nV still sell bucket loads of TNT2 type cards.

Re:Too much work?

[moderators_are_w*nke]

I don't think those prodcts would have been at the same stage in the development cycle. It seems to me to be one of the better aspects of 3dfx that they kept going with the new products. Not to do so would have left them completely dead in the water had they stayed in business.

I would have been interesting to see how products like Mojo would have compared with the likes of GeForce 4s and the new Radeons when they all came to market.

Re:Surprising this has not happened with soundcard

[kin_korn_karn]

good to hear someone stick up for the Santa Cruz, I bought one early on and it's a fantastic card. I wish it did EAX as well as the Creative cards, but it's all good.

Sure!

[zrk]

Most secret technology is often sent through methods that can be intercepted by halfway decent corporate spies.

Re:Sure!

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm guessing you operated out of San Hosa.

Re:Surprising this has not happened with soundcard

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, they weren't the first makers of the modern soundcard. I think that distinction would go to Adlib not Creative Labs. Creative Labs first showing of a soundcard was the incredibly medicore Game Blaster. We also can't forget the incredible for its time Roland MT32 which still has kick ass Midi today.

Re:Surprising this has not happened with soundcard

[Anonymous Coward]

I had an SB Live! and a GeForce 2 in a Via K133 motherboard. I never had any problems.

Not that I'm saying that no one ever had any problems, just that not everyone did have those problems.

3dfx started to fail for this reason

[MtViewGuy]

I think one thing that really started to kill 3dfx was the fact until Voodoo5, 3dfx acceleration required you buy a separate board in addition to the main graphics card, something many users and OEM's intensely dislike.

When both nVidia and ATI started offering better 3-D graphics cards that didn't need a second card for good 3-D performance, that seriously hurt 3dfx very quickly. It also didn't help that 3dfx's offerings when the Voodoo5 did finally get released didn't compare well with the nVidia and ATI competition, either.

What finally killed 3dfx was the release of nVidia's GeForce 256 chipset, which offered a quantum leap forward in 3-D acceleration. ATI's rapid development of the Radeon R100 and R200 chipsets didn't help things for 3dfx, either.

Re:3dfx started to fail for this reason

[MentalPunisher2001]

Nope.
Until the Riva 128/Riva TNT arrived on the scene, 3dfx was the ONLY way to go.
Trust me - I even had a Rendition Verite card.
Don't even mention ATI's rage pro (or MY rage at the lack of decent drivers for it).
After the TNT, Voodoo 2 SLI was STILL faster.
The Banshee gave 3dfx a 2d/3d solution, but it was inferior to the TNT AND the Voodoo 2 (without SLI).
Later, 3dfx created the Voodoo 3 - in its many flavors, at different clock speeds.
NONE could render in 32 bit color.
Nvidia came out with the TNT 2 which COULD render in 32 bit color, and was slightly faster anyways (my V3 topped out at 200MHz, a lot of TNT 2 cards went even faster - and could use asynchronous memory/GPU speeds (yes, I know the term GPU was non-existent at the time - but it is now).
That was the time for 3dfx to shine with its Rampage product.
Nvidia released the Geforce - bringing geometry acceleration to the masses.
3dfx brought the Voodoo 4 and 5, which were 32 bit enabled. However, they did not have geometry acceleration, and used a more expensive multiple chip architecture to achieve semi-competitive performance. They were behind the times in an industry where you cannot afford to fall behind.
That was the end - Rampage never saw the light of day. Even the Voodoo 5 6000 (or Voodoo 6 6000 - I forget) vanished.
3dfx was good, but NVidia made some bets which paid off.
3dfx was used to LOOONNNGGG product cycles.
Remember how many years the Voodoo graphics chipset (original) ruled the 3d scene??
Remember how long the V2 SLI obliterated the competition??
Nvidia changed everything with their 6 month product cycles - less profit, but more progress.
Had 3dfx encountered stronger opposition in the Voodoo Graphics days, we might not be speaking of the company in the past tense.

Sorry if this is double posted - my login didn't work right.

Re:3dfx started to fail for this reason

[JerkBoB]

I think one thing that really started to kill 3dfx was the fact until Voodoo5, 3dfx acceleration required you buy a separate board in addition to the main graphics card ...

That's not true. I had a Voodoo3 in my computer until only a few months ago, and it did 2D/3D all by its own self.

Now I have a GF4 Ti4200, but I think I need to get a faster proc than the 800MHz Athlon that's in there now.

/me reluctantly plods along on the upgrade treadmill...

Re:3dfx started to fail for this reason

[MtViewGuy]

I still contend that the one-board solution was what really did in 3dfx.

Once nVidia developed the RIVA 128 and TNT/TNT2 chipsets, you could get decent 3-D performance without having to hog a valuable expansion slot(s) like what you had to do with the earlier Voodoo cards. This is something a lot of end users and OEM's really liked in terms of simpler installation.

Alas, by the time 3dfx released Voodoo5, both nVidia and ATI with their one-board solutions pretty much sewed up the market, and it was essentially all over for 3dfx.

By the way, the original ATI Rage Pro chipset wasn't really that great for 3-D; it wasn't until the Rage 128 that ATI started to really make strides for 3-D performance, and the Radeon R100/R200 chipsets finally had pretty good 3-D performance.

