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Industry Semiconductors
Fate Bankrupt,[1] most assets bought by Nvidia, fate of remaining assets unknown. (Talk:3dfx)
Successor Nvidia
Founded 1994
Defunct 2002[1]
Headquarters San Jose, California, USA
Key people Ross Smith, Scott Sellers, Gary Tarolli
Products Voodoo Graphics Series
3dfx Interactive was a company that specialized in the manufacturing of 3D graphics processing units and, later, graphics cards. It was a pioneer in the field for several years in the late 1990s until 2000 when it underwent one of the most high-profile demises in the history of the PC industry. It was headquartered in San Jose, California until, on the verge of bankruptcy, many of its intellectual assets (and many employees) were acquired by its rival, Nvidia. 3dfx Interactive filed for bankruptcy on October 15, 2002.[1][2]
Early history
Founded in 1994 by Ross Smith, Gary Tarolli and Scott Sellers (all SGI alumni) with backing from Gordie Campbell's TechFarm, 3dfx released its Voodoo Graphics chip in 1996. The company only manufactured the chips and some reference boards, and initially did not sell any product to consumers; rather, it acted as an OEM supplier for graphics card companies, which designed, manufactured, marketed, and sold their own graphics cards including the Voodoo chipset.
3dfx gained fame due to their great success within the arcade market. At the time, arcades were a very visible place to go visit and see the latest in 3D gaming and technology. The first arcade machine that 3Dfx Voodoo Graphics hardware was used in was called ICE Home Run Derby, a game released in 1996. Later that year they were featured in more popular titles, such as Atari's San Francisco Rush and Wayne Gretzky's 3D Hockey.[3] 3Dfx received a lot of focus from the media because of the obvious graphical prowess of these titles, and that new game consoles such as Nintendo 64, PlayStation, and Sega Saturn would be showcases for similar next-generation graphics.
Voodoo Graphics PCI
Towards the end of 1996, the cost of EDO DRAM dropped significantly and 3Dfx was able to enter the consumer PC hardware market with aggressive pricing compared to previous 3D graphics solutions for computers. The Voodoo heralded a new era of high-performance and high-quality 3D graphics for gaming. Prior to it, games such as Doom and Quake had compelled video game players to move from their 80386s to 80486s, and then to the Pentium.[4]
A typical Voodoo Graphics PCI expansion card consisted of a DAC, a frame buffer processor and a texture mapping unit, along with 4 MB of EDO DRAM. The RAM and graphics processors operate at 50 MHz. It provided only 3D acceleration and as such the computer also needed a separate graphics card for 2D software. A pass-through VGA cable daisy-chained the VGA card to the Voodoo 1, which was itself connected to the monitor. The method used to engage the Voodoo's output circuitry varied between cards, with some using mechanical relays while others utilized purely digital components. The mechanical relays emitted an audible "clicking" sound when they engaged and disengaged.
The Voodoo 1's primary competition were products from PowerVR and Rendition. PowerVR produced a similar 3D-only add-on card with capable 3D support, although it was not comparable to Voodoo Graphics in either image quality or performance. 3Dfx saw intense competition in the market from cards that offered the combination of 2D and 3D acceleration. While these cards, such as Matrox Mystique, S3 ViRGE, and ATI 3D Rage, offered unquestionably inferior 3D acceleration, their lower cost and simplicity often appealed to OEM system builders. Rendition's Vérité V1000 was an integrated (3D+VGA) single-chip solution as well that was perhaps Voodoo's closest competitor, but it too did not have comparable 3D performance and its 2D capabilities were considered merely adequate relative to other 2D cards of the time.
Glide API
Originally developed for use within the specialized resource constrained environment of an arcade game that included non-Intel architectures such as MIPS and PowerPC CPUs, as well as to support DOS-based, full-screen 3D games which were still popular at the time and which neither Microsoft nor Intel desired to support with their own APIs (Intel 3DR and Microsoft 3D-DDI), Glide was created to handle error prone tasks like chip initialization for the programmer, but implemented nothing more than what the Voodoo hardware was directly capable of. This strategy differed from that of other 3D APIs of the era (Direct3D, OpenGL, and QuickDraw 3D), which hid low-level hardware details behind an "abstraction layer," with the goal of providing application developers a standard, hardware-neutral interface.
The advantage of an abstraction layer is that game developers save programming effort and gain flexibility by writing their 3D rendering code once, for a single API, and the abstraction layer allows it to run on hardware from multiple manufacturers. This advantage is still in place today. However, in the early days of the 3D graphics card, Direct3D and OpenGL implementations were either non-existent or, at minimum, substantially less mature than today, and computers were much slower and had less memory. The abstraction layers' overhead crippled performance in practice. 3dfx had therefore created a strong advantage for itself by aggressively promoting Glide, which was designed specifically around the Voodoo hardware, and therefore did not suffer from the performance hit of a higher level abstraction layer.
While there were many hit games that used Glide, including several coin-op/arcade games from Midway Games and Atari Games (e.g., San Francisco Rush, NFL Blitz, Hydrothunder, etc.) and games like Eidos' Tomb Raider, the killer application for Voodoo Graphics was the MiniGL driver developed specifically to allow hardware acceleration of the game Quake, by id Software, on 3dfx cards. The driver implemented only the subset of OpenGL used by Quake.
By 2000, the improved performance of Direct3D and OpenGL on the average personal computer, coupled with the huge variety of new 3D cards on the market, the widespread support of these standard APIs by the game developer community and the closure of 3dfx, would make Glide obsolete.
