What were the main reasons for the fall of 3dfx?

[spanky]

go ATI

 

[JKuz]

One more thing of note. I due recall reading some pc magazine (don't recall which one) having a 4 page article about the voodoo 4 & 5 in great detail a year before their release. This was a huge mistake as well. Anyone reading this would put their money back in their wallet and wait for a year which means no sales for a year, Not Good!! Anand has insight on upcoming cards but not like this article, practically gave you schematics to the cards. Oh well. One thing I must say though my personal experience 3dfx were the compatability kings.

 

[rodney174]

I can answer this in one word....NVIDIA!

 

[rimshaker]

In the smallest nutshell?

They got cocky being that they were the pioneers in the 3D arena..

And they assumed consumers would stick with them no matter what marketing decisions they made.

That's all there is to it.

 

[Pocatello]

Enron is the blame for this!

 

[kendogg]

<<

<< And no one got my Robotech joke? What kind of tech board is this? >>



Where is Robotech now day's? Last I heard he was shipping off to Korea or somewhere was'nt he? >>



ahha wow speaking of Robotech... he sold me his Voodoo5 5500agp for a 100 bux a while back when he was active.. I havent seen him for ages..

 

[DoubleL]

Well their is one thing for sure, 3DFX will be in the computer hall of fame, They gave the world 3D and from the monster 2 to the Voodoo 3000 when you put a 3DFX card in your computer all you could do was say man look at that,

 

[BFG10K]

These are the reasons why I think 3dfx fell over:
-a refusal to adopt standard features in 3D rendering.
-Mac development (what a waste of time and money that was).
-poor management.

 

[kormaster]

release of Voodoo 4 and 5 that DID NOT outperform the competitor (Nvidia)

 

[spanky]

i remember seeing the v5 at a computer show. i had no idea the v5 was released, becuz i'm thinking "didn't they just release the v3? what happened to v4?". hehe... well it carried a price tag of $400!!! i have a v5 now... love it and all... but for $400, they can suck my toe! especially now that i realized when they released the v5... it was not really up to par with nvidia's cards. well i got my v5 for $65 off FS/FT... so the ranting will stop. off to play some CS

 

[giocopiano]

Let sleeping dogs lie.
You can't flog a dead horse.
A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.

 

[Finality]

Also: even towards the end 3dfx was burning through cash. I believe they thought they where a dot.con

They lost what 0.25 Billion in the last quater on sales of 120 Mill? I couldn't be bothered looking at the actual figures but its pretty accurate.

Primarily: the old CEO never had a clue he was a marketing guy and there motto was "We dont have it so you dont need it". There engineering department was the same "Yeah we'll get round to it when we think you need it". Pure arrogance nothing else. They told consumers what they did and did not need instead of letting the markets decide.

A poorely designed feature set competing for the same OEM space as the then massive ATI and the underdog nvidia. Both these companies had good cards with good feature sets at a comparable price.

I essentially blame the engineering team. Back in the Voodoo 1-5 days they never bothered segmenting engineering teams till the end. Essentially the company moved engineering teams when a product was complete not running teams parallel so as to cut development time (something Nvidia has mastered and ATI is fast catching up on). Is it managements fault as well? Probably but I doubt they where the main cause. Yes the made some bad decisions with STB but remember Wall-street thought it was a good idea. Essentially the only model anyone had to work on for a success story was ATI. Everyone else came and flopped on their face. I dont think many people predicted the force they would become.

As for me I pretty much forecasted there fate once I saw the V3 specs (I was one of those pissed off agn3d readers ).

 

[nRollo]

"LOL, it's a good thing the GeForce2 was already available by then "
As a guy who's owned GF2s, Radeon DDRs, and a V5- I can honestly say the image quality of the GF2 was not up to par with the Radeon and V5.
The GF2 was faster than either, but it didn't look as good either, so that kind of makes sense.
3dfx bit off more than they could chew buying STB, and then didn't execute with the V5. If it would have launched when the GF1 did, and if they could've got Rampage out when the GF3 launched, they could have survived.
If's don't pay the rent though.

 

[cmdrdredd]

3dfx never ever ever used T&L rendering in their VSA100 based cards. They relied on raw horsepower and pixel pushing. They didn't have any programmable features. T-Buffer technology never became a useful thing. Motion, blur, depth of field never became of much use because it required new game code not standard with other cards around that time and to develope a game based on a specific card was stupid.

3dfx basically thought they were the greatest...what really killed them is the poor openGl support they had from miniGl drivers...it was a basic hack you could do yourself if you needed to. They were still pushing Glide which didn't offer 32bit colors or large textures.

 

[jiffylube1024]

<< These are the reasons why I think 3dfx fell over:
-a refusal to adopt standard features in 3D rendering.
-Mac development (what a waste of time and money that was).
-poor management. >>



nVidia and ATI both make their cards for Macs and I don't see either of them going out of business anytime soon.

 

[BFG10K]

nVidia and ATI both make their cards for Macs and I don't see either of them going out of business anytime soon.

The major difference is that both ATi and nVidia have official support from Apple and get plenty allocation in Apple's machines straight from the Apple store. 3dfx never had either and were nuts to think they would even after they produced non-beta drivers for Macs.

Also both ATi and nVidia are big enough to absorb any losses from the Mac market they might inccur and are both there largely just to smack each other around. 3dfx entered the Mac market expecting to make profits to keep them afloat.

 

[piasabird]

whenever a company doesnt listen to its customers, it loses grip with reality and falls behind. If a company tries to dictate to its customers what they need and someone else makes a better product they are history.