In short, 3dfx sat on its laurels too long and could not come back against nVidia and ATI.

Re:3dfx started to fail for this reason

[(H)olyGeekboy]

one thing that really started to kill 3dfx was the fact until Voodoo5, 3dfx acceleration required you buy a separate board in addition to the main graphics card

What facts are YOU working with, guy?

The Banshee and VooDoo3 lines were ALL cards with 2d/3d chipset combos. Only the first two VooDoo iterations were separate passthrough boards.

It's all in the article. And GeForce / GeForce 2 were both benchmark-smoked by the VooDoo5 cards, but the prices were too high and the products were introduced too late... if at all, as was the case with the V5-6000.

Re:3dfx started to fail for this reason

[xmnemonic]

ATI's rapid development of the Radeon R100 and R200 chipsets didn't help things for 3dfx, either.

"Rapid"? Come on, the reason the ATi video cards based on those chips failed was that they were released months late. Many thought that the same mistake would occur with the later Radeon models, though thankfully it didn't.

Re:3dfx started to fail for this reason

[MtViewGuy]

However, ATI was saved by the fact they had a good number of OEM contracts, which pretty much kept them going until the more modern Radeon models started to make serious inroads among upgrade customers. Yes, the Radeon 8500 was a bit late and the initial drivers for the board was a bit disappointing, but in the end ATI did finally release decent drivers and the Radeon 8500 was much-liked.

But frankly, I do think that 3dfx's inability to take on nVidia and ATI in the OEM market by 1999 and their ill-advised purchase of STB did them in. :-(

It's the management, silly

[Aapje]

Yep, it's all very simple:

If a company fails because it tries to do the wrong things, the management is at fault because they are supposed to tell the rest of the company what to do. If the rest of the company fails to do the things the management asks of them, the managers are at fault because they hired these guys.

In short, always blame the boss when something goes wrong. ;)

Re:It's the management, silly

[jasonbw]

Isn't the captain responsible for his/her crew?

Re:It's the management, silly

[Natalie's Hot Grits]

Though you seem to be making a funny, do you really know how close to the mark you are?

If you think about it, how many jobs have you had where everything was hunky dorey? And did you realise that it probably was like that because of management? Now look back at all the jobs that were just run by idiots.

You are more correct than you know, even though it was ment as a joke.

Re:It's the management, silly

[Anonymous Coward]

In short, always blame the boss when something goes wrong. ;)

That's why they pay them six figures+.

Re:It's the management, silly

[Aapje]

Why do you think I wasn't serious just because I ended on a light note? It's actually incredibly smart* to write a post like this, since the people who understand it will see the wisdom, while the people who don't (managers) see it as a joke. So my post will be appreciated by everyone and won't cost me my job.

*Figured this out later though ;)

Liquidation is not the same as bankruptcy

[ites]

"Death of a business" is exactly the thing to avoid.
Normal liquidation means paying all creditors,
giving the employees a decent period of dismissal
and splitting the remains between the shareholders.
It's not about quitting after a "first profit"
but about applying the same rules to the future
as one hopes the founders applied at the start.

dear old Voodoo... and a message to developers

[ynohoo]

I got tired of chasing this tech curve. Sure, I like playing computer games, but keeping up with the spec required just ticks me off. I've got an old P1 233mmx with a Voodoo2 (which Quake3 runs just fine on, thank you), and a P3 laptop with no hardware acceleration.
So I go to the games store these days, and (with the exception of Civ3) there's nothing to buy - unless I want to stump up a couple of thousand for a new system. Thanks, but no thanks.

Re:dear old Voodoo... and a message to developers

[Dehumanizer]

You just don't like games.

Some of us *do*.

Re:dear old Voodoo... and a message to developers

[Datafage]

Playing a modern game requires less than $1000 in new hardware if you still have monitor, keyboard, and mouse. While not exactly pocket change, it's nto horrible. A game that was designed to run well on your desktop would look worse than all its competitors and bomb. If you want a game that requires little or no acceleration, look online for freeware games. The commercial game market, for better or worse, requires hardware pretty much no more than 2 years old.

Re:dear old Voodoo... and a message to developers

[ynohoo]

Not neccessarily true - Unreal tournament worked fine on old and new systems. No hardware acceleration? Still looked and played good. Monster latest card? Looks excellent, plays the same.
Designers spend so much effort on getting it looking excellent, and forget they are loosing sales without supporting older setups. I've got other things I'd rather do with a spare grand.

Re:dear old Voodoo... and a message to developers

[Lost Engineer]

There's a solution for people like us: console games. Maybe not too popular around here but at least they're cheap. Some console stuff is better than pc too, especially if you're into the right genres.

Re:dear old Voodoo... and a message to developers

[jasonbw]

$1k seems a bit much. I just put together a pretty damn good system for $800, mouse and keyboard included, and still feel like we overdid it.

But hell, you could buy a $500 system from walmart now (with an agp slot, mind you), slap a Radeon 9000 in it (about $100 - hell, crucial's selling its 8500le for $110) and play just about any 'modern' game.

yes, its still a bunch more than $200 for a console, but you can also do productive-type things on a full-fledged computer.

