On this day but 24 years ago, 3DFX announced its bankruptcy. The news came through a latest press release, in which they apologized to their clients for the drastic measure they had been forced to take. Facing bankruptcy in late 2000, 3DFX shareholders agreed to sell their brands and assets to NVIDIA to obtain the “best possible outcome” from their creditors, investors and employees. And, although the company disappeared so long ago, many fans retain the memory of what the company was, and proof of this is that even today we continue to see retro projects based on its products.
A tribute to 3DFX Voodoo 24 years later
The first 3DFX product was the 3D Voodoo Graphics chip, which went into production in November 1995, although it did not reach consumers until the COMDEX show in October 1996. Those who were lucky enough (including myself) to have With one of these PCI graphics they could enjoy unprecedented 3D graphics at that time, since only this chip manufactured in a 500 nm node and that worked at only 50 MHz could offer. It had, by the way, just 4 MB of VRAM in EDO format.
A curious fact is that this was really a 3D accelerator, and it needed you to also have 2D graphics on the PC to work. Of course, when you had it you could already enjoy the best games of that time, like DOOM or Quake. Games had to adopt the Glide graphics API to take advantage of the power of this Voodoo chip, but the graphical quality and performance increase were unmatched.
3DFX Voodoo was a resounding success, so much so that it is considered the precursor of the new generation of PC gamers. If you didn’t have a Voodoo, you were nobody, so it became an object of desire for all gamers at that time. The following year, 3DFX released the Voodoo Rush and in 1998 came the Voodoo2. However, 3DFX’s leadership was eroded as the competition (Matrox, ATI and NVIDIA) introduced new 3D accelerators following in its footsteps, and this was right at the time when 3DFX launched the very famous Voodoo Bansheethe first that contained 2D and 3D accelerators and no longer required another graphics card on the computer. Later, the Voodoo3 arrived, but they failed to take flight.
In the final months of the 1990s, a series of unfortunate events hit the company. 3DFX tried to put some fresh air into its catalog by acquiring the company STB, but things did not go as expected and it turned out to be a fiasco that only served to waste money. They also acquired the chip maker Gigapixel, but meanwhile their rivals decided to reorient their developments to Microsoft’s graphics APIs, at the same time that a court battle against NVIDIA over a patent issue was looming.
All of this caused the following 3DFX releases to be delayed, causing them to “arrive late” to the market because Matrox, but above all ATI and NVIDIA, had already surpassed them in technology, performance and availability, so in the end 3DFX decided that it was best to retire while they still could, declaring bankruptcy.
Worst of all, the valuable 3DFX patents passed to its biggest rival, NVIDIA, and in fact many of the 3DFX engineers signed with the green ones. Over the last few years we have seen some hints of a possible return of 3DFX, but the way the market is with NVIDIA and AMD on the rise, things are quite complicated.