What happend to (3DFx ) ???

[Hossam]

What happend to (3DFx ) ???

how there is a product like this

VOODOO5 5500 AGP 64MB

 

[Utterman]

3dfx went bye-bye when Nvidia bought them out a while ago. There are still a lot of peopel using them today and there are some people still making drivers for them.

 

[Hossam]

so how there is a new product

VOODOO5 5500 AGP 64MB


u see

64MB ??????????????????????/

 

[Utterman]

well the voodoo 5500 64 meg has been out for a few years now and nothing new has come out of 3dfx since they were bought out. So I'm guessing that they mean that it is new as in upopened.

 

[tapir]

There are a lot of V5's lying around since the days when 3DFX still existed.. not sure 3DFX actually made them all or if there's some card maker still churning them out. But the V5 is pretty easily beaten by ATi and nVidia's current offerings for the same price (a GF2 Ti should beat one easy).

 

[BFG10K]

so how there is a new product
VOODOO5 5500 AGP 64MB

That product is almost two years old.

 

[cmaMath13]

In my opinion, 3dfx made the mistake of "wanting their cake and eating it too".

1) After the release of the Voodoo2 chipset (at that time they did not sell video cards only chips), the stocks were sky-rocketing! However, they decided to produce the end product video card and not sell to other companies. This killed a lot of competition for their own cards, because they were the sole makers.

2) Plus, I believe when 3dfx started to make 2d/3d cards they lost something. I remember when you had a 2d card (normal computer users), but gamers had an additional 3D video card!

Anyway, that's my personal spin on 3dfx.

 

[Hawk]

Yeah, the Voodoo 5 had 64 MB, 32 MB for each chip. So it's not a new card.

 

[chuckieland]

i'm using voodoo3 3500tv which is x number of year ago
and it still work great
3dfx made a mistake
v5 suppose to come out and compete against geforce256 and would definely kill geforce256
but mangement of 3dfx do something stupid and delay the product release, and it end out 6 month late, and went up again geforce2
but it's still complete well, only lose by a fraction of %
if their mangement do their job instead spenting time watch hot girls
they would kill geforce with v5 5500 and v5 6000 would kill geforce2
and it's would be 3dfx buying out nivdia
but tough luck

 

[Auric]

LOL chuckieland, it is fun to pretend.

If company X had only gotten their product X out a year earlier it would have owned! Ha ha. 3dfx was a flash in the pan. They were lucky to produce one competitive product at the right time. The rest were mostly failures. They had bad engineering and worse management plus a lame scheme of paying developers to use their backwards proprietary API. Their own greed and ignorance was their doom. And will the 3dfx Jonestownsers once and for all give up the myth that the company was bought out for Jehova's sake!? Put a wooden stake in it.

 

[SpeedTester]

<< They were lucky to produce one competitive product at the right time. >>



One? More like three, Voodoo I, Voodoo II and Voodoo 3. All were the best cards when they were out.

 

[Auric]

Well, the 1 and 2 were unique performance-wise but only the 2 was widely succesful. Rush was a failure. Banshee a bit better. The 3 was subpar and quickly relegated to the low-end market and despite selling a lot of them they could not have made any profit on it since they went bankrupt soon after the 4 and 5 were introduced. I am sure they had hoped their software investment would support their hardware sales longer but a refined DirectX made it a level playing field which they simply could not compete on with only moderately updated and comparatively featureless hardware.

 

[azkiwi]

Hey Auric,

Nice synopsis.



<< And will the 3dfx Jonestownsers once and for all give up the myth that the company was bought out for Jehova's sake!? Put a wooden stake in it. >>



LOL!

 

[DevilsAdvocate]

3dfx's real mistake was alienating first tier OEM's by buying STB, and retailbranding their own cards. nVidia really capitalized on 3dfx's mistake and got into bed with these guys (Creative, Diamond, etc.) as fast as possible - gobbling up OEM's and marketshare.

STB is what killed 3dfx. That and the Voodoo5 being expensive to produce, while never achieving the kind of market penetration they envisioned.

 

[conlan]

This is making me kinda nostalgic for the ol' nVidia vs. 3dfx flame wars, NOT! cmaMath, and advocate hit the nail on the head as to what doomed 3dfx, much to the chagrin of old-time Glide Flight-Simmers such as myself. One thing else, (although to a much lesser extent than the reasons already mentioned), hastened the already inevetible doom of 3dfx, the often times sole use of Quake3 as the testing benchmark for Video Cards. This problem seems to have been corrected though, as review sites are now using a variety of games to test Video Cards.

