Voodoo 3 Agp Driver
En agosto de 1997, 3dfx lanzó el chipset Voodoo Rush, que combinaba el chip Voodoo con un chip 2D de Alliance Semiconductor en la misma placa, eliminando así la.
Discussion about old PC hardware and Retro PCs
I am testing a 3dfx STB Voodoo3 2000 AGP video card. The BIOS POST screen says that the BIOS is version 1.00.01-SD. I like these cards. They have good signal quality, and are still cheap and easy to find on ebay.
1 Link to 3dfx Voodoo3 driver. Search for 22 Nov 2000
2 Link to 3dfx uninstaller. Search for 06 Apr 2000
3 Link to V-Control, version 1.82B. Search for 09 Aug 2003
4 Link to MiniGL version 1.49. Search for 04 Sep 1999
5 Link to 3dfx card flasher Search for EEPROM
6 Link to this card s BIOS rom
7 Link to Internet Explorer 4.01 service pack 2.
1 This is the lastest and final reference driver, dated 22 Nov 2000, version V1.07.00. Other 3rd party drivers exist. Apparently, the best AmigaMerlin driver to use for w98 is version 2.0.
2 This 3dfx Uninstaller is for Windows 98, not for w95. It seems to work on w95, but then freezes.
3 V-Control is probably the best tweaker for a 3dfx card.
4 MiniGL will allow you to play Quake type games using GLide.
5 3dfx utility will allow you to flash a 3dfx card. I tested this with the ROM file above, and it worked.
6 BIOS ROM file, for this V3 SD-RAM card.
7 The 3dfx Voodoo3 reference driver listed above won t install unless you have SP1 or greater, for Internet Explorer verison 4.01. This issue appeared on Windows 95. It won t happen if you are using Windows 98.
1 Can anyone recommend any other good software/utils for the Voodoo3 card. Thanks a lot.
Re: 3dfx STB Voodoo3 2000 AGP video card, basic info
retro games 100 wrote:Questions
A question from me instead of the answer:
Do you even need any more utils/software when you already have vcontrol.
Seriously, vcontrol has every possible modifiable parameter for every voodoo out there. It only lacks dual-chip overclock for Voodoo 5 it overclocks only a single chip, instead of both. but you asked about V3 not V5
V3 software well - you can try the tech demos from falconfly Demos are quite picky about drivers though - not everything will work on the fly, and most will not work with latest drivers.
Posts: 630Joined: 2007-5-25 Location: Aachen, Germany
Nice little series you ve got going here.
On the software side, the 3DHQ drivers are probably worth a mention. Everybody kinda has their own favorites amongst the Voodoo drivers, so there s quite a bit of YMMV involved depending on the particular system configuration and what games you re playing, but the 3DHQ ones seem to work quite well on my V5, and I like their control panel thingy. The SFFT Alpha drivers look interesting too probably be worth playing around with, though I d expect they have some issues that limit their value for general everyday use.
Other random observation: your V3 2000 uses the same RAM as my V3 3000.
Posts: 1607Joined: 2009-6-08 Location: Central FL
I tend to just use the last non-beta 3dfx drivers because I usually intend to play games of that age anyway and have a belief that games and drivers of similar age mesh well.
lately I ve been pondering a V3 DOS quirk regarding flickering distortion. I ve seen this with a few games such as Zephyr and Dark Forces. surely other people have run into this issue. I have not tried the Voodoo VESA fix TSR yet as a remedy.
just have a S3 card on hand for DOS quirks, I say.
Posts: 6396Joined: 2002-7-22 Location: WI, USA
retro games 100 wrote:1 Can anyone recommend any other good software/utils for the Voodoo3 card. Thanks a lot.
Old Trashbarg already mentioned SFFT. Those are the only 3dfx drivers still in development. Last version was released less than a month ago. I haven t really tried them, but have read many positive feedbacks from other users. They are supposed to greatly improve D3D compatibility with some games.
Probably you already know MesaFX; if not, you should give it a try. It is a standalone OpenGL driver that works with every 3dfx card ever made though I noticed some missing textures when using it with a Voodoo1, featuring improved vertex processing, lots of added extensions, and much better support for modern OpenGL games Doom III running on 3dfx cards, remember. Not really useful, but nice to see as a technical curiosity.