Also, don't forget why developers push hardware with new games (programs, operating systems). To sell new computers and computer parts. Once 'good enough' happens, the industry will dry up and there will be even less games and hardware available.

Re:dear old Voodoo... and a message to developers

[MadBurner]

FRAMERATE IS LIFE! put ut on a lan and play with people that are actually getting good framerates. I was a walking target with my old voodoo 3/3000. it doesn't show in single player but when you put your machine up against other machiens through a lan game .... FRAMERATE IS LIFE!

Re:dear old Voodoo... and a message to developers

[ynohoo]

I thought hardware manufacturers want to sell new hardware. Game developers want to sell new games. Or do game developers get their initial funding from hardware manufacturers? Sounds like payola to me...

Re:dear old Voodoo... and a message to developers

[Anonymous Coward]

What, the bargain bins haven't got anything in them worth playing?

Sorry, but you see the same kind of thing everywhere, not just in computers. No shipping startup will ever be able to compete against UPS and FedEx if they don't use 'newfangled' barcode readers and computers. NASCAR teams of yesteryear would have zero chance against today's crews. The entire German Wehrmacht of 1942 would be crushed to powder by only one or two modern US Army divisions at full strength. A [US]football player from the 40s would be hospitalised minutes into the game if he wore his old padding.

You can't expect to get full benefits out of the latest games without at least attempting to fulfill the minimum specs. Sorry. That's just the way it is.

Evolve. Cope. That's life.

Re:dear old Voodoo... and a message to developers

[Anonymous Coward]

abandonware, emulators, there's no reason to not keep up with games just because you don't have the hardware! ;)

regards,

p200/128mb ram/4mb gfx ;)

Re:dear old Voodoo... and a message to developers

[jasonbw]

well, both the America's Army game and UT2k3 demos both had Nvidia sponsorships behind them. There was the story a few months ago about Doom 3 being shown off on some new ATI hardware. I'm sure there's a significant amount of resource sharing between the both of them.

Re:dear old Voodoo... and a message to developers

[Datafage]

Sure, UT works fine on his desktop. UT is three years old. And yes, you could run UT without hardware acceleration, but it hardly looked "good" and was noticably slow.

As for your other point, developers get more money from making their games look good on new hardware and pretty good on hardware a year old than they would from making their games run well on hardware five years old. If you want to keep your old system, that's fine, no reason to needlessy upgrade, but anything older than one or two years is irrelevant in terms of modern games, and you have to deal with that.

Re:Surprising this has not happened with soundcard

[ninjadoug]

yes but these could only be used to play tunes (Fm synthisis on Adlib bit better on Roland) any explosions were silly musical sounds Creative added a DAC and then people took PC games seriously. better stop now, going off topic I see, apolagies

Re:Surprising this has not happened with soundcard

[Drachemorder]

I've got an SB Live Platinum on a VIA-based mobo and it works like a charm, even in Linux. (I had to disable the on-board audio in BIOS before Linux would configure the SB card properly, though, but that's not really something I'd call an "issue" with the mobo --- any conflict with onboard audiowould need to be resolved, no matter what the chipset.) Maybe they do have problems on some boards, though. My mobo is a newer board, and they might have fixed some things.

Re:Why did they pick such a name?

[Ilgaz]

Are you the same guy who blamed Mozilla for being communist because of that Red Star? (yes, it HAPPENED!)

I am turkish and even I can understand "voodoo" is named after "voodoo magic". Like, it was magic to us those times to see realtime 3d graphics on PC. Its the time you were attending some sort of church chorus and get brainwashed.

I only thought muslim fundementalism was evil before seeing some people like you.

I wouldn't reply to such an obvious troll (or if you really mean it, god help you) but seeing this kind of thing on /. pushed me.

Oh btw, what about PENTAgon? ;-)

Re:Last Days,

[MentalPunisher2001]

UT ran GREAT on my Voodoo 3.
It used the 3dfx Glide API, and ran closer to 60fps for me (even at higher res).

Re:Why did they pick such a name?

[tx_mgm]

you dont like the naming scheme of the cards because they're pagan?
would you have bought a 3dfx catholic 6000?
i dont know about you, but the word "voodoo" just sounds cool...

Re:Surprising this has not happened with soundcard

[Forkenhoppen]

Simple; Creative does it with Creative marketing.

The Audigy, for instance, is little more than a gamer's card. Any serious review of the card that you come across on the internet will tell you this, or if you bought it hoping for some advanced features, you'll find it out for yourself.

Here are some examples of this Creative marketing:

- The Audigy does support 24bit/96kHz sound playback, as advertised, but does not actually play it at that. The second it hits the main chip, it's downmixed to 16/44. So while you can play sound at the higher frequency to it, you're not actually going to hear it. (This is what they mean when they plaster 24/96 all over the boxart.)

- The Audigy does not have independant recording and playback volume controls on the line in. If you wish to record something on a TV tuner, for instance, then you'll have to either listen to it while it records, or turn off the global volume on your soundcard. (Or turn off the speakers.) This makes it impossible to use an Audigy in a PVR setup.

- The much-touted sub 100dB SNR is only on playback. On recording, the SNR is much higher.

