Why did 3dfx disappear?

[jiffylube1024]

Originally posted by: SickBeast
IMO nVidia single-handedly put 3DFX out of business. At least they had the courtesy to buy them out afterwards.

3DFX did have something to do with it on their own though. They got lazy with the Voodoo5 and didn't actually invent anything; they just put more old chips onto a new card.

If you really want to learn more about the "Voodoo People" you have to listen to "The Prodigy". :roll:

I agree that it was basically nVidia who put them out of business. ATI was far too inept back then to step into the top-of-the-line graphics market (they were basically 1-2 generations behind until the Radeon).

3dfx was a terribly managed company, and the STB merger (taking on so much debt and going into a half-hearted merger where nobody knew what they were doing) made 3dfx sink faster than the Titanic, but without a viable competitor (nVidia with the TNT and TNT2 and finally the GeForce 256, the nail in 3dfx's coffin), 3dfx could keep the market covered with their own slow release cycles.

As it turned out, 3dfx gave engineering too much time to work on Rampage and nVidia kept trumping them. The fact that Nvidia got the GeForce 2 GTS out before 3dfx even got the Voodoo 4/5 series out demonstrated 3dfx's arrogance and ineptitude in an increasingly competitive graphics market.

 

[DefRef]

While buying STB to give them a vertical monopoly (such a winning formula as proven by Appleisgust screwed them financially, what killed them was their engineering philosophy that refused to look toward the future.

Every evolutionary step - AGP texturing, 32-bit color, HW T&L - was sneered at by 3dfx and dismissed with a wave and comment like, "Why buy a card that has these features? No current games need them." They decided to run YESTERDAY'S games fast as opposed to preparing for TOMORROW'S games.

As Nvidia raised the feature bar, a lot of people accused them of ripping people off for unneeded features, but what Nvidia was doing was laying down an installed base of users that DEVELOPERS would see and say, "We can add [feature X] now because people will be able to render it." It's a chicken-and-egg situation and developers weren't going to code HW lighting if no silicon existed that could run it and if it was up to 3dfx, they wouldn't add the feature until enough games existed to make it worthwhile. Catch-22.

Someone had to take the first step and Nvidia is to thank for the current state of the art and choice in cards, just as AMD forced Intel to become price competitive. I mentioned Apple above and their marginal existance is similar to 3dfx's, except they didn't die (though if the iMac and iPod hadn't come along, they may've met the same fate) despite taking the same arrogant position of meeting customers needs and prices.

 

[cholula0]

There was also a lawsuit between Nvidia and 3DFX, As I recall 3DFX won the lawsuit but it cost them alot of money. Then 3DFX went bankrupt, Nvdia swept in and bought out the company for the patents and destroyed the chips.

 

[Triforceofcourage]

I remember when I bought my Voodoo 5500 on the box was a kickass looking game. The game pictured on the front of the box looks strangely and almost exactly like Halo. Can anyone confirm it, I can still picture it in my mind and it looks very strangely similar

 

[konakona]

Despite the Voodoo5 5500's shortcomings(err, long...pehaps) it was an awesome videocard. The GeForce2 may have been faster, but the 5500 owned in output quality.

a v5 5500 owner here, it sure had better OGSS based FSAA for flight sims, racing games and such... but the colors in general looked washed out compared to nvidia's offerings. there was a walk around posted on flying penguin's page, which only helped to bridge the gap. 22bit rendering looked good enough for most things but nvidia card were preffered for their higher standard of IQ if memory serves me right. another gripe with v5's was their inability to do trillinear filtering and anisotrofic at the same time. (or was it multi texturing and trillinear? its kinda confusing )

 

[kylebisme]

your memory doesn't serve you right at all. the voodoo5 did rgss, not ogss. the 22-bit color was a voodoo3 thing, the voodoo5 did 32-bit color very nicely and looked considerably better than the visiontek geforce3 i replaced mine with. i do recall some issues with trillinear and the voodoo5 but i can't say exactly what they were, i do know however that the voodoo5 had no af at all.


oh and ya Triforceofcourage, that was halo on the back of the box.

 

[konakona]

ok i was wrong on all accoutns, i stand corrected. however i still insist gf2 cards were favored for 3d IQ. if 2D IQ is what you are talking about, then i would have to agree.

looks like it was trillinear and multi texturing then... stuck with billinear most times

 

[Schadenfroh]

Originally posted by: VanillaH
ok i was wrong on all accoutns, i stand corrected. however i still insist gf2 cards were favored for 3d IQ. if 2D IQ is what you are talking about, then i would have to agree.

looks like it was trillinear and multi texturing then... stuck with billinear most times

voodoo3 2D iq rivled matrox

 

[SickBeast]

Originally posted by: Schadenfroh

Originally posted by: VanillaH
ok i was wrong on all accoutns, i stand corrected. however i still insist gf2 cards were favored for 3d IQ. if 2D IQ is what you are talking about, then i would have to agree.

looks like it was trillinear and multi texturing then... stuck with billinear most times

voodoo3 2D iq rivled matrox

Come to think of it, mine did have very nice 2D.