I don t think that miniGL 1.49 is the best version for Voodoo3; I remember that the general recommendations about miniGL releases were: 1.46 for Voodoo1/2, 1.47 for Banshee, 1.48 for Voodoo3 and 1.49 for Voodoo4/5. But from my personal experience, I would always recommend miniGL 1.46 because it was the latest one with ALT TAB support, a very cool feature back then to leave games in background instead of closing them.
Last but not least, Metabyte made some software tools that I personally consider little pieces of art. WickedGL was a faster and better miniGL driver that could sometimes replace the full OpenGL implementation from 3dfx, but used Glide2x.dll instead of Glide3x.dll for rasterization. This allowed the usage of other Metabyte tools, like a special Voodoo2 driver that enabled a 1024 resolution with a single Voodoo2 card . . And Wicked3D eyeScream, a stereoscopic not anaglyph 3D driver that enabled real 3D on 3dfx cards and CRT monitors more than 10 years ago, way before Nvidia released 3D Vision.
Posts: 391Joined: 2003-11-12 Location: Spain
swaaye wrote:lately I ve been pondering a V3 DOS quirk regarding flickering distortion. I ve seen this with a few games such as Zephyr and Dark Forces. surely other people have run into this issue. I have not tried the Voodoo VESA fix TSR yet as a remedy.
I will try Dark Forces on the voodoo 3 and see what happens. Also I will flash the Bios on the thing.
Well I don t have any S3 card again, but all games I care about work fine with the Nvidia Vesa implementation. Also AFAIK 2MB S3 cards will not even allow me to run windows in 1024x768x24BPP.
I was thinking, is DosBox Glide support overrated considering there are only 32 games that can make use of it list I posted earlier.
-- ISA Soundcard Overview // Doom MBF 2.04 // SetMul v1.1
Posts: 1845Joined: 2004-5-07 Location: NL
yup NV has superb VESA too. youcan even get around a few of their quirks by using the 3dfx VESA fix TSR, curiously enough. There is a palette corruption issue that is fixed in Terra Nova this way.
Regarding my S3 comment, I only meant for DOS use. it s not much of a inconvenience to swap video cards in DOS. Indeed using an old S3 PCI card in Windows is not desireable on faster machines.
I tried dark forces on the V3, but could not really notice any flickering distortion
Also I tried GTA, the 3dfx dos version. It seemed to malfunction at first, but you just have to blindly press F11, down and enter, to select a video mode that is actually supported by the V3. After that the game shows. It looks better then the plain dos version.
The problems may be related to write combining and as such not appear with all motherboards because BIOSs vary I seem to remember FastVid tweaking causing the probs on a PPro with V3. Some 440BX boards automatically enable those features.
Yes, last week I stopped auto-loading fastvid with the voodoo 3, as it caused some games to appear garbled beyond recognition. Even with minimal settings Ski or Die comes to mind.
I wonder if this is true, about MS-DOS 7.x, as I only use 7.x in the last 10 years:
USING FASTVID TO IMPROVE GRAPHICS PERFORMANCE
The downloads page of my webiste also has a download link to a very useful utility called FastVid, written by John Hinkley. FastVid can improve graphics throughput by as much as 10 times on some machines, so I strongly recommend its use on any Pentium Pro or higher machine running any stand-alone DOS except for MS-DOS 7.x MS-DOS 7.x already does what FastVid does, so it s not needed with this O/S.
Well actually it shows to be false considering these observations:
Most demanding DOS game, resource wise.
Next I wondered whether loading a Dos game from Windows 9x enables faster fps. I think I noticed a thing like that
Probably you already know MesaFX; if not, you should give it a try. It is a standalone OpenGL driver that works with every 3dfx card ever made though I noticed some missing textures when using it with a Voodoo1, featuring improved vertex processing, lots of added extensions, and much better support for modern OpenGL games Doom III running on 3dfx cards, remember. Not really useful, but nice to see as a technical curiosity.
Do the SFFT drivers support Win9x. I thought they were 2k/XP.
gerwin wrote:I wonder if this is true, about MS-DOS 7.x, as I only use 7.x in the last 10 years:
It could be referring to that stupid real counterfeit MSDOS 7 distribution the one that is under the GPL, effectively smearing the license with loads of violations and doesn t have much actual MSDOS in it
I don t remember real MS-DOS 7 doing any fastvid stuff under win9x. Fastvid s role wasn t redundant.
sliderider wrote:Do the SFFT drivers support Win9x. I thought they were 2k/XP.