I haven't been this disappointed in a card since my SB 128 upgrade ran slower than my SB 64. (I suspect the 64 did the soundfonts in hardware; the 128 did them in software.) Looking at the new Audigy 2, it appears that they'll be offering the 24/96 functionality that was insinuated to be present in the original Audigy, but I don't think I'll bite. I think my next card will be a Hoontech.

And, of course, this is all off-topic..

Re:Why did they pick such a name?

[Anonymous Coward]

You're an idiot. I just thought you might like to know.

Or IHBT? IHL?

Re:Why did they pick such a name?

[Anonymous Coward]

"They might have been great engineers at 3dfx, but I as well as many other" [um, not that many, since 3dfx were market leaders] "people would not simply buy a card named after pagan worshop with some satanic elements and put it my computer in my bedroom."

And I suppose you don't like using "icons" either? (I know there's a commandment about them; but, as I once explained to a client, you're supposed to click them, not worship them). I somehow doubt that God will strike you down for your choice of graphics card, unless He's a flight-sim fanatic.

No one makes a religion look more foolish than a mindless zealot.

Re:Why did they pick such a name?

[purrpurrpussy]

I only thought muslim fundementalism was evil before seeing some people like you.

Think of the crusades!!! Won't somebody think of the crusades!!!!!

You might as well toss your computer.

[Viewsonic]

The industry will not stop for a single person who thinks it is too expensive to upgrade once or even twice a year.

The Real failure of 3dfx

[travail_jgd]

Sorry, but you're completely wrong.

1. The Voodoo 3, 4, and 5 all had integrated 2D and 3D.

2. If OEMs didn't like add-on cards, why did they sell them preinstalled? I was shopping online for my PC way-back-when, and Voodoo 1 (and eventually Voodoo 2) cards were offered as (overpriced) options. Just like you can get NIC's and CD-RWs as options now.

3. The GeForce and Radeons weren't the main killers of 3dfx. The other contributing factors were:

a. Technical limitations. The Voodoo 3 and 4 line weren't much more than fast Banshees. My Voodoo 3 card has most of the same limitations as a Voodoo 1 (16-bit color, 256x256 textures), but almost no additional 3D features (primarily higher screen resolution).

b. Marketing. The Voodoo 1 and 2 lines were always the fastest in benchmarks. NVidia's TNT line was slower (but had more stable framerates), and Matrox was known for picture quality. When the Voodoo 3/4 came out, 3dfx lost the speed crown, and started talking about "image quality".

c. NVidia's 6-month release cycle. 3dfx couldn't keep up, and their "older" cards had an outdated feature-set. The GeForce was a big advance, but only in terms of fill-rate; there weren't any games (at that time) taking advantage of the new features. 3dfx lost a lot of the hearts of gamers and enthusiasts when they started pushing back release dates.

d. Buying STB. I don't think that the purchase was the final nail in 3dfx's coffin, but it certainly didn't provide the desired benefits.

Re:The Real failure of 3dfx

[UpnAtom]

Plus the whole T&L issue. For a long time, T&L looked like a largely unsupported feature. There was Q3 of course, then a trickle of T&L games a year later.
It took more than 2 years after the release of the GF256 before widespread T&L support. The article points out how Voodoo 4/5 missed this enormous window of opportunity.

Dave.

Re:The Real failure of 3dfx

[rodgerd]

1 - By the time the Voodoo 3 was out, the writing was on the wall. People were beginning to notice better image quality and features from NVIDIA and ATI.

Re:The Real failure of 3dfx

[abdulla]

Since I had a Banshee, I can testify to the fact that they were indeed slower than Voodoo 3/4 for that matter Voodoo 2's, simple because they only had one TMU (Texture Management Unit), so could not do multitexturing and had to do it all in multiple passes, killing the framerate, I don't know where you got the idea that Banshees were king of the hill or that the newer Voodoos were that crap.

Re:The Real failure of 3dfx

[travail_jgd]

I said that "The Voodoo 3 and 4 line weren't much more than fast Banshees."

Other than being faster, they really didn't offer any new features. Excluding fillrate, maximum screen resolution, and texture buffer size, my Voodoo 3's 3D (and your Banshee's) is just a sped-up Voodoo 1. No transform and lighting, no shaders, no 24/32 bit color, no support for large textures, etc.

My Voodoo 3 was a great card for the time -- it still does a great job with Half-Life and Unreal Tournament -- but even when it was new, it wasn't "new".

Re:Why did they pick such a name?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not just the star, red is a sign of communism! :)

Re:3D Rectum

[Anonymous Coward]

The blade is calling you. It wants to sink it's self into your skin. The body will feel more blunt and pleasurable with every slice, squelching your pain and worries with warmth of life.

Re:Why did they pick such a name?

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh shit, man you didn't hear?
(I guess that's what you get for not going to the meetings)

A "Matrox" is a Pagan ceremony that involves the ritualistic raping of chickens.

If you are a good christian you'll burn that heathenis card at once!

Re:Surprising this has not happened with soundcard

[Anonymous Coward]

The Audigy does support 24bit/96kHz sound playback, as advertised, but does not actually play it at that. The second it hits the main chip, it's downmixed to 16/44. So while you can play sound at the higher frequency to it, you're not actually going to hear it. (This is what they mean when they plaster 24/96 all over the boxart.)

