please help improve it or discuss these issues on the talk page . learn how and when to remove these template messages this article possibly contains original research . please improve it by verifying the claims made and adding inline citations . statements consisting only of original research should be removed . january 2012 learn how and when to remove this template message this article needs additional citations for verification . please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources . unsourced material may be challenged and removed . may 2008 learn how and when to remove this template message learn how and when to remove this template message 3dfx interactive industry semiconductors fate bankrupt 1 most assets bought by nvidia fate of remaining assets unknown . successor nvidia founded 1994 ; 22 years ago 1994 defunct 2002 1 headquarters san jose california usa key people ross smith scott sellers gary tarolli products voodoo graphics series website official website 3dfx interactive was a company headquartered in san jose california founded in 1994 that specialized in the manufacturing of 3d graphics processing units and later graphics cards . it was a pioneer in the field from the late 1990s until 2000 . the company s flagship product was the voodoo graphics an add in card that accelerated 3d graphics . the hardware accelerated only 3d rendering relying on the pc s current video card for 2d support . despite this limitation the voodoo graphics product and its follow up voodoo2 were popular . it became standard for 3d games to offer support for the company s glide api . 3dfx rapidly declined beginning in the late 1990s and was acquired by nvidia mostly for intellectual property rights after going bankrupt in 2002 . contents 1 early history 1.1 voodoo graphics pci 1.2 glide api 2 voodoo rush 3 voodoo2 4 sli 5 banshee 6 dreamcast 7 decline 7.1 voodoo3 and strategy shift 7.2 voodoo 4 and 5 8 acquisition and bankruptcy 9 cause of decline 10 graphics card table 11 references 12 external links early history edit founded in 1994 by ross smith gary tarolli and scott sellers all former employees of silicon graphics inc. with backing from gordie campbell s techfarm 3dfx released its voodoo graphics chip in 1996 . the company manufactured only the chips and some reference boards and initially did not sell any product to consumers ; rather it acted as an oem supplier for graphics card companies which designed manufactured marketed and sold their own graphics cards including the voodoo chipset . 3dfx gained initial fame in the arcade market . the first arcade machine that 3dfx voodoo graphics hardware was used in was ice home run derby a game released in 1996 . later that year it was featured in more popular titles such as atari s san francisco rush and wayne gretzky s 3d hockey . 2 voodoo graphics pci edit a diamond monster 3d using the voodoo chipset towards the end of 1996 the cost of edo dram dropped significantly and 3dfx was able to enter the consumer pc hardware market with aggressive pricing compared to the few previous 3d graphics solutions for computers . prior to affordable 3d hardware games such as doom and quake had compelled video game players to move from their 80386s to 80486s and then to the pentium . 3 a typical voodoo graphics pci expansion card consisted of a dac a frame buffer processor and a texture mapping unit along with 4 mb of edo dram . the ram and graphics processors operated at 50 mhz . it provided only 3d acceleration and as such the computer also needed a traditional video controller for conventional 2d software . a pass through vga cable daisy chained the video controller to the voodoo which was itself connected to the monitor . the method used to engage the voodoo s output circuitry varied between cards with some using mechanical relays while others utilized purely electronic components . the mechanical relays emitted an audible clicking sound when they engaged and disengaged . the voodoo s primary competition was from powervr and rendition . powervr produced a similar 3d only add on card with capable 3d support although it was not comparable to voodoo graphics in either image quality or performance . 3dfx saw intense competition in the market from cards that offered the combination of 2d and 3d acceleration . while these cards such as matrox mystique s3 virge and ati 3d rage offered inferior 3d acceleration their lower cost and simplicity often appealed to oem system builders . rendition s v rit v1000 was an integrated 3d vga single chip solution but it did not have comparable 3d performance and its 2d capabilities were considered merely adequate relative to other 2d cards of the time . glide api edit main article glide api originally developed for arcade games that included non intel architectures glide was created to handle error prone tasks like chip initialization for the programmer but implemented nothing more than what the voodoo hardware was directly capable of . this strategy differed from that of other 3d apis of the era direct3d opengl and quickdraw 3d which hid low level hardware details behind an abstraction layer with the goal of providing application developers a standard hardware neutral interface . the advantage of an abstraction layer is that game developers save programming effort and gain flexibility by writing their 3d rendering code once for a single api and the abstraction layer allows it to run on hardware from multiple manufacturers . this advantage is still in place today . however in the early days of the 3d graphics card direct3d and opengl implementations were either non existent or at minimum substantially less mature than today and computers were much slower and had less memory . the abstraction layers overhead crippled performance in practice . 