Sorry, you re right. They re 2K/XP only. I forgot that retro games was using Windows 9x, though he just asked for other software/utils for the Voodoo3, in general. For Win9x, I have mainly used AmigaMerlin latest release.
batracio wrote:Last but not least, Metabyte made some software tools that I personally consider little pieces of art. WickedGL was a faster and better miniGL driver that could sometimes replace the full OpenGL implementation from 3dfx, but used Glide2x.dll instead of Glide3x.dll for rasterization. This allowed the usage of other Metabyte tools, like a special Voodoo2 driver that enabled a 1024 resolution with a single Voodoo2 card . . And Wicked3D eyeScream, a stereoscopic not anaglyph 3D driver that enabled real 3D on 3dfx cards and CRT monitors more than 10 years ago, way before Nvidia released 3D Vision.
Well, this certainly seems interesting. But either its not quite true, or I don t know how to make it work. In fact, I have metabyte Wicked3D eyescream glasses and I was testing them a lot both with V3 and V5. The only game I found, where the stereoscopy wonderfully. worked with Glide was NFS 2:SE. All other games were working explicitly in D3D mode w/ glasses. I had no luck running Wicked3D in OpenGL/Glide mode, but only in DirectX which plainly put, sucks, and if I had to choose whether I want to play a game in stereo D3D or in Glide, I would ALWAYS choose glide.
BTW, Wicked3D driver works not only on 3dfx, but on all other 3D accelerators of that time as well also on S3 in fact. if the driver information is correct.
elfuego wrote:Well, this certainly seems interesting. But either its not quite true, or I don t know how to make it work. In fact, I have metabyte Wicked3D eyescream glasses and I was testing them a lot both with V3 and V5. The only game I found, where the stereoscopy wonderfully. worked with Glide was NFS 2:SE. All other games were working explicitly in D3D mode w/ glasses. I had no luck running Wicked3D in OpenGL/Glide mode, but only in DirectX which plainly put, sucks, and if I had to choose whether I want to play a game in stereo D3D or in Glide, I would ALWAYS choose glide.
You calling me a liar I swear I did play GLQuake, Tomb Raider-something and maybe other games in stereoscopic 3D with shutter glasses. I found Tomb Raider games confusing because they use flat bitmaps for background in open areas, so that background is assigned a wrong depth and can be seen floating somewhere around the 3D scene. Closed areas without 2D surfaces, sprites, etc, should be displayed fine.
GLQuake was impressive in stereoscopic 3D, by the way. But I can t really confirm that I only needed Wicked3D eyeScream driver. I may have used the special Metabyte Voodoo2 driver with resolution override, because it also supported the stereo 3D effect, or so I think. It came with a Glide2x wrapper that enabled those features at loading, and then used a standard 3dfx Glide2x.dll for actual rendering. I know for sure it worked on Voodoo2.
It may be possible to try that Glide2x wrapper with other 3dfx Glide2x.dll and get it working on other Voodoo cards, or even with a Glide-to-GL/D3D wrapper and use it on any 3D card. I don t think I ever tried this at home.
By the way, you re right about Wicked3D eyeScream not enabling the stereoscopic 3D effect in OpenGL with non-3dfx cards; eyeScream 2000 version supported Direct3D games only. You need eyeScream Pro version to get full OpenGL support. But I could never found that Pro version, just a demo that only works in Quake III.
Hey - Im not calling anyone a liar. I did state that I may be too dumb to configure it properly. I dont know much about V2 Wicked3D, I m just stating the facts about V3/V5 Wicked3D. It works mostly in D3D mode not in OGL. I m using v5.02 driver since the version 3.xx which comes on the CD doesnt support V5. Maybe it does work in OGL glide mode with a V2. If so, I have to dig out my V2 and try it out, since I hate playing NFS 3/4 in D3D mode looks like crap.
