At 3DFX I helped build up and run the field failure / customer support analysis lab. I left not long after the release of Voodoo 3. It seemed we had lost our way, trying to build our own video cards and compete directly with our partners. We were trying to build cards in Mexico and quality crashed hard. Tensions grew, and I had to leave. A little later, I was picked up by Nviida, and had fun picking through my old lab stuff out of salvage to help build up a new, similar operation. I implemented the same 3DFX mission at my new Nvidia home - nothing half-assed, everything world-class. The work continues, into 2022.
Could you describe the "tension" a little bit more in depth?! I'm kind of curious, because I've heard that's when things really started to crack internally. Did the upper management just have no idea how to proceed in the market? Were Gary and Scott against building 3Dfx branded boards (which as you said totally alienated your customers)?
That seems really strange to me that the company pushed away partners that had helped make them a big success. I can think of a few companies that did that, and it never seems to turn out well.
@@MaxAbramson3 There is an interview about that. It looks like some time before the STB acquisition they got a CEO who then decided to buy STB. And that was the biggest mistake that led to the downfall of 3dfx. A clear CEO management mistake.
It's sad watching something like this knowing how 3Dfx' fate was sealed. At the time this video was done, the company was about to release the Voodoo2, which was the biggest thing this company did beyond its initial launch. After that, it was all downhill as competitors caught up. It's unfortunate they invested too much in the wrong technology later on and had to file for bankruptcy. What a vision they had and everything that followed owes so much to 3Dfx, which is largely forgotten. RiP 3Dfx and Silicon Graphics. I loved the final shot in this video with the toilet paper roll, but that's hubris and irony has a sick sense of humor.
they still wiped S3 and Matrox lol. I miss these days, good old 3dfx. I still use a 3dfx mouse pad, sold my voodoo cards long ago though. Wish I hadn't. I have been wanting to play win98 games again under 3dfx glide. Such good times!
@@blairlohnes8103 I think they still would have failed even if they didn't buy STB or gigapixel. They'd have money for another attempt or two, but they were really falling behind. Voodoo 3 sort of kept up; sacrificing some features for slightly better performance than its competitors. It had a 256x256 texture resolution limitation and was about as fast as voodoo 2 SLI in a single card; games were actually starting to use larger texture sizes than this not that long after release. VSA-100 is where it really went off the rails. That's a 112 mm^2 die. It's not far off from the 139 mm^2 geforce 256 die. It needed two of those in SLI to equal the geforce 256 DDR. The SLI stuff added a lot of complexity and it was delayed so much that it wasn't actually competing against the geforce 256 DDR, where it might have survived another generation on name reckognition with poor profit margins (two large chips, expensive PCB, needed almost twice the amount of memory to equal its competitors since each processor in SLI needed to duplicate textures in its own memory for memory bandwidth). It was competing against the geforce 2 GTS; which was the mid-budget geforce 2 and it just got smashed to bits. Voodoo 5 6000 with 4 chips could have eeked out a lead (with 4x as much memory, very complex PCB and 4 chips each one of which larger than the 88 mm^2 of the geforce 2 GTS); and then the VSA-100 chip would be done. Already the geforce 256 had some impressive per pixel lighting with register combiners; not yet programmable pixel shaders, but sufficient for running doom 3 fully correctly (with an embarassing amount of passes and at *very* low speed, but correctly). The next generation of voodoo would have gone up against geforce 3 and radeon 8500 or worse. The original radeon was likewise far ahead in terms of per pixel lighting. It wasn't actually that useful on the geforce 3 and radeon 8500, but it's too late to start developing the feature at that point; this had to happen over multiple generations. It felt like ATi and nvidia caught up to 3DFX very quickly and just kept going and left them in the dust.
It's sad waching Generation Minecraft play old pc games like Heretic 2 and looks like dogchit !! When i was watching a dude play it on an old pc and was wtf is this. so smooth, glows, magic, voodoo everywhere. When youtubers make it look it bland and blocky cuz they love teh pixel look.
3DFX..The most ground breaking 3D card ever made. I still own Voodoo 1 and 2. Both from Orchid. NVIDIA's 3D card at the time looked like a 2D card and relied hard on CPU. lol
Algo se murió en el corazoncito de muchos cuando 3dfx desapareció. Todavia recuerdo mi AMD K6 2 350 mhz con la 3dfx voodoo banshee y sus 16 mb de SGRAM... que tiempos aquellos.
This takes me way back. I remember looking for a 3d card to turn my family's Compaq Presario in a gaming rig. It had a Pentium 233 MMX, which was pretty good, but the onboard S3 graphics weren't 3d accelerated. I bought a Voodoo Banshee PCI, because 3dfx was really the way to go from about 1996 to 1999. Nothing else would do. If you didn't have a Voodoo card, you didn't have sh!t.
