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Ross Smith, Scott Sellers and Gary Tarolli were 3dfx founders, they left Silicon Graphics to do this startup.
LGR Tech Tales - 3Dfx & Voodoo's Self-Destruction
This episode covers the founding, voodoo-powered rise, and ridiculously powerful fall of 3Dfx Interactive. Join me in LGR Tech Tales, looking at stories of technological inspiration, failure, and everything in-between!
The 3dfx timeline gives you an idea of how much the computer field has slowed down and consolidated. Voodoo was released in 1996, into a market with half a dozen competitors. Voodoo 2 in 1998, the same year as the first viable NVIDIA card (Riva TNT). NVIDIA released the GeForce 256 in 1999, cementing its dominance. 3dfx released its last card in 2000, just four years after its first. NVIDIA is now still dominant, 18…
That's pretty much standard in every industry, though. Competition will kick underperformers out of the market and some amount of consolidation is inevitable. It's not Nvidia doesn't have any competition nowadays.
Apple couldn't budge Microsoft in the desktop market and they went "around" them by going into the mobile market.
The 3dfx timeline gives you an idea of how much the computer field has slowed down and consolidated. Voodoo was released in 1996, into a market with half a dozen competitors. Voodoo 2 in 1998, the same year as the first viable NVIDIA card (Riva TNT). NVIDIA released the GeForce 256 in 1999, cementing its dominance. 3dfx released its last card in 2000, just four years after its first. NVIDIA is now still dominant, 18…
I remember fondly in the late 90s just walking into a Best Buy (maybe Circuit City) and buying a GPU off the shelf.
I had no benchmark data like today. I bought based on whether or not I liked the packaging and how much video RAM did it have. Because I really didn't have much more data to go off of.
I subsequently bout the Diamond Viper 770, linked below.
https://www.anandtech.com/show/307
Times have really changed.
In this case, Nvidia and ATI were already making 3D accelerators for the professional 3D rendering market. All they had to do was to make stripped down cards that wouldn't cannibalize their high margin business, and sell them in volume for a price gamers could bear.
Maybe 3Dfx could have made a moat out of GLide, but OpenGL already existed and Microsoft was working on Direct3D.
The 3dfx timeline gives you an idea of how much the computer field has slowed down and consolidated. Voodoo was released in 1996, into a market with half a dozen competitors. Voodoo 2 in 1998, the same year as the first viable NVIDIA card (Riva TNT). NVIDIA released the GeForce 256 in 1999, cementing its dominance. 3dfx released its last card in 2000, just four years after its first. NVIDIA is now still dominant, 18…
Most of the other companies are still there though. PowerVR still makes 3D chips, but only for the embedded market (e.g. Android phones). Matrox gave up on 3D and now only makes specialized cards for 8 and 16+ monitor displays (airports, kiosks). IIRC, even Trident switched to embedded graphics. The thing that bothers me is that if you want a PCI-E card on a consumer system, you only have nVidia/AMD. Intel only does…
The 3dfx timeline gives you an idea of how much the computer field has slowed down and consolidated. Voodoo was released in 1996, into a market with half a dozen competitors. Voodoo 2 in 1998, the same year as the first viable NVIDIA card (Riva TNT). NVIDIA released the GeForce 256 in 1999, cementing its dominance. 3dfx released its last card in 2000, just four years after its first. NVIDIA is now still dominant, 18…
In 1998 3dfx was incredibly dominant in the market. I don't think that after the release of Voodoo 2 many people would have bet on another company being the market leader. Riva TNT was ok, but it wasn't a breakthrough for Nvidia.
The article blames management failure, but I'm not convinced. There's a general bias to blame management any time a company fails. Of course management is always responsible, but I don’t think anyone could have saved say, Kodak. In this case, Nvidia and ATI were already making 3D accelerators for the professional 3D rendering market. All they had to do was to make stripped down cards that wouldn't cannibalize their h…
Why not? What if Kodak management had went hard on digital initially instead of clinging to film for so long?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
In 1998 3dfx was incredibly dominant in the market. I don't think that after the release of Voodoo 2 many people would have bet on another company being the market leader. Riva TNT was ok, but it wasn't a breakthrough for Nvidia.
TNT was the first viable Voodoo 2 competitor, though it didn't quite catch up. The year after, NVIDIA released GeForce, which was indisputably better. 3dfx never recovered after that.