Oh and I didnt play GLquake - I only tested UT 99 and it didnt work properly with Glide glasses officially it did work, but I saw no difference. Honestly, if you can play UT 99 and Quake 3 with high details FSAA, why would you play GLquake anyway
By the way, you are also right about one thing: resolution override. I was somehow able to run NFS 2: SE in 1280x1024 and 1024x768, even if the game was thinking it runs in 640x480. But, thats only NFS 2. Other games didnt do the hardware justice
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3dfx Interactive was a company headquartered in San Jose, California that specialized in the manufacturing of 3D graphics processing units and, later, graphics cards. It was a pioneer in the field from the late 1990s until 2000.
The company s flagship 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 and its follow-up Voodoo2 were popular, and it became standard for 3D games to offer support for the company s Glide API.
3dfx rapidly declined beginning in the late 1990s and was acquired by Nvidia mostly for intellectual property rights before going bankrupt in 2002.
7.1 Voodoo3 and strategy shift
Founded in 1994 by Jeff Smith, Phil Smith, and Gary Tarolli and Scott Sellers all former employees of Silicon Graphics Inc. with backing from Gordie Campbell s TechFarm, 3dfx released its Voodoo Graphics chip in 1996. The company manufactured only 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 initial fame in the arcade market. The first arcade machine that 3Dfx Voodoo Graphics hardware was used in was ICE Home Run Derby, a game released in 1996. Later that year it was featured in more popular titles, such as Atari s San Francisco Rush and Wayne Gretzky s 3D Hockey. 2
A Diamond Monster 3D, using the Voodoo chipset
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 the few previous 3D graphics solutions for computers. Prior to affordable 3D hardware, games such as Doom and Quake had compelled video game players to move from their 80386s to 80486s, and then to the Pentium. 3
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 operated at 50 MHz. It provided only 3D acceleration and as such the computer also needed a traditional video controller for conventional 2D software. A pass-through VGA cable daisy-chained the video controller to the Voodoo, 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 electronic components. The mechanical relays emitted an audible clicking sound when they engaged and disengaged.
The Voodoo s primary competition was 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 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, but it did not have comparable 3D performance, and its 2D capabilities were considered merely adequate relative to other 2D cards of the time.
Originally developed for arcade games that included non-Intel architectures, 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 games that used Glide, the killer application for Voodoo Graphics was the MiniGL driver developed to allow hardware acceleration of the game Quake by id Software. MiniGL 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, made Glide obsolete.
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 four Voodoo Graphics cards working in parallel.
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.
STB Systems Blackmagic 3D in SLI
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 800x600 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.
The Voodoo2 introduced Scan-Line Interleave SLI, in which two Voodoo2 boards were connected together, each drawing half the scan lines of the screen. SLI increased the maximum resolution supported to 1024 768. Because of 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 had minimal effect on total market share and was not a financial success.
The potential of the Voodoo2 s SLI was limited by CPU bottlenecking 4 Still, the long-term accomplishment of this technology can be seen in its usefulness in gaming as late as 2004. 5
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 acronym now Scalable Link Interface in the GeForce 6 Series. ATI Technologies has also since introduced its own multi-chip implementation, dubbed CrossFire. Although NVIDIA SLI and ATI Crossfire operate on the original SLI principle of utilizing the power of multiple video cards, the implementation is different, such as NVIDIA requiring graphics cards running the same graphics processor, and an SLI bridge to be connected to the cards. CrossFire, from the Rx 200 series onwards, uses the PCI Express bus instead of a bridge to connect cards together.
Creative 3D Blaster Banshee AGP
Near the end of 1998, 3dfx released the 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. 6 7
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 adopted only in small numbers by OEMs. 8
The banshee suffered from overheating issues which would cripple its performance.
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 Imagination Technologies then VideoLogic technology, and Blackbelt, a system designed in the United States using 3Dfx technology. citation needed
However on July 22, 1997, Sega announced that it was terminating the development contract, citation needed and that Sega chose to use NEC s PowerVR chipset for its game console.
3Dfx said Sega has still not given a reason as to why it terminated the contract or why it chose NEC s accelerator chipset over 3Dfx s. According to Dale Ford, senior analyst at Dataquest, a market research firm based in San Jose, California, a number of factors could have influenced Sega s decision to move to NEC, including NEC s proven track record of supplying chipsets for the Nintendo 64 and the demonstrated ability to be able to handle a major influx of capacity if the company decided to ramp up production on a moment s notice.