Voodoo Rush
In August 1997, 3dfx released the Voodoo Rush chipset, combining a Voodoo chip with a 2D chip that lay on the same circuit board, eliminating the need for a separate VGA card. Most cards were built with an Alliance Semiconductor AT25/AT3D 2D component, but there were some built with a Macronix chip and there were initial plans to partner with Trident but no such boards were ever marketed.
The Rush had the same specifications as Voodoo Graphics but did not perform as well because the Rush chipset had to share memory bandwidth with the CRTC of the 2D chip. Furthermore, the Rush chipset was not directly present on the PCI bus but had to be programmed through linked registers of the 2D chip. Like the Voodoo Graphics, there was no interrupt mechanism, so the driver had to poll the Rush in order to determine whether a command had completed or not; the indirection through the 2D component added significant overhead here and tended to back up traffic on the PCI interface. The typical performance hit was around 10% compared to Voodoo Graphics, and even worse in windowed mode. Later Rush boards released by Hercules had 8 MiB VRAM and a 10% higher clock speed to close the performance gap.
A rare third version was produced which featured a Cirrus Logic 2D chip. This version fixed the PCI bus collisions and memory interface problems.
Some manufacturers bundled a PC version of Atari Games' racing game San Francisco Rush, the arcade version of which used a Voodoo Graphics chipset.
Sales of the Voodoo Rush cards were very poor, and the cards were discontinued within a year. The company would not attempt another 2D/3D solution again until the release of the Voodoo Banshee in 1998.
Voodoo2
In 1998, 3dfx released Voodoo's successor, the popular Voodoo2. The Voodoo2 was architecturally similar, but the basic board configuration added a second texturing unit, allowing two textures to be drawn in a single pass.
The Voodoo2 required three chips and a separate VGA graphics card, whereas new competing 3D products, such as the ATI Rage Pro, Nvidia RIVA 128, and Rendition Verite 2200, were single-chip products. Despite some shortcomings, such as the card's dithered 16-bit 3D color rendering and 800×600 resolution limitations, no other manufacturers' products could match the smooth framerates that the Voodoo2 produced. It was a landmark (and expensive) achievement in PC 3D-graphics. Its excellent performance, and the mindshare gained from the original Voodoo Graphics, resulted in its success. Many users even preferred Voodoo2's dedicated purpose, because they were free to use the quality 2D card of their choice as a result. Some 2D/3D combined solutions at the time offered quite sub-par 2D quality and speed.
The arrival of the Nvidia RIVA TNT with integrated 2D/3D chipset would offer minor challenge to the Voodoo2's supremacy months later.
SLI
The Voodoo2 introduced Scan-Line Interleave (SLI) to the gaming market. In SLI mode, two Voodoo2 boards were connected together, each drawing half the scan lines of the screen. For the price of a second Voodoo2 board, users could easily improve 3D throughput. A welcome result of SLI mode was an increase in the maximum resolution supported, now up to 1024×768. Despite the high cost and inconvenience of using three separate graphics cards (two Voodoo 2 SLI plus the general purpose 2D graphics adapter), the Voodoo2 SLI scheme was the pinnacle of gaming performance at the time[citation needed].
SLI capability was not offered in subsequent 3dfx board designs, although the technology would be later used to link the VSA-100 chips on the Voodoo 5.
Having since acquired 3dfx, Nvidia in 2004 reintroduced the SLI brand (now for Scalable Link Interface) in their GeForce 6 Series. ATI Technologies has also since introduced its own multi-chip implementation, dubbed "CrossFire". Although Scalable Link Interface and Crossfire operate on the original SLI principle, the algorithms used are now totally different.
Voodoo Banshee
Near the end of 1998, 3dfx released the Voodoo Banshee, which used a lower price achieved through higher component integration, and a more complete feature-set including 2D acceleration, to target the mainstream consumer market. A single-chip solution, the Banshee was a combination of a 2D video card and partial (only one texture mapping unit) Voodoo2 3D hardware. Due to the missing second TMU, in 3D scenes which used multiple textures per polygon, the Voodoo2 was significantly faster. However, in scenes dominated by single-textured polygons, the Banshee could match or exceed the Voodoo2 due to its higher clock speed and resulting greater pixel fillrate. While it was not as popular as Voodoo Graphics or Voodoo2, the Banshee sold a respectable number of units.
Banshee's 2D acceleration was the first such hardware from 3Dfx and it was very capable. It rivaled the fastest 2D cores from Matrox, Nvidia, and ATI. It consisted of a 128-bit 2D GUI engine and a 128-bit VESA VBE 3.0 VGA core. The graphics chip capably accelerated DirectDraw and supported all of the Windows Graphics Device Interface (GDI) in hardware, with all 256 raster operations and tertiary functions, and hardware polygon acceleration. The 2D core achieved near-theoretical maximum performance with a null driver test in Windows NT.[5][6]
While Nvidia had yet to launch a product in the add-in board market that sold as well as 3dfx's Voodoo line, the company was gaining steady ground in the OEM market. The Nvidia RIVA TNT was a similar, highly-integrated product that had two major advantages in greater 3D speed and 32-bit 3D color support. 3dfx, by contrast, had very limited OEM sales, as the Banshee was only adopted in small numbers by OEMs.[7]
Dreamcast
In 1997, 3dfx was working with entertainment company Sega to develop a new video game console hardware platform. Sega solicited two competing designs: a unit code-named "Katana", developed in Japan using NEC and VideoLogic technology, and "Blackbelt", a system designed in the United States using 3dfx technology.