It's actually worse than that. One of the Winamp developers (Brennan Underwood?) did an analysis of the Audigy's audio capabilities, and found that:

1. The Audigy's driver rejects all audio streams above 16/48. It doesn't even downmix it for you -- it just rejects everything above that outright.
2. The DACs are 24/96 capable, but the DSP doesn't seem to be. That's how they get away with advertising 24/96.
3. You could, in theory, get 24/96, but only if you had a 24/96 digital source and outputted it directly to the SPDIF port, bypassing the DSP entirely.
4. Creative is full of shit.

Although the last one is not much of surprise to people who dealt with the SB Live! fiasco. (The SB Live!, due to not being 100% PCI compliant, couldn't share IRQs correctly; but ACPI requires that all PCI devices share the same IRQ, so if you had an ACPI-compliant board and OS, you were screwed. Creative's tech support blamed the motherboards, telling people that their boards were unsupported and that they should build new computers with motherboards that didn't enable ACPI's IRQ-sharing feature.)

Voodoo 1

[RatBastard]

The Voodoo 1 was one of the most ground-breaking pieces of hardware I've ever seen. In an era when a good graphics card would set you back $400.00 (US) and still give you NO 3d acceleration, a day when no one cared about that, the Voodoo 1 came out of nowhere and changed everything.

While it did have the drawback of needing a 2D video card in your system, it did have the advantage that it simply worked with ANY video card you had. Period. It did what it claimed it would do and it did it well.

3DFX really pulled a rabit out of a hat with that card. Many people do not remember that the compitition was either laughable (The Verite or the NV1) or so expensive as to be rediculous. 3DFX created a consumer level 3D card at a price point people would accept.

To do this they concentrated on doing ONLY what was needed. This would later bite them on the ass when they tried to move into the combined 2D/3D card market.

As for GLIDE, well, there wasn't anything else out there. Direct 3D was a joke at the time and OpenGL didn't even run on Windows 95 (the primary gaming OS of teh day). GLIDE wasn't perfect, and it wasn't portable, but it worked.

Looking back on the history of the computer (or any other) industry, we can see that the trail blazers often get left behind by the people that follow their lead, and this is what happened to 3DFX. The dicisions that made their product work in the early days (16-bit color, limited texture size, 3D only, etc...) created a foundation of basic technology that held them back later. The minute NVidea came out with the TNT 3DFX' days were numbered.

I owned a Orchid Righteos 3D, a Canopus Voodoo 1, a Creative Labs Voodoo 2, and a Creative Labs Voodoo 3. They were all great products for their day. There are times that I think about getting my old Voodoo 1 card back from my friend and rebuilding my old gaming rig to play some of my old GLIDE games again.

Not outrageously expensive.

[Inoshiro]

Well, not compared to what people will pay today. Do you really need to spend 400-500$ USD on a GeForce 4 or Radeon 9700 Pro? But people do, just like they bought a V2 SLI config back in 1998.

You might not buy it, but someone does, otherwise they'd not be selling at that price point. Although I'd rather spend the 200$ USD on a good set of console games :)

And where is Ballard now?

[Anonymous Coward]

I worked at Diamond when Ballard pulled the STB merger. It's kind of ironic that he is now in charge of what S3 and Diamond became: SBLU.

53 days and counting until SBLU gets delisted.

Console

[Lynchenstein]

Xbox, Playstation 2, Gamecube.
Get one of each and you are still spending less than getting a new hotrod gaming PC. Then you will be able to go into the games store and spend bags of cash on the games!

Along with the company...

[i_am_nitrogen]

Whenver a company with good engineers but bad marketing dies, not only is there a loss of decent hardware, but also a loss of information. I can't find the original programmers' specs for the Voodoo series anywhere. I used to have the Voodoo3 specs in PDF, but lost it. Does anyone have the Voodoo3 specs? I've got an old voodoo3 sitting around, and I miss hardware level programming it.... 3dfx was the only recent company that was so friendly to Open Source, Free Software, and independent developers as to give out driver source code and hardware specs. Of course, though, some troll is going to try to blame their failure on the fact that they were the only company giving out source code, or that their OSS friendliness was simply a sign of their coming demise...

Re:Along with the company...

[Anonymous Coward]

This would be the company that sued people for
making compatible implementations of their API?
How open-source! How friendly!

Voodoo2

[Anonymous Coward]

When they entered the consumer market, available were units with 4mb, 8mb, and later 12mb units. They were quite costly at first. Voodoo2 offers anti-aliased polygons; which was a secret for a long time. With a Voodoo2 and XFree86 3.3, you can achieve in-window openGL graphics with a little enironment-variable trick and by leaving off the pass-through cable. Many people didn't like the idea of Voodoo2 SLI taking 2 PCI slots in addition to a 2D(and/or 3d) graphics adaptor; 3 slots total required! Quantum3d released a Voodoo2 SLI solution called the Quantum Obsidian2 X24 and it offered Voodoo2 SLI with dual 12MB RAM capability. It was fast and a more realistic solution, but it was outside the above-average consumer due to its hefty price-tag of $800.00. 75% of retailers didn't stock Quantum's X24 and good reason to do it. Now, you can buy a new OEM Quantum Obsidian2 X24 on eBay for nearly $75.00(+ S/H). All Voodoo2 SLI solutions scale with the computer and Voodoo2 SLI is a superior solution to Voodoo3 and Voodoo4 because you may integrate Voodoo2 with another brand of Graphics accelerator such as ATI, nVidia, 3DLabs, PowerVR, Matrox, etc. 3Dfx created the consumer 3d graphics market and that it their only undying success. b-bye.

