Fall of Voodoo

>all my friends had Voodoo GPUs back in the days.

Mostly becoz many games were better on Glide then OpnenGL

The year after the TNT was the TNT2 (which was a great chipset).

Geforce didn't come out until Oct 1999 and even then it was only one chipset. The rest of the product range came the following quarter (2000).

I skipped that generation and jumped to the Geforce 2 (this time first party rather than a 3rd party card with nvidia GPU), which was also an awesome card.

As for the fall of 3dfx, I dont think the rise in popularity of DirectX and OpenGL helped their case as that really levelled the playing field. After that, specifically targeting Voodoo cards felt more like a chore than an enhancement.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I miss 3Dfx, I miss Voodoo.

Good Old Times.

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

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=swVoXHVW-jI

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

I'm not sure what you mean, but the root of graphics is graphikos, Greek for writing or drawing. Mathematical graphs are called that by analogy to their graphical forebears.