This is a highly competitive market with price wars happening all the time and it would appear that after evaluating a number of choices and the ramifications each choice brings Sega went with a decision that it thought was best for the company s longevity, said Mr. Ford.
Sega has to make a significant move to stay competitive and they need to make it soon. Now whether this move is to roll out another home console platform or move strictly to the PC gaming space is unknown.
Sega quickly quashed 3Dfx s Blackbelt and used the NEC-based Katana as the model for the product that would be marketed and sold as the Dreamcast. 3Dfx sued Sega for breach of contract, accusing Sega of starting the deal in bad faith in order to take 3Dfx technology. 9 The case was settled out of court.
In early 1998, 3dfx embarked on a new development project. The Rampage development project was new technology for use in a new graphics card that would take approximately two years to develop, and would supposedly be several years ahead of the competition once it debuted. The company hired hardware and software teams in Austin, Texas to develop 2D and 3D Windows device drivers for Rampage in the summer of 1998. The hardware team in Austin initially focused on Rampage, but then worked on transform and lighting T L engines and on MPEG decoder technology. Later, these technologies were part of the Nvidia asset purchase in December 2000.
Voodoo3 and strategy shift edit
3dfx executed a major strategy change just prior to the launch of Voodoo3 by purchasing STB Systems, which was one of the larger graphics card manufacturers at the time; the intent was for 3dfx to start manufacturing, marketing, and selling its own graphics cards, rather than functioning only as an OEM supplier. STB was obviously intended to give 3dfx access to that company s considerable OEM resources and sales channels, but the intended benefits of the acquisition never materialized. The two corporations were vastly different entities, with different cultures and structures, and they never integrated smoothly. 10
STB prior to the 3dfx acquisition also approached Nvidia as a potential partner to acquire the company. At the time, STB was Nvidia s largest customer and was only minimally engaged with 3dfx. 3dfx management mistakenly believed that acquiring STB would ensure OEM design wins with their products and that product limitations would be overcome with STB s knowledge in supporting the OEM sales/design win cycles. Nvidia decided not to acquire STB and to continue to support many brands of graphics board manufacturers. After STB was acquired by 3dfx, Nvidia focused on being a virtual graphics card manufacturer for the OEMs and strengthened its position in selling finished reference designs ready for market to the OEMs. STB s manufacturing facility in Juarez, Mexico was not able to compete from either a cost or quality point of view when compared to the burgeoning Original design manufacturers ODMs and Contract electronic manufacturers CEMs that were delivering solutions in Asia for Nvidia. Prior to the STB merger finalizing, some of 3dfx s OEMs warned the company that any product from Juarez will not be deemed fit to ship with their systems, however 3dfx management believed these problems could be addressed over time. Those customers generally moved to Nvidia solutions and no longer chose to ship 3dfx products.
The acquisition of STB was one of the main contributors to 3dfx s downfall; citation needed the company did not sell any Voodoo 4 or 5 chips to third party manufacturers which were a significant source of revenue for the company. These third-party manufacturers turned into competitors and began sourcing graphics chips from NVIDIA. This also further alienated 3dfx s remaining OEM customers, as they had a single source for 3dfx products and could not choose a CEM to provide cost flexibility. The OEMs saw 3dfx as a direct competitor in retail. With the purchase of STB 3dfx created a line of Velocity boards a STB brand that used crippled Voodoo3 chips, as a product to target the low-end market. The chip came with only a single functional TMU, making it similar to a Voodoo Banshee.
As 3dfx focused more on the retail graphics card space, further inroads into the OEM space were limited. A significant requirement of the OEM business was the ability to consistently produce new products on the six-month product refresh cycle the computer manufacturers required; 3dfx did not have the methodology nor the mindset to focus on this business model. In the end, 3dfx opted to be a retail distribution company manufacturing their own branded products.
The Voodoo 3 was hyped as the graphics card that would make 3dfx the undisputed leader but the actual product was below expectations. Though it was still the fastest as it edged the RIVA TNT2 by a small margin, the Voodoo3 lacked 32-bit color and large texture support. Though at that time few games supported large textures and 32-bit color, and those that did generally were too demanding to be run at playable framerates, the features 32-bit color support and 2048x2048 textures were much more impressive on paper than 16-bit color and 256x256 texture support. The Voodoo3 sold relatively well, but was disappointing compared to the first two models and 3dfx gave up the market leadership to Nvidia.