Nothing learned, nothing gained from article

[Torgo's Pizza]

This article really sheds very little light on the demise of 3Dfx. Most of the information is already publicly known. The problem here is that the author was never in a position to know what was really going on, not to mention his writing style is tedious to read.

Which isn't to say that the last two pages of the article aren't interesting. It's clear the author was either a board designer or working on the silcon somehow. These last two pages help me make that assumption, and the insights as to the future chips are worth reading.

But because he was stuck in the trenches, he makes these general statements as to what the "board" was doing. Just your typical rumor-mill and water cooler talk you hear at your own office. I started to have tired head after the formulaic writing that in each paragraph read, "3Dfx tech guys did good. 3Dfx managment made poor decision. NVidia catches up." My advice is to skip over the already publicly known information and get to the last two pages which feature chip specs of cards that never made it to market.

Re:Surprising this has not happened with soundcard

[Anonymous Coward]

Makes me wonder how Creative have managed to stay top of the soundcard pile

A combination of great marketing and incompetent consumers. The Ensoniq AudioPCI had superior sound. Aureal had superior sound. Right now, Turtle Beach has superior sound. It doesn't seem to matter to consumers (ironic considering that Creative is going to lead them into the path of audio slavery with their DRM "support").

At first, the reason for Creative's success was that "Sound Blaster" was the standard, and it was quite difficult (well, a hassle at least) to develop for different sound cards in a DOS environment. This created a "I should buy Creative if I expect sound" mentality for game players (and even though no one would like to admit it, games have been driving the hardware market since 1990). After the introduction of abstracted sound APIs supported by the OS, that "SB compatibility" isn't as important, yet people still had that "I should get Sound Blaster if I want to play games" meme stuck in their heads.

HAH!

[imsabbel]

Well.
All the "first" things are correct.
Voodoo1 was great. Really really great.

Then voodoo2. Die shrink. more memory. third chip. Faster clocked. SLI possible. But no real innovation

Then banshee. 2D graphics. slower then voodoo2 sli. no new features.

then voodoo 3. faster clocked. Only innovation was enabling the voodoo2 multitexturing banshee lacked.

then
long time nothing.
---
now voodoo3 remained their main product until all was lost (the vsa-100 was to little to late). While everybody else innovated , 3dfx told people that speed, not quality is important.
The voodoo3 had the great "22 bit coloring" they advertised because EVERYBODY else supported 32 bit
The same 256*256 pixel limit for textures voodoo1 already featured ("nobody will ever want more then 640K ram, ähhh more then 65K pixels in a texture...).

They were only able to continue that long because customers and "review" sites liked them.
when 3dfx announced the voodoo3 and the stats said it still had only 16 bit rendering, limited texture sizes and so on - their fanboys cheered. Because they were told they get "22bit" colour. And quake 2 at 1024*786 in 60 frames...

You really got the impression the whole managment was stoned by this "we created the fastest biggest best thing in computer history" shit and forgot to do theis job...

Even the vsa-100 architecture couldnt save them. They simply DIDNT innovate for at least 2 years.
To long.

Where the name "voodoo" comes from...

[tlambert]

Where the name "voodoo" comes from: it's from a song:

"You Do Something to Me"
Words and Music by ColePorter , 1929

You do somethin' to me,
Somethin' that simply mystifies me,
Tell me, why should it be?
You have the power to hypnotize me . . .

Let me live 'neath your spell,
Do do that 'voodoo' that you do so well!
For you do somethin' to me,
That nobody else could do!

You . . . do . . . somethin' to me,
Somethin' that simply mystifies me,
Tell . . . me . . . why should it be?
You have the power to hypnotize me ...

Let me live 'neath your spell,
Do do that 'voodoo' that
you do so well!
For you do somethin' to me,
That nobody else could do!

That nobody else could do ...

-- Terry

wah freakin wah

[Anonymous Coward]

"...keeping up with the spec required just ticks me off..."
"...old P1 233mmx with a Voodoo2 (which Quake3 runs just fine on, thank you), and a P3 laptop with no hardware acceleration..."

But according to the second quote, you *haven't* been keeping up with the minspecs. So exactly what is it that you're pissed off at? Something you haven't had to do? Monkeys dipped in orange paint?

Pfft. Hey, here's an idea - just think of all the money you're saving by not buying all those new games *and* by not buying all those computer upgrades, and then take all that money and go very far away.

I win!!!

[Brock Suter]

My sMacPowerBook/DualVoodooRush powered sMicrowave cooks mama celeste pizzas at about .008734 frames per second!!! http://home.earthlink.net/~powersthatbe/110-1022_I MG.jpg It's all good! ;-D brockout.

What about drivers?

[Anonymous Coward]

Look at Nvidia. I still have a TNT2 and you can find almost 3 NEW "leaked" drivers every month! I also own a 3dfx Banshee and the bastards barely released 3 buggy drivers over its lifetime!