They should have keep going on whit the Voodoo 2 tech and give them more power and ram, SLI was power. Why you might ask simple Voodoo 2 did even support my Gigabyte Radeon 9800 Pro. How it done performance did fine 128mb +8mb Voodoo 2. It did fine in testing, little lower in top max 2% difference but when drop Fps it did hold it so the GPU did'nt "Lag fps" but flat it out when it happens. Voodoo 5 + Voodoo 2 was bottom power. compair to a GPU 2 year later then 3dfx droped out, it still was a beast when GPU got a hard time. Diablo 2 i droped (Cheating) all other computer to 0 fps, but my 2 cards still had 1-2 fps. and i had a lower pc then the other. How i wish for a Voodoo 2 type usb 3.0 SLI booster card or some thing. like 500+ mhz (x3+) 2+ gb ram that run the same way. Laptop will like :-).
IMO 16 bit color on 3dfx (fake 22 bit color) was a perfect trade off. I had TNT2 but I havent played many games in 32 bit color anyway because of performance penalty and 16 bit color looked nowhere near as good as on 3DFX cards. I started playing games in 32 bit color when I bought Geforce 3 but that card was like 4x times faster compared to TNT2.
![The Queen of Heart '99 SE (Morikawa Yuki) (Watanabe Seisakusho) (Windows) [1999] [PC Longplay]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/OP6HxENeKyg/mqdefault.jpg)
At 3DFX I helped build up and run the field failure / customer support analysis lab. I left not long after the release of Voodoo 3. It seemed we had lost our way, trying to build our own video cards and compete directly with our partners. We were trying to build cards in Mexico and quality crashed hard. Tensions grew, and I had to leave. A little later, I was picked up by Nviida, and had fun picking through my old lab stuff out of salvage to help build up a new, similar operation. I implemented the same 3DFX mission at my new Nvidia home - nothing half-assed, everything world-class. The work continues, into 2022.
Could you describe the "tension" a little bit more in depth?! I'm kind of curious, because I've heard that's when things really started to crack internally.
Did the upper management just have no idea how to proceed in the market? Were Gary and Scott against building 3Dfx branded boards (which as you said totally alienated your customers)?
That seems really strange to me that the company pushed away partners that had helped make them a big success. I can think of a few companies that did that, and it never seems to turn out well.
@@MaxAbramson3 There is an interview about that. It looks like some time before the STB acquisition they got a CEO who then decided to buy STB. And that was the biggest mistake that led to the downfall of 3dfx. A clear CEO management mistake.
It's sad watching something like this knowing how 3Dfx' fate was sealed. At the time this video was done, the company was about to release the Voodoo2, which was the biggest thing this company did beyond its initial launch. After that, it was all downhill as competitors caught up. It's unfortunate they invested too much in the wrong technology later on and had to file for bankruptcy. What a vision they had and everything that followed owes so much to 3Dfx, which is largely forgotten. RiP 3Dfx and Silicon Graphics. I loved the final shot in this video with the toilet paper roll, but that's hubris and irony has a sick sense of humor.
they still wiped S3 and Matrox lol. I miss these days, good old 3dfx. I still use a 3dfx mouse pad, sold my voodoo cards long ago though. Wish I hadn't. I have been wanting to play win98 games again under 3dfx glide. Such good times!
They shouldn't have started making their own boards after buying STB, that really burnt some bridges.
tbh, I feel like they kinda knew what was going on, but wanted to have some fun before going out of the game(pun may be intended)
@@blairlohnes8103 I think they still would have failed even if they didn't buy STB or gigapixel. They'd have money for another attempt or two, but they were really falling behind.
Voodoo 3 sort of kept up; sacrificing some features for slightly better performance than its competitors. It had a 256x256 texture resolution limitation and was about as fast as voodoo 2 SLI in a single card; games were actually starting to use larger texture sizes than this not that long after release.
VSA-100 is where it really went off the rails. That's a 112 mm^2 die. It's not far off from the 139 mm^2 geforce 256 die. It needed two of those in SLI to equal the geforce 256 DDR. The SLI stuff added a lot of complexity and it was delayed so much that it wasn't actually competing against the geforce 256 DDR, where it might have survived another generation on name reckognition with poor profit margins (two large chips, expensive PCB, needed almost twice the amount of memory to equal its competitors since each processor in SLI needed to duplicate textures in its own memory for memory bandwidth). It was competing against the geforce 2 GTS; which was the mid-budget geforce 2 and it just got smashed to bits. Voodoo 5 6000 with 4 chips could have eeked out a lead (with 4x as much memory, very complex PCB and 4 chips each one of which larger than the 88 mm^2 of the geforce 2 GTS); and then the VSA-100 chip would be done.
