Learn more about the game changer for gaming
3Dfx was found in San Jose, California in 1994 by three former Silicon Graphics employees, and initially they made hardware for arcade machines. Their first Voodoo chipset powered arcade games were San Francisco Rush, ICE Home Run Derby and Wayne Gretzky’s 3D Hockey. However, in late 1996, memory prices went very low so 3Dfx started focusing on the consumer PC market.
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Revolutionising PC Graphics
Their Voodoo graphics was a 3D-only add-in card that needed a VGA cable pass-through from a separate 2D card to the Voodoo, and then connected to the display. Many companies sold these cards, and reaped huge profits.
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Voodoo Graphics was able to bring about a major change in the PC graphics industry and resulted in a lot of other designs going obsolete overnight, and this included all the 2D-only graphics producers who were thriving till that time. While Voodoo was in the top spot, 3Dfx held 80-85% of the 3D accelerator market.
The other competitors started recovering from the severe blow they took and started making combo cards that had both 2D and 3D displays. Voodoo still had better quality but the others sold their cards at lower prices and got many hits.
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During this period 3Dfx adopted a new style. They didn’t make graphics cards directly but sold their chipset to third-party Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEM) for their personal use. But this led to their downfall as other companies modified around this and they started facing tougher competition from all around. Nvidia was one such company and many of 3Dfx’s partners decided to switch sides to it.
However, one can’t deny that we won’t be having all the high functioning graphics cards if it weren’t for the 3Dfx.
(Cover: TechSpot)