3Dfx Interactive, Inc.
3Dfx was a graphics card manufacturer for the IBM PC and its compatibles from 1994 until 2002. Initially they manufactured only the 3D accelator chips which they sold to graphics card companies. Towards the end of 1996 the cost of EDO RAM dropped significantly, enabling 3Dfx to enter the consumer PC market with a full product.
Their main product was the Voodoo Graphics - an add-in card that accelerated 3D graphics. The hardware accelerated only 3D rendering, relying on the PC's current video card for 2D support. Despite this limitation, the Voodoo Graphics product and its follow-up, Voodoo2, were popular. It became standard for 3D games to offer support for the company's Glide API.
3Dfx' main competition was from Rendition and PowerVR, who also produced 3D-only accelerator cards. Once 3D graphics rendering was becoming more mainstream in PC games, 3Dfx saw further competition from Matrox with their Mystique, S3 with the ViRGE, and ATI's 3D Rage. All these cards offered inferior 3D acceleration to a 3Dfx card but their low cost and the fact they were both 2D and 3D cards combined often appealed to OEM system builders.
They had thus far relied upon selling their chipsets to other vendors. In 1998 they purchased STB Microsystems which put a lot of financial much pressure on a company that was already struggling in the market. Prior to this acquisition/merger, 3Dfx worked with most of the other graphics card manufacturers including Guillemot and Diamond Multimedia. With the merger, they would now be creating their own cards, leaving their previous partnerships out in the cold. What did these companies do? They all went to 3Dfx's main competitor at the time, nVidia, to build cards for them.
3Dfx finally lost market share as Microsoft made DirectX more robust and developers began to move away from OpenGL and 3Dfx' own GLide to that.
Click here for a list of games that support 3Dfx cards.
Voodoo Graphics
The design goal behind the original Voodoo was to provide smooth gameplay at a resolution of 640 x 480 with bilinear-filtered textures. The 2 MB frame buffer was good enough for triple-buffered 640 x 480 x 16-bit colour depth, and with proprietary compression (3:1 reduction in size), this 2 MB allowed for many more textures to be stored and reduced bandwidth limitations that would otherwise have been an issue. A pass-through VGA cable was daisy-chained the 2D graphics card to the Voodoo, and the Voodoo is then connected to the monitor. Colour writes and Z-buffer are limited to 16-bit, but sensitive alpha blending is performed at 24-bit precision. The Voodoo's lowest supported resolution is 512 x 384. The first graphics card manufacturer to use the Voodoo 1 chipset was Diamond, with the launch of the Monster 3D - a 4 MB card. The Canopus Pure3D is unique in that it's a 6 MB card but also has a TV Out, enabling you to run your 3D games from a TV in addition to your monitor! Competition for the 3dfx Voodoo 1 card arrived a whole year later in 1997 with nVidia's launch of the Riva 128. This performed 10% better in Direct 3D, but slightly worse in OpenGL. On a system with a very powerful CPU and open API, the Riva 128 was about 25% faster than the Voodoo 1. Key features:
Cards that used the Voodoo 1 chipset were:
The latest official drivers for 3dfx Voodoo 1 are v3.01.
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Voodoo Rush
Key features:
The Voodoo Rush combined a 3D accelerator with a 2D chip on the same board. This was an attempt to meet the needs of the customers who were prepared to justify the added cost of a separate 3D card. The Rush had the same 3D specifications as the Voodoo Graphics but was a poorer performer due to having to share memory bandwidth with the CRTC (Cathode Ray Tube Controller) of the 2D chip. In addition, the Rush chipset wasn't directly present on the PCI bus but had to be programmed through linked registers of the 2D chip. One advantage of the Rush over the Voodoo 1 is that is works well with slower CPUs. The Voodoo Rush was also sold rebranded as:
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Voodoo 2
The Voodoo 2 also introduced the world to SLI (Scan-Line Interleave), where two Voodoo 2 boards could be used together, each one drawing half the screen. SLI increased the maximum resolution to 1024 x 768. Due to the high cost and inconvenience to end users of running 3 cards (two Voodoo 2s and a 2D graphics card), SLI was not a financial success. SLI was later re-used by nVidia after they bought 3Dfx. Key features:
The Voodoo 2 was also sold rebranded as: |
Voodoo Banshee (PCI)
Its 2D accelerator was very capable, rivalling the fastest core from nVidia, Matrox and ATI. It consisted of a VESA VBE 3.0 core and a 128-bit 2D GUI engine. This core capably accelerated DirectDraw and supported all of the Windows Graphics Device Interface (GDI) in hardware. Sadly, the Banshee was adopted only in small numbers by OEMs, with nVidia's Riva TNT taking a lot of the OEM market share. |
Voodoo Banshee (AGP)
The AGP version of the Banshee is only able to take advantage of AGP's faster DMA bandwidth. Banshee is not at all able to use any of the real AGP features like AGP texturing, AGP1x or AGP2x. This can be a problem when running games with particularly large textures especially at high resolutions, because the local memory won't be able to contain all those textures so that they have to be swapped from main memory via DMA transfers, which isn't by far as fast as AGP texturing. The 3D quality of Banshee is identical to Voodoo2, meaning that it doesn't have a more than 16 bit deep Z-buffer and cannot do real 32-bit color rendering either. Cards flaggd as 'Velocity' were typically sold to OEMs, and had only 8 MB of RAM. The card was also sold as:
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Voodoo 3 1000
The Voodoo 3 1000 ran both the core clock and memory at 125 MHz. It was fabricated using a 0.25 micron process.
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Voodoo 3 2000 PCI
The Voodoo 3 2000 ran both the core clock and memory at 143 MHz. It was fabricated using a 0.25 micron process.
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Voodoo 3 2000 AGP
STB Systems Voodoo 3 2000 AGP (part #210-0364-003).
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Voodoo 3 3000 PCI
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Voodoo 3 3000 AGP
Key features:
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Voodoo 3 3500 AGP
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Voodoo 4
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Voodoo 4 4500 PCI
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Voodoo 4 4500 AGP
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Voodoo 5 5500 AGP
The Voodoo 5 arrived to a market that was now full of multi-texture games, and it was a single-texture card, so it was losing 50% of its fillrate doing two texture layers.
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