Why did 3DFX fail?

[DigDog]

same reason everything wins over anything sony tries to put in the market...

Blu-Ray pwnd' HD DVD

 

[alkemyst]

you guys were only 10 or 11 then, couldn't afford the cards.

 

[Ichinisan]

I wish NVIDIA had incorporated Glide support in their older cards after buying 3DFX patents and intellectual property. Then it would be much simpler to build a legacy game box with Win98 and a GeForce 3 or something.

 

[OBLAMA2009]

i remember i used to have one of those, i think it was voodooo 3. at the time it had 16 mb when nvidia cards were available in 32mb. you had to have a 300 watt power supply as well, so you couldnt use it in most computers, basically only the ones you built yourself

 

[Rakehellion]

No way, UT really shined when using glide, which was a 3dfx exclusive. People who used openGL when a glide implementation was available were doing it oh so wrong.

When the Unreal Tournament demo was first released, it was GLIDE and software rendering only. The OpenGL version was released a week later. The had enough influence to sabotage a major game release as a promotion.

 

[Braznor]

I remember when I asked for a Voodoo and my parents got me a RIVA TNT instead.

Loved the RIVA TNT though. My friends were blown away when I ran Quake 2 on it.

 

[Ichinisan]

Unreal and UT always looked better in Glide for me.

I don't know about this PSU thing. My Voodoo 3 3000 AGP was perfectly happy in my system. I think the PSU was only 200W or 250W.

[edit]
...and I got the card at-launch; so it wasn't some future-revision on a better process or anything like that.

 

[Leyawiin]

I had an old Dell with a Voodoo5 5500 PCI (yes, PCI) card in it. I used it for Diablo II (which still supported Glide) instead of my new Athlon XP rig with a Radeon 9600 Pro. The full scene AA on the Voodoo5 applied itself not only to the 3D characters, but also the 2D landscapes in the game (no other card I've owned could do that) It look about as good as Diablo II could. Wish I still had it.

 

[Ichinisan]

I remember when I asked for a Voodoo and my parents got me a RIVA TNT instead.

Loved the RIVA TNT though. My friends were blown away when I ran Quake 2 on it.

I can't imagine that Quake II looked any better on a TNT2 versus a Voodoo 3 3000 AGP. If I recall correctly, the OpenGL support was just an afterthought; using a subset of OGL calls ("miniGL") that mapped directly to Glide counterparts.

I specifically remember the difference in filtered particles between OGL and Glide in Q2. When you fire the standard blaster or rocket launcher, the falling energy particles look like square-ish pixels with OGL enabled. With Glide enabled, they look perfectly round.

 

[Anarchist420]

i liked 3dfx. but even once the voodoo3 came out, the best machines had a voodoo2 for glide compatiblity and a G400max for d3d and opengl. napalm was better than the geforce 2 GTS because of glide and because nvidia only did ordered grid supersampling. G80 was the first nvidia gpu to have a really good feature set imo

it took a while for matrox to get good opengl performance, but their image quality could not be beat