As 3dfx attempted to counter the TNT2 threat, it was surprised by Nvidia s GeForce 256. The GeForce was a single-chip processor with integrated transform, lighting, triangle setup/clipping hardware T L, and rendering engines, giving it a significant performance advantage over the Voodoo3. The 3dfx Voodoo3 2000 PCI was the highest-performance 2D/3D card available for the Apple Macintosh at the time of its release, though support from 3dfx was labeled as beta and required a firmware reflash. 11
The company s next and as it would turn out, final product was code-named Napalm. Originally, this was just a Voodoo3 modified to support newer technologies and higher clock speeds, with performance estimated to be around the level of the RIVA TNT2. However, Napalm was delayed, and in the meantime Nvidia brought out their landmark GeForce 256 chip, which shifted even more of the computational work from the CPU to the graphics chip. Napalm would have been unable to compete with the GeForce, so it was redesigned to support multiple chip configurations, like the Voodoo2 had. The end-product was named VSA-100, with VSA standing for Voodoo Scalable Architecture. 3dfx was finally able to have a product that could defeat the GeForce.
However, by the time the VSA-100 based cards made it to the market, the GeForce 2 and ATI Radeon cards had arrived and were offering higher performance at that price point. The only real advantage the Voodoo 5 5500 had over the GeForce 2 GTS or Radeon was its superior spatial anti-aliasing implementation, and the fact that it didn t take such a large performance hit relative to its peers when anti-aliasing was enabled. 3dfx was fully aware of the Voodoo 5 s speed deficiency, so they touted it as quality over speed, which was a reversal of the Voodoo 3 marketing which emphasized raw performance over features. 5500 sales were respectable but volumes were not at a level to keep 3dfx afloat.
The Voodoo 5 5000, which had 32 MB of VRAM to the 5500 s 64 MB, was never launched, as the smaller frame buffer didn t significantly reduce cost over the Voodoo 5 5500.
The only other member of the Voodoo 5 line, the Voodoo 4 4500, was as much of a disaster as Voodoo Rush, because it had performance well short of its value-oriented peers combined with a late launch. Voodoo 4 was beaten in almost all areas by the GeForce 2 MX a low-cost board sold mostly as an OEM part for computer manufacturers and the Radeon VE. 12
One unusual trait of the Voodoo 4 and 5 was that the Macintosh versions of these cards had both VGA and DVI output jacks, whereas the PC versions had only the VGA connector. Also, the Mac versions of the Voodoo 4 and 5 had an Achilles heel in that they did not support hardware-based MPEG2 acceleration, which hindered the playback of DVDs on a Mac equipped with a Voodoo graphics card.
The Voodoo 5 6000 never made it to market, due to a severe bug resulting in data corruption on the AGP bus on certain boards, and was limited to AGP 2x. It was thus incompatible with the then-new Pentium 4 motherboards. Later tests proved that the Voodoo 5 6000 outperformed not only the GeForce 2 GTS and ATI Radeon 7200, but also the faster GeForce 2 Ultra and Radeon 7500. In some cases it was shown to compete well with the GeForce 3, trading performance places with the card on various tests. 13 However, the prohibitively high production cost of the card, particularly the 4 chip setup, external power supply and 128 MB of VRAM a very large amount at the time, would have likely hampered its competitiveness.
