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What killed the 3dfx giant

Mercurial said:
1. 3Dfx purchasing STB (who incidently used to make the TNT1 cards, and god knows how bad they were), which put a huge drain on the companie's resources apparently.
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That particular reason included also associated income loss from stopping selling chips to other makers.
 
As others have said 3Dfx buying STB and making thier own cards was really the begining of the end. All those partners that used to buy chips and sell cards had no new 3Dfx product so they started selling nvidia or went out of business. As for hardware T&L titles at the Geforce 256 launch I think there were about two :p I'm sure I got Evolva Scout bundled with my Creative Geforce 256 and there was a game with a little angel that could take people over the name of which escapes me at the moment.
 
On a related note...

http://www.techpowerup.com/index.php?77529

TechPowerUp said:
Saturday, November 29 2008

3dfx SFFT 1.5 Driver Released

3dfx Zone has released an updated driver package for 3dfx accelerators, version 6.17.0065.0001 (SFFT 1.5), published today. The driver is based on a unified architecture, meaning the same driver would work for a whole range of 3dfx GPUs, Voodoo3 and upwards. This includes Voodoo3 2000, Voodoo3 3000 and Voodoo3 3500 cards, as well as all 3dfx VSA-100 products and so Voodoo4 4500, Voodoo5 5500 and Voodoo5 6000 cards, is on line.

This driver extends support to Windows 2000, Windows XP (both 32bit and 64bit). Apparently there isn't a Windows Vista driver, possibly due to the newer driver model. 3dfx Zone also publishes Set3Tile and Set4Tile Utilities that tweak the texture-handling capabilities of the accelerators.
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Time to party like it's 1999 all over again :D
 
I think one of the problems was that they arguably rested on their laurels a bit - V1/V2 were class-leading cards, but around the V3 era they lost market share due to:

-Max texture size of 256x256
-Lack of 32bit support (they never really convinced people with the whole 'our 16bit is the equivalent of 22bit' thing)
-V4/5 delayed until long after NV had come out with the Geforce DDR (DDR memory and HW T&L)
-Glide no longer being the selling point it once was as developers increasingly moved towards D3D (don't forget that even opengl wasn't too bad for 3dfx as they used minigl drivers to port it to Glide calls)
-Bringing manufacturing inhouse

Personally I quite liked 3dfx because their mentality was primarily built around speed - the lack of 32bit support wasn't such a big deal at first, because it had a big performance hit compared to 16bit (until the TNT2 came along at least). Games like Unreal excelled on 3dfx hardware. Heck, there was even DOS glide - games like Carmageddon, GTA and Screamer Rally only supported 3dfx acceleration via that IIRC.
 
clv101 said:
Matrox just seemed to give up by never producing a real 3D accelerated card. The G400 wasn't even in the game.
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Actually the MAX version of the G400 wasn't too bad. OpenGL performance was a little off the pace, but it was faster than the tnt2/v3 in most D3D titles.

Don't forget it also introduced proper DX6 bumpmapping and being a Matrox card had a very good reputation for 2d quality/performance. Add to this dual-head (not many cards had it in those days)

Basically the G400MAX was a very good card, ultimately let down by a high price tag and driver support (I don't think it helped that THE killer app, Quake 3 demo came out shortly afterwards and being an opengl title it didn't do very well). IMO it was the last Matrox card that I wouldn't have minded having in my rig (Parheilia was a massive let down).
 
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'twas the same old story - complacency. At some point the market leader always starts to get a bit too complacent and the competition springs a surprise on them. In 3Dfx's case it was primarily their stubborn refusal to support 32-bit colour, claiming there was no need or desire for it. NVidia proved them wrong. They had a number of other weaknesses but I think this was their major undoing.

The complacency issue has lead to a number of similar "surprises" in recent history. NVidia got complacent and then had their backsides kicked by the ATI 9700. The same thing happened earlier this year with the 48xx series. Intel got complacent and the Athlon 64 shook them badly. AMD then had their turn when the C2D arrived and promptly murdered the Athlon.
 
Vertigo1 said:
'twas the same old story - complacency. At some point the market leader always starts to get a bit too complacent and the competition springs a surprise on them. In 3Dfx's case it was primarily their stubborn refusal to support 32-bit colour, claiming there was no need or desire for it. NVidia proved them wrong. They had a number of other weaknesses but I think this was their major undoing.

The complacency issue has lead to a number of similar "surprises" in recent history. NVidia got complacent and then had their backsides kicked by the ATI 9700. The same thing happened earlier this year with the 48xx series. Intel got complacent and the Athlon 64 shook them badly. AMD then had their turn when the C2D arrived and promptly murdered the Athlon.
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Yep..it does not matter how smart the engineers are...its the management that will ultimately screw things up.
 
V2 was one of the single hugest upgrades I ever had, it was jaw-dropping. I had a voodoo4 for a while that was great with unreal engine games.
 
Putting it simply 3dfx died because of two main factors they got complacent and they got arrogant assuming they could dictate at a time when other companys were being more innovative and providing far better cards.
 
Ahhhh 3DFX, I rember going into game in 1997/8 and getting a Guilmot 3dfx card for £99. I didn't really get it at the time, but remember being totally amazed when I ran Quake 2. After that I moved onto the Voodoo 2... I think you could SLI the voodoo 2?!? But I never did, the last 3dfx card I got was the best though... The Voodoo 3 3500TV, it was the fastest Voodoo 3 card and had a built in TV tuner, and a crazy big external pod that had component in & out!

Voodoo3500TV.JPG


Anyone remeber PowerVR who competed with the Voodoo 1?
 
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