3dfx had therefore created a strong advantage for itself by aggressively promoting glide which was designed specifically around the voodoo hardware and therefore did not suffer from the performance hit of a higher level abstraction layer . while there were many games that used glide the killer application for voodoo graphics was the minigl driver developed to allow hardware acceleration of the game quake by id software . minigl implemented only the subset of opengl used by quake . by 2000 the improved performance of direct3d and opengl on the average personal computer coupled with the huge variety of new 3d cards on the market the widespread support of these standard apis by the game developer community and the closure of 3dfx made glide obsolete . voodoo rush edit intergraph intense3d voodoo in august 1997 3dfx released the voodoo rush chipset combining a voodoo chip with a 2d chip that lay on the same circuit board eliminating the need for a separate vga card . most cards were built with an alliance semiconductor at25 at3d 2d component but there were some built with a macronix chip and there were initial plans to partner with trident but no such boards were ever marketed . the rush had the same specifications as voodoo graphics but did not perform as well because the rush chipset had to share memory bandwidth with the crtc of the 2d chip . furthermore the rush chipset was not directly present on the pci bus but had to be programmed through linked registers of the 2d chip . like the voodoo graphics there was no interrupt mechanism so the driver had to poll the rush in order to determine whether a command had completed or not ; the indirection through the 2d component added significant overhead here and tended to back up traffic on the pci interface . the typical performance hit was around 10 % compared to voodoo graphics and even worse in windowed mode . later rush boards released by hercules had 8 mib vram and a 10 % higher clock speed to close the performance gap . a rare third version was produced which featured a cirrus logic 2d chip . this version fixed the pci bus collisions and memory interface problems . some manufacturers bundled a pc version of atari games racing game san francisco rush the arcade version of which used four voodoo graphics cards working in parallel . sales of the voodoo rush cards were very poor and the cards were discontinued within a year . the company would not attempt another 2d 3d solution again until the release of the voodoo banshee in 1998 . voodoo2 edit main article voodoo2 stb systems blackmagic 3d in sli in 1998 3dfx released voodoo s successor the popular voodoo2 . the voodoo2 was architecturally similar but the basic board configuration added a second texturing unit allowing two textures to be drawn in a single pass . the voodoo2 required three chips and a separate vga graphics card whereas new competing 3d products such as the ati rage pro nvidia riva 128 and rendition verite 2200 were single chip products . despite some shortcomings such as the card s dithered 16 bit 3d color rendering and 800x600 resolution limitations no other manufacturers products could match the smooth framerates that the voodoo2 produced . it was a landmark and expensive achievement in pc 3d graphics . its excellent performance and the mindshare gained from the original voodoo graphics resulted in its success . many users even preferred voodoo2 s dedicated purpose because they were free to use the quality 2d card of their choice as a result . some 2d 3d combined solutions at the time offered quite sub par 2d quality and speed . the arrival of the nvidia riva tnt with integrated 2d 3d chipset would offer minor challenge to the voodoo2 s supremacy months later . sli edit the voodoo2 introduced scan line interleave sli in which two voodoo2 boards were connected together each drawing half the scan lines of the screen . sli increased the maximum resolution supported to 1024 768 . because of the high cost and inconvenience of using three separate graphics cards two voodoo 2 sli plus the general purpose 2d graphics adapter the voodoo2 sli scheme had minimal effect on total market share and was not a financial success . sli capability was not offered in subsequent 3dfx board designs although the technology would be later used to link the vsa 100 chips on the voodoo 5 . having since acquired 3dfx nvidia in 2004 reintroduced the sli acronym now scalable link interface in the geforce 6 series . ati technologies has also since introduced its own multi chip implementation dubbed crossfire . although nvidia sli and ati crossfire operate on the original sli principle of utilizing the power of multiple video cards the implementation is different such as nvidia requiring graphics cards running the same graphics processor and an sli bridge to be connected to the cards . crossfire from the rx 200 series onwards uses the pci express bus instead of a bridge to connect cards together . banshee edit creative 3d blaster banshee agp near the end of 1998 3dfx released the banshee which featured a lower price achieved through higher component integration and a more complete feature set including 2d acceleration to target the mainstream consumer market . a single chip solution the banshee was a combination of a 2d video card and partial only one texture mapping unit voodoo2 3d hardware . due to the missing second tmu in 3d scenes which used multiple textures per polygon the voodoo2 was significantly faster . however in scenes dominated by single textured polygons the banshee could match or exceed the voodoo2 due to its higher clock speed and resulting greater pixel fillrate . while it was not as popular as voodoo graphics or voodoo2 the banshee sold in respectable numbers . banshee s 2d acceleration was the first such hardware from 3dfx and it was very capable .