3DFX Still kicking in the simulation market

[Stonent1]

The company I work for uses Quantum3D AAlchemy systems in their simulators, they use 4, 8, or 16 3DFX VSA-100 GPUs with up to a gig of ram per video card. We seem to have no problem getting these systems from Quantum3D

When did 3dfx Jump the Shark?

[piznut]

That story was pretty interesting..although I was hoping to see a little more commentary about the Rush fiasco :p.

For me, 3dfx jumped the shark with the Voodoo Rush. Maybe I was just naive, but I figured that a card that came out after the Voodoo 2, would have similar performance (the Voodoo 1 was faster). They did make good by allowing Rush users to send in the 3d daughterboard and exchange it for a faster Voodoo 1 (which I did)...but that whole experience left a bad taste in my mouth.

I became an Nvidia convert shortly after that, as did quite a few other people who bought that card.

What about Matrox Mystique?

[Anonymous Coward]

The #1 3D card when the Voodoo 1 came out was the Matrox Mystique. It had support for Tomb Raider 2 and so sold quite a few copies. It was not a great card and didn't produce as good of output as the Voodoo 1 but it was integrated 3D and it did sell more than a few.

Lessons from "Been there, done that"

[Eric Green]

When I read the 3dfx article, I winced. The story was so familiar. Let me summarize it:

1. Bunch of cool geeks come up with great idea, and start a company.
2. They don't have lots of money, so they release a limited compromise version of the product. Even this version is really cool.
3. To handle all the sales and manufacturing tasks necessary because of the new best-selling gear, the vulture capitalists call in "professional" management, which might be someone who last ran a garbage truck company, or a carpet cleaning company.
4. The new management has no understanding of the market, so they look at what the biggest company in the market is doing, and say "We want to do that!".
5. In the meantime, this bunch of cool geeks is working on the great idea that will be the company's next product. There still isn't lots of money or people.
6. The new management says "Don't do that, we need this other product first!".
7. The new management strips the engineering team of the cool product. The engineering team pleads for more good people, but the new management says "that'll hurt our margins too much."
8. The other product flops.
9. The cool product has gotten obsolete while the other product flops.
10. Management panics and hires lots of dunderheads.
11. Meanwhile, management decides they can make more margin in another business, and put all the money from the sales of the first product into that new business.
12. The new business flops.
13. The cool product is being worked on by a few die-hard engineers, but is starved of resources. Delivery date gets shoved off further and further in the future.
14. Company realizes mistake. Hires a bunch of bodies off the street to work on cool product. Unfortunately, the bunch of bodies are dunderheads and make the project even *LATER*.
15. The first product becomes obsolete.
16. Sales plummet.
17. Company dies.

I've seen this happen so many times. The point:

1. *FOCUS*. Choose your niche. Don't try to be all things to all people. Decide exactly what you're going to do, and do that one thing. Only. Diversification is for the Fortune 500, not for a high-tech startup.
2. *EXECUTE*.
3. Hire good people when they're available, not when there's a project for them. A good person can always fit into an existing project.
4. Throwing bodies via mass hiring at a project dooms it to failure, because most of said bodies will be dunderheads. Most good people are available only for short periods of time. You have to hire them when they're available, not when it's convenient.
5. Professional management is important, but unless you have a visionary at the top who understands the market, the company will lose its focus, thrash around, and die.
6. *DELIVER*.

Re:Along with the company...V3 PDF specs.

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www2.mplayerhq.hu/MPlayer/doc-tech/voodoo3_ spec.pdf

Google is your friend.

[check near the bottom]
http://members.fortunecity.com/pa3pyx/voo doo3.html

x3dfx

[ergean]

Hmm... this remainds me of http://www.x3Dfx.com, but they don't seem alive and kicking, same old welcome message and a few tweaked drivers, voodoo users may find them useful. Would be nice to see them shake a leg.

I visited www.3dfx.com and it is sad to find an nVIDIA advertising there.

Well they went on in a blaze of glory, made it in the history of computing and disappear in a blink, adding a piece to my computer shrine to the history of PC where you can find along my (t)rusty Voodoo 3 2000, an Aureal Vortex 2 (Aureal gone), a 13Gb HDD from Quantum (Qunatum bye-bye) and an Ambient modem (Ambient bye-bye).

Re:Last Days,

[Com2Kid]

I have run UT on my Riva128, so bleh! :)

Mac support was a nice 3dfx aspect

[EvilStein]

I was sad to see 3dfx go under because they were offering fantastic Mac support - seperate Mac versions of the cards, online updates, full QuickTime acceleration, DVI output, the works.
For Mac gamers, the cards were a wonderful (and welcome) addition to the Mac market.

I would have liked to see 3dfx continue. It would have been nice to have their cards as OEM choices at the Apple Store (they were pushing for that, too..)

Oh well. Guess I'll get a GeForce 4 Ti in my next Mac purchase... unless an All-In-Wonder comes out for the Mac (and works well)

3dfx had highest performance with open source driv

[Anonymous Coward]

3 Dfx had the highest performance with open source drivers, Nvidea at the time had gforce2 with closed drivers, and in linux nvidea had a little better performance, but the linux drivers at the time for the vodoo5 5500 did not support LSI mode, so instead of using both chips it used only one.
I am not sure how ATI performed at the time.