 

[nRollo]

Originally posted by: sandorski
STB!! :|

Despite the Voodoo5 5500's shortcomings(err, long...pehaps) it was an awesome videocard. The GeForce2 may have been faster, but the 5500 owned in output quality.

Word to your mutha....

LOL

The V5 was a cool card.

 

[gururu]

i loved my v5500. it made ultima x look sooooo good.

 

[Triforceofcourage]

When I got my Voodoo 5 I became instantly more popular with the ladies

 

[Auric]

Due to an ill-conceived business plan which relied too heavily on proprietary software investment (including payments to developers and publishers) and marketing with the aim of controlling hardware advancement rather than conforming to standards. At the point that DirectX development clearly negated the viability of such a scheme they could have changed course but had already "drank the Kool-Aid" and particularly became spellbound with the success of their Voodoo 2 (thanks in large part to a fortuitous decline in memory prices). In fact, it was only in that year that the company ever turned a fiscal profit which only just managed to offset earlier losses. Thereafter, they continued to lose money. The common enthusiast red herring is that the STB merger was a critical mistake but I always contend that it allowed them to linger longer since other board makers would have declined to purchase their uncompetitive chips for any price that would have been profitable anyway. The company issued a desperate flurry of press releases in its final days touting great retail sales while skirting the reality that not only was retail less important than OEM to profitability but that relative brand sales were insignificant compared to those of chips overall (across numerous brands).

 

[Soulkeeper]

Anyone care to hypothesize on the AVERAGE release cycles of 3dfx's new products during their waining days ?
also what kinda "time-to-market" did they have with their new gpu-chipsets/products ?

 

[Budarow]

IMHO and greatly simplified...3dfx made innovative products which performed well and looked better (Glide) than the competing products from other firms (using DirectX). Along comes nVidia who failed at their early attempt to enter the 3d graphics market so they steal some technology/code from 3dfx and S3 and lure some employees from Matrox and produce their TNT line of chips. nVidia made better products with more features and 3dfx kept trying to "slowly" release their newer technology which enabled nVidia to consistently capture more and more market share (due to better products) until 3dfx went belly up. The same basic thing happened to nVidia verses ATI (except both companies had money so no one went out of business and they just swapped the number 1 and 2 spots for 3d chip makers). ATI has been on top for a couple of years and now it may be nVidia's turn.

 

[edmundoab]

Originally posted by: gururu
i loved my v5500. it made ultima x look sooooo good.

Yeah a comparison from Tom's Hardware did show a good difference on FSAA against the GF2 GTS at that point in time. Though they were loosing FPS like mad

 

[eastvillager]

3dfx had no real competition for awhile, which covered up for the poor business practices. Once nvidia came into the picture, though, they pretty much imploded with one bad decision after another.

I'm not sure what they were thinking with STB, but it was a bad, bad idea, lol. I was an STB fan, and I ended up losing both 3dfx AND STB on that deal.

 

[Czar]

The reason they lost was the bad technology everything was based on. The Voodoo1 chip was the chip that all up to Voodoo5 was based on and because of that had all the stupid limitation the Voodoo1 had.

256x256 max texture size!
16bit colors!

and some other idiotic things which I cant remember

 

[Schadenfroh]

Originally posted by: Czar
The reason they lost was the bad technology everything was based on. The Voodoo1 chip was the chip that all up to Voodoo5 was based on and because of that had all the stupid limitation the Voodoo1 had.

256x256 max texture size!
16bit colors!

and some other idiotic things which I cant remember

umm, the voodoo4/5 had 32bit colours

 

[jiffylube1024]

Originally posted by: Schadenfroh

Originally posted by: Czar
The reason they lost was the bad technology everything was based on. The Voodoo1 chip was the chip that all up to Voodoo5 was based on and because of that had all the stupid limitation the Voodoo1 had.

256x256 max texture size!
16bit colors!

and some other idiotic things which I cant remember

umm, the voodoo4/5 had 32bit colours

Yeah, it was only up to the Voodoo 3 series where it was 16-bit colours (22/24-bit internal ).

 

[Czar]

Originally posted by: Schadenfroh

Originally posted by: Czar
The reason they lost was the bad technology everything was based on. The Voodoo1 chip was the chip that all up to Voodoo5 was based on and because of that had all the stupid limitation the Voodoo1 had.

256x256 max texture size!
16bit colors!

and some other idiotic things which I cant remember

umm, the voodoo4/5 had 32bit colours

true but by that time every other card had t&l, which ofcorse 3dfx didnt have, the voodoo2-3 generation was up against cards that did 32bits and did 1025x1025 textures if I remember correctly while the voodoo cards only did 16 and 256x256
They were always up there in the lead with speed but always down the bottom when it came to features. Because of that developers used other brand cards when developing new games