Personally i think the STB merger was like a kick in the groin b ut as for the voodoo 6000 making it to market, I dont think that would have saved TDFX since it would have been an ultra expensive card and they had nothing up there sleves after this; Rampage was still MIA. They realized money was short and even if they released the VSA-100 products on time that it would have been too long before there next graphics card product release(rampage), that's why they went after gigapixels mosaic techonogy and aquired all that tv tuner technoloy (to generate short term cash flow). Anyhow,most money was to be made in the oem market, i think that's why they put alot of resources into creating the banshee. But i think that Nvidia had a good hold on the OEM market by this time. Also because of the merger TDFX stopped suppying chips to 3rd parties; this caused NVidia to be the only major supplier of chips to board manufacturers. No only did this give nvidia more shelf space but everytime u went to check a benchmark review, there was one voodoo3 versus 4 different nvidia cards based on the same chip. This game NVidia alot more exposure on the retail end of things. Another problem with TDFX not pushing into the OEM market was the inability to have windowed 3d-hardware acceration (from what i recall the voodoo1/2/3/banshee couldnt run in windowed opengl mode).
Anyhow, It was sad to see them go, but NVidia and ATI are still quality companies. Anyways I still have my voodoo 4500/ banshee and 3000 lying around somewhere, maybe i'll end up framing them or something
[edited by - _walrus on December 16, 2003 11:38:42 AM]
3DFx + GLIDE - The Life and Death.
quote:Original post by Ingenuquote:Original post by OpenGL_Guru
GeForce 3 still at the core is 3dfx(voodoo1 architecture)
I don''t think so.
The GF-FX is the first nVidia product to include 3Dfx technology, AFAIK.
-* So many things to do, so little time to spend. *-
geforce fx using TDFX Tech
So I remember well
Thanks for the link _walrus.
-* So many things to do, so little time to spend. *-
Thanks for the link _walrus.
-* So many things to do, so little time to spend. *-
i thought i had read(and i will give you the link if i can find it again explaining how the later GeForce cards, namely GeForce 3 and above have included some of the 3dfx core technology. maybe they didnt publicly announce it but it is obvious with the GeForce FX and with the help of some of x-3dfx''s knowledge people, as explained in that think (courtest of walrus ) that one of the major components of the 3dfx core and ideas, i.e. RAMPAGE are built onto this chip....it will be good for 3dfx to get a little more recognition even though it is "dead". as far as i am concerned if i can go onto the official x-3dfx website and download new drivers for my voodoo for win 2000 , winXP and play GTA 3 and warcraft 3 then its not dead, just the doors are closed. 3dfx started it all, but i guess when you start it all and you are on top that leaves you open for competitors to build their cards on top of your ideas and you feel like you are king and you are for a while, but you get too cocky and before you know it you hit bottom. i believe and have read some of this mentality still plagues NVIDIA today.
i still love 3dfx cards, voodoo and GLIDE i will admit...Still to this day there is not a video card available on the market that can match 3dfx''s style of rotated-grid super-sampled FSAA. The Voodoo5 6000 was the most powerful card in 3dfx''s arsenal, and it could not only boast 2x and 4x sampled AA, but was the ONLY card that could do 8x.
i got a score of 3435 for my 3D Mark tonight(of course for 3dfx cards this isnt a reliable benchmark) from my Voodoo5. i also have updated patches for it that make it possible for me to play games like Blood Rayne and other games which use the T&L shaders and pixel shader hardware features. the company might be dead but the hardware is not as drivers continue to be built. i just got an offer to work on updated drivers for these cards and i accepted as i will also be coding in openGL also doing my regular thing, at work and in working on my game. ill be busy for a while dontcha think?
i got a score of 3435 for my 3D Mark tonight(of course for 3dfx cards this isnt a reliable benchmark) from my Voodoo5. i also have updated patches for it that make it possible for me to play games like Blood Rayne and other games which use the T&L shaders and pixel shader hardware features. the company might be dead but the hardware is not as drivers continue to be built. i just got an offer to work on updated drivers for these cards and i accepted as i will also be coding in openGL also doing my regular thing, at work and in working on my game. ill be busy for a while dontcha think?
3Dfx cards may have been limited in terms of texture memory, and their support for standard OpenGL features may have been missing but they succeeded in bringing high quality, fast 3d graphics cards into the mainstream gamers market. For that alone they deserve much praise. (and I''m actually writing this on a machine with a 12mb voodoo 2 card from Orchid, now also dead ).
Unfortunalty their technology never really changed much after the first couple of iterations, allowing themselves to be suppassed by nVidia''s TNT. Probably more damaging though was their decision to stop being just a chipset vendor like nVidia and ATi are now and instead become the only producer of their graphics cards (voodoo3 and onwards). They never seemed to have as firm a grip on the market from that point on. Possibly the increased time spent on actually manufacturing them meant that they had less money for R&D. Driver stability became a much larger issue with the voodoo3 and up cards as well, a time where nVidia were very solid in that area.
Unfortunalty their technology never really changed much after the first couple of iterations, allowing themselves to be suppassed by nVidia''s TNT. Probably more damaging though was their decision to stop being just a chipset vendor like nVidia and ATi are now and instead become the only producer of their graphics cards (voodoo3 and onwards). They never seemed to have as firm a grip on the market from that point on. Possibly the increased time spent on actually manufacturing them meant that they had less money for R&D. Driver stability became a much larger issue with the voodoo3 and up cards as well, a time where nVidia were very solid in that area.
High quality? Not at all. Apart from them being in 16bit colour up until the V4+, the Voodoo line gained some of its speed by skipping fragments during rendering. A few years back I had an article comparing the V3 and TnT2 image quality, and whilst the TnT2 had a nice clean image, zooming in on the V3 image saw some rather gaping holes where fragments had been skipped.
3dfx''s reasoning for that, along with 16bit colour and refusing to go 32bit for quite a long time, was essentially "with our high framerates you wont notice". Rather arrogant of them.
IMHO the only thing 3dfx had going for them were their exceptionally friendly developer relations staff.
3dfx''s reasoning for that, along with 16bit colour and refusing to go 32bit for quite a long time, was essentially "with our high framerates you wont notice". Rather arrogant of them.
IMHO the only thing 3dfx had going for them were their exceptionally friendly developer relations staff.
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