What is important about this, is that over time open source drivers work better than closed source drivers, one of the problems with closed source is that once the product is discontinued it is no longer supported, and no more new and improve drivers, with open source the drivers continue to improve.

forgot?

[corian]

Please tell me....how does one forget to fly to Asia? Does one hide their tickets in their underwear drawer and forget about it? Does one's manager not say, "I'm really exited about the new sample you're flying out to get next week... Can't wait to see it!" Did one neglect to write the trip in one's calendar?

Enquiring minds want to know.

Re:Surprising this has not happened with soundcard

[Anonymous Coward]

4. Creative is full of shit.

How did you know Creative(C) is full of shit? Stick your hand up their ass lately?

Re:Surprising this has not happened with soundcard

[Anonymous Coward]

more than that

they was swaping assholes

you gotta be "creative" to ride the hershey highway

Translation, please

[Anonymous Coward]

I am by no means a hard-core gamer, but I thought this would be an interesting article to describe the video card industry. Unfortunately, the article was so full of jargon and subjective comments you'd have to already know everthing in it first-hand for anything to make any sense.

Could someone please define the term "taped out", which is used about every second paragraph, without flaming?

Also, what does it mean to say a problem"was corrected for bring up boards by fibbing the chips"?

Voodoo3 *was* integrated 2d/3d...

[Chasing Amy]

> I still contend that the one-board solution was what really did in 3dfx.

Then you're wrong, because the Voodoo3 cards were all one-board 2D/3D solutions. :-) The era of the passthrough cable ended with the Voodoo2.

Incidentally, this is why many enthusiasts of older games keep a Voodoo2 in their machines--it provides seamless Glide support while allowing the primary card to handle all OpenGL and DirectX calls without interfering, and doesn't even use up an IRQ.

I myself have several old Voodoo2 cards for just this purpose--many older games look worlds better when rendered under Glide as they were intended, than when rendered under D3D or a software renderer. I've tried Glide wrappers and they absolutely suck. So, for retro PC gaming, many well-rounded gamers keep a Voodoo2 along with their modern GeForceSomenumber or RadeonWhatever series cards. My favorites are the dual-Voodoo2-SLI-on-a-single-card solutions made by Quantum3D, such as the Obsidian2 X-24, which provided the best performance ever seen back in 1998 and retailed for $699. Today they can be found on eBay for less than $50, while "plain" Voodoo2 cards can be had for just a few dollars.

I digress, but anyway, my point was that the Voodoo2 was the last add-in 3d-only accelerator. Everything after, including the Voodoo3 series, were integrated 2d/3d. And at the time, the Voodoo3 series spanked all but the TNT2 Ultra line, which of course was released 6 months later than the original TNT2, which was stomped by the Voodoo3 cards in performance. The TNT2's only advantage was 32-bit color, which at the time required a rather high-end processor to be playable anyway.

Re:3DFX and Real3D tsarkon

[Anonymous Coward]

And really stupid, crappy Mac zealot shithead employees like yourself. Thats the crux of why your company is dead in the water - they didnt flush the SHIT like you away. And here you are, touting the überness of this no name never heard of backwater company, and you blame everyone else but yourself. Stupid, zealous idiot. Suck on these insults, you tird.

Thou art so leaky that we must leave thee to thy sinking. Thou beslubbering rampallian foot-licker! Thou art spacious in the possesion of dirt. Thou fawning spur-galled foot-licker! Thou clay-brained guts, thou knotty-pated fool, thou whoreson obscene greasy tallow-catch! Methink'st thou art a general offence and every man should beat thee. I throw thy name against the bruising stones. Thou wimpled hell-hated bum-bailey! Confusion now hath made his masterpiece! Thou mammering fool-born scullian! God hath given you one face and you make yourselves another. Thou mad mustachio purple-hued maltworms! Thou hast neither heat, affection, limb, nor beauty To make thy riches pleasant. Draw your neck out of your collar. Thou impertinent rough-hewn haggard! Thy bones are hollow; impiety has mad a feast of thee. So, so, thou common dog, didst thou disgorge thy glutton bosom. Thou art wither'd like an old apple-john. Thou villainous abominable misleader of youth! You are as rheumatic as two dry toasts.. Most shallow man! Thou worms-meat in respect of a good piece of flesh indeed! Thou gleeking boil-brained scut! I breathe defiance to thine ears. Thou leathern-jerkin, crystal-button, knot-pated, agatering, puke-stocking, caddis-garter, smooth-tongue, Spanish pouch! You perverted glob of contaminated rubbish dim-witted sliver of polluted chicken shit confused box of decomposed over-ripe caramelized pieces of shit crusty dribble of dehydrated pig vagina juice slimy smudge of fungus-covered dog sphincter.

Last Post!

[alpg]

In the beginning there was data. The data was without form and
null, and darkness was upon the face of the console; and the Spirit of
IBM was moving over the face of the market. And DEC said, "Let there
be registers"; and there were registers. And DEC saw that they
carried; and DEC separated the data from the instructions. DEC called
the data Stack, and the instructions they called Code. And there was
evening and there was morning, one interrupt.
-- Rico Tudor, "The Story of Creation or, The Myth of Urk"

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