Acquisition and bankruptcy edit
In late 2000, not long after Voodoo 4 s launch, several of 3dfx s creditors decided to initiate bankruptcy proceedings. 3dfx, as a whole, would have had virtually no chance of successfully contesting these proceedings, and instead opted to be bought by Nvidia, thus ceasing to exist as a company. The history of and participants in the 3dfx/Nvidia deal making can be read in the respective companies financial filings from that time period. The resolution and legality of those arrangements with respect to the purchase, 3dfx s creditors and its bankruptcy proceedings were still being worked through the courts as of February 2009 update, nearly 9 years after the sale. A majority of the engineering and design team working on Rampage the successor to the VSA-100 line that remained with the transition, were requested and remained in house to work on what became the GeForce FX series. Others are known to have accepted employment with ATI to bring their knowledge to the creation of the X series of video cards and reform their own version of SLI known as Crossfire and yet another interpretation of 3Dfx s SLI ideal. citation needed
After Nvidia acquired 3dfx, mainly for its intellectual property, they announced that they would not provide technical support for 3dfx products. Drivers and support are still offered by community websites. However, while being functional, the drivers do not carry a manufacturer s backing and are treated as Beta by users still wanting to deploy 3dfx cards in more current systems. Nvidia offered a limited time program under which 3dfx owners could trade in their cards for Nvidia cards of equal performance value. 14 On December 15, 2000 3dfx apologized to the customers with a final press release. 15 The 3dfx bankruptcy is in the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, appeal, Docket 11-15189. Following is a clerk s order as filed in the docket:
05/01/2012. Oral argument in this case is vacated. Oral argument and submission of this case are deferred pending resolution of In re Bellingham, No. 11-35162 Argued and Submitted October 13, 2011. The question in In re Bellingham is whether, or in what circumstances, a bankruptcy court has jurisdiction to enter judgment on a fraudulent conveyance action.
Although 1997 was marked by analysts as a turning point for 3dfx due to the marketing led by the new CEO Greg Ballard, there was criticism of Ballard s understanding of R D in the graphics industry. Single-card 2D/3D solutions were taking over the market, and although Ballard saw the need and attempted to direct the company there with the Voodoo Banshee and the Voodoo3, both of these cost the company millions in sales and lost market share while diverting vital resources from the Rampage project. 3 Then 3dfx released word in early 1999 that the still-competitive Voodoo2 would support only OpenGL and Glide under Microsoft s Windows 2000 operating system, and not DirectX. Many games were transitioning to DirectX at this point, and the announcement caused many PC gamers–the core demographic of 3dfx s market–to switch to Nvidia or ATI offerings for their new machines.
Full article: Comparison of 3dfx graphics processing units
1Pixel shaders : Vertex shaders : Texture mapping units : Render output units
a b SEC filings, Form 8-K: Bankruptcy or receivership, updated October 21, 2002, retrieved August 17, 2007
Donovan, Gary. 3dfx/Quantum3D Arcade Hardware. The Dodge Garage. Retrieved 2006-07-26.
a b A Fallen Titan s Final Glory. Sudhian Media. 31 December 2004. Archived from the original on 19 November 2006.
Churchill. Celeron 450 Voodoo2 SLI
Pabst, Thomas. New 3D Chips - Banshee, G200, RIVA TNT And Savage3D, Tom s Hardware, August 18, 1998.
3dfx Specifications: Voodoo Banshee AGP/PCI, 3dfxzone, accessed July 26, 2006.
Sudhian Media. Sudhian.com. Retrieved 2014-08-18.
Sega accused of contract breach. CNET. 3 September 1997. Archived from the original on 19 February 2005.
A Fallen Titans Final Glory: The Golden Age. Sudhian.com. Retrieved 2014-08-18.
Review: 3Dfx Mac Voodoo3 2000. Mac3dfx.com.
Lal Shimpi, Anand. 3dfx Voodoo4 4500AGP, Anandtech, October 23, 2000.
Jasper. 3dfx Voodoo 5 6000 Review, Sudhian, July 26, 2006.
3dfx Owners Can Now Trade in their Voodoo Graphics Card for a Verto Graphics Cards Featuring NVIDIA s High-Performance GPUs. Nvidia. 26 November 2001. Retrieved 18 August 2014.
Letter to Customers. X86-secret.com. 2000-12-15. Retrieved 2014-08-18.
Wikimedia Commons has media related to 3dfx Interactive.
Greg Ballard discusses some of the reasons for 3dfx s decline, Stanford University, November 2006
3dfx Oral History Panel PDF - Gordon Campbell, Scott Sellers, Ross Q. Smith, and Gary M. Tarolli interviewed by: Shayne Hodge, Computer History Museum, 29 July 2013
Retrieved from https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php.title 3dfx_Interactive oldid 671780885
Categories: Companies established in 1994Companies that filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 2002Graphics hardware companiesDefunct computer companies of the United StatesNvidiaCompanies disestablished in 2002Companies based in San Jose, CaliforniaDefunct companies based in CaliforniaDefunct computer hardware companies.
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