Slashdot Mirror
Video Card History
John Mathers writes "While searching the net for information on old Voodoo Video Cards, I came across this fabulous Video Card History article up at FastSilicon.com. It's nice to see that someone has taken the time to look back on the Video Cards that revolutionized the personal computer. Here's a quote "When 3dfx released their first card in October of 1996, it hit the computer world like a right cross to the face. That card was called Voodoo. This new card held the door open for video game development. The Voodoo card was simply a 3D graphics accelerator, which was plugged into a regular 2D video card; known as piggy backing."
because motherboards don't come with 2 AGP slots, so you'd have one fast and one slower vid card in there, which doesn't appeal to most people. SLI allowed you to have 2 equal speed vid cards to double your speed. Makes more sense to pay $200 per card to double your power than it does to pay $200 per card to not really double your power ;)
The card took up its own slot, and used a pass-through video cable to connect the monitor: When a Voodoo-compliant video signal was detected, it hijacked the output to the monitor and took over.
Nice design, for the time. The best thing was, it was CHEAP for the time (considering the performance). I think I paid $199.
I personally think (but I am biased) that the PowerVR PCX1/2 solution was nicer. It also piggy-backed off the 2D card but, instead of using cables, it squirted pixels (in packets) across the PCI bus into the 2D card's memory and so could even do 3D in a window. The scheme wouldn't work well today with ultra-high resolutions but it was fine for 1024x768 @30+ Hz.