 

[FalseChristian]

I think the biggest mistake 3dfx made with the Voodoo5-5500 was not doubling the texel fill-rate over the pixel fill-rate. This is the company that always did that and nVidia was the one that always had their pixel and texel fill rates the same.

So if 3dfx played it smart they would of had a pixel fill-rate of 667 megapixels/sec and a texel fill-rate of 1.334 gigatexels/sec.

This was there only mistake, I believe. The card woulda been much faster and would have competed well with nVidia's GeForce2 GTS.

 

[TimisoaraKill]

What i liked about 3DFX was ,...you plugged the card in (card was reconized in all systems) , install the card without any hitch and play every game you had without any crash or something 100% stable . The GTS was faster in OGL but the GLIDE killed the 0GL in allmost everything and the games supporting GLIDE just flyed in my comp and also that was the only card on market who supported D3D , 0GL and Glide.
The Voodoo series had also the picture quality far better than Nvidia's
Before i had this Phophet GF3 that i own now i never was happy with NVidia and owned before a MX , GF2 GTS and GF2 Pro Gainward .
When i first played UT with the GTS i was stunned how ugly the game is near to my V0odoo.
3DFX had awesome drivers also .
So at the end i think that 3DFX was much better .

 

[cmaMath13]

conlan,

Here is one of my best video card memories:

I remember when I purchased the Quantum Obsidian X-24 to run along side my Diamond Viper TNT2 Ultra Video card! I used to LOVE have friend and family over to show off the graphics. I would load Unreal and just sit back and listen to them go "OH MY". Those were the GOLDEN DAYS of 3D Video Cards!

 

[ObiDon]

NVIDIA 0wnz 3dfx

 

[Auric]

Sad gits think Voodoo made UT look good with low-res textures and "high" color. LOL.

Savage4ever!

 

[conlan]

cmaMath....... That Quantum was sweet, SLI on one card. I had similar experiences with my v2 SLI, it was my first 3d accelerator.

 

[Lark888]

Seems that trying to corner the market on 3Dfx based cards did them in. Reminds me of IBM's attempt to corner the market with the PS/2 Microchannel bus. Both of these were trying to force all buyers to one company. Didn't work in either case. 3Dfx died. IBM lost the leading edge they had created with the PC. Consumers don't like being squeezed for no good reason.

I was saddened to see 3Dfx go out of business. My first 3D card was the VooDoo 4MB card - what a rush that was over the other cards. It was hard to believe the difference in Interplay's Descent game. Paid about $180 for the card and was happy with the results (of course I also paid some astronomical sum for two 16MB Ram modules).

 

[rudder]

So at the end i think that 3DFX was much better .

I really hated giving up my voodoo. It was the most compatible card in the industry at the time. Nvidia had lots of issues early on. But I gave it up for a g2mx and run it on a via chipset and have nary a problem out of it. The voodoo was just getting too slow for some of the newer games.

 

[Allanv]

i still use a Voodoo 4500 32meg and think it great....

why in the world would i want to install a video card that you need to tweak and play and d/l hundreds of drivers and still have poor performance at least with a voodoo card you slamed it in a played yer game no messing around..

i build computers and all of my customers who insisted on geforce cards are having no end of problems getting the right mix of drivers and tweaks bla bla ...... i had a text message today asking if i know of a site that has some better support to enable him to get more out of his geforce 3

It will be a cold day in hell if my V4500 fails i will have to bury it in the garden and erect a memorial to the poor old fella and then what card to i get? cus for the life of me i dont want a Geforce card


And these are my opinions and not worthy of a flame war - voodoo against nvidia these are my experiences


thank you

 

[Innoka]

Wow it takes a big guy to stick the knife in a dead company.

I saw the Voodoo 5 was going for $115 a year ago and I don't think I would return one now for that price. It had something the competition didn't have - a very effective kind of FSAA you could use on any 3D API without compatibility problems. Even 1998 games were worth playing on it. OK the graphics looked comparitively spartan but at least 640x480 looked smooth. If you trawl the bargain zone the card would do you well.
Hey, you the guys that squabble about money all the time ...