3dfx
More info
- Creator
- Ross Smith, Gary Tarolli, Scott Sellers
- Released
- 1994–2000
- Successor
- Assets bought by Nvidia
The company whose Voodoo cards made 3D acceleration something every PC gamer needed, and which was gone four years later.
Three former SGI engineers founded 3dfx in 1994. Voodoo Graphics (1996) was a 3D-only card that sat next to your regular graphics card, linked by a stubby VGA pass-through cable. It was clunky, but the difference in games like GLQuake was so dramatic nobody cared. Developers wrote to 3dfx's own Glide API rather than OpenGL or Direct3D, which delivered speed and lock-in in one package.
Voodoo2 (1998) could run in pairs with Scan-Line Interleave, each card drawing alternate lines. The same year 3dfx bought board maker STB to sell its own cards, turning its former customers into competitors overnight. Nvidia caught up with better chips and bought what was left in December 2000.