Already the geforce 256 had some impressive per pixel lighting with register combiners; not yet programmable pixel shaders, but sufficient for running doom 3 fully correctly (with an embarassing amount of passes and at *very* low speed, but correctly). The next generation of voodoo would have gone up against geforce 3 and radeon 8500 or worse. The original radeon was likewise far ahead in terms of per pixel lighting. It wasn't actually that useful on the geforce 3 and radeon 8500, but it's too late to start developing the feature at that point; this had to happen over multiple generations. It felt like ATi and nvidia caught up to 3DFX very quickly and just kept going and left them in the dust.
It's sad waching Generation Minecraft play old pc games like Heretic 2 and looks like dogchit !! When i was watching a dude play it on an old pc and was wtf is this. so smooth, glows, magic, voodoo everywhere. When youtubers make it look it bland and blocky cuz they love teh pixel look.
18:47 talking about 120FPS being ridiculous and how no one would ever want to run that frame rate lmao. Oh sweet summer child.
Now we have 120 / 240 hz monitors cranking at 4k… what a world we live in.
Those 3dfx pullovers at 4:50 are AWESOME!!
3DFX..The most ground breaking 3D card ever made. I still own Voodoo 1 and 2. Both from Orchid. NVIDIA's 3D card at the time looked like a 2D card and relied hard on CPU. lol
Algo se murió en el corazoncito de muchos cuando 3dfx desapareció. Todavia recuerdo mi AMD K6 2 350 mhz con la 3dfx voodoo banshee y sus 16 mb de SGRAM... que tiempos aquellos.
y ahora años despues valen una fortuna cualquier tarjeta de ellas xd
This takes me way back. I remember looking for a 3d card to turn my family's Compaq Presario in a gaming rig. It had a Pentium 233 MMX, which was pretty good, but the onboard S3 graphics weren't 3d accelerated. I bought a Voodoo Banshee PCI, because 3dfx was really the way to go from about 1996 to 1999. Nothing else would do. If you didn't have a Voodoo card, you didn't have sh!t.
Was trying to launch NFS High Stakes by emulating glide, - no luck. Decided to watch this instead :-)
Try modern patch man, I still play it.
Trust me. If you want an interview with 3DFX you could just ask him or bother him on YT
Need for speed se ve increible con la 3dfx activada
loved how they mentioned Orchid cards i had this huge VLB card from thrm shoukda kept it alont wirh my Tsang labs
Это уже история. Причем история в хорошем смысле этого слова! У меня есть ретро-система на базе voodoo2, иногда завожу ее.
These guys are legends
А куда делись основатели 3dfx на сегодняшний день? Их нет в живых? Или работают в NVidia и AMD (ATI Radeon)? Что с выжившими сотрудниками?
18:50 "[...]nobody is going to run a game at that framerate or want to[...]" - talking about 120 FPS.
glide was impressive tho cool api
0:03 POWERSLIDE!
like to see the demo movies from the chip simulator
They should have keep going on whit the Voodoo 2 tech and give them more power and ram, SLI was power.
Why you might ask simple Voodoo 2 did even support my Gigabyte Radeon 9800 Pro.
How it done performance did fine 128mb +8mb Voodoo 2.
It did fine in testing, little lower in top max 2% difference but when drop Fps it did hold it so the GPU did'nt "Lag fps" but flat it out when it happens.
Voodoo 5 + Voodoo 2 was bottom power. compair to a GPU 2 year later then 3dfx droped out, it still was a beast when GPU got a hard time.
Diablo 2 i droped (Cheating) all other computer to 0 fps, but my 2 cards still had 1-2 fps. and i had a lower pc then the other.
How i wish for a Voodoo 2 type usb 3.0 SLI booster card or some thing.
like 500+ mhz (x3+) 2+ gb ram that run the same way. Laptop will like :-).
First mistake : stop OEM products....
Gold
18:47 - 19:00 "Nadie va a querer ejecutar un juego a 120fps, es una tontería" xD
Que lástima que no esté subtitulado.
pienso k los usuarios de 3dfx fuimos abandonados a nuestra suerte y pienso k lo hiceron mal en vender estoy desilosionado con los creadores
Yo fui uno de los poseedores de la famosa Voodoo2 que me costó nada más y nada menos que 20.000 pesetas del ala.
3dfx tenía k exisstor
RIP 16bit color crap, murdered by 32bit color Nvidia
IMO 16 bit color on 3dfx (fake 22 bit color) was a perfect trade off. I had TNT2 but I havent played many games in 32 bit color anyway because of performance penalty and 16 bit color looked nowhere near as good as on 3DFX cards. I started playing games in 32 bit color when I bought Geforce 3 but that card was like 4x times faster compared to TNT2.
Cesar U ATI was the best with 32 bit performance, didn’t have the 3D market presence Nvidia had though
At the time of Voodoo1/2 nobody cared about 32bit colours for gaming
Steffen Stengård Villadsen A lot of people did, it just cost a lot more so it wasn’t as popular in the market.
@@steffenstengardvilladsen3740 wasn't 24bit the highest during that time?
18:47 - 19:00 "Nadie va a querer ejecutar un juego a 120fps, es una estupidez" xD