I
t’s a classic case of being the right company with
the right tech at the right time. 3Dfx launched its
revolutionary Voodoo Graphics chipset just as fully
polygonal 3D graphics hit the mainstream and PC gamers
wanted an easy and accessible way to get them.
In late 1996, Quake and Tomb Raider had just been
released, the Nintendo 64 was out in Japan and North
America, and the Sony PlayStation and Sega Saturn were
still in their first year. Reliant purely on CPU horsepower, and
with no dedicated 3D hardware to back it up, the PC was
beginning to lose its place as the king of gaming platforms.
Sure, it had a bunch of 2D/3D accelerator cards, but
they were too damn slow to make any difference. With the
Voodoo Graphics chipset, 3Dfx played a bigger role than any
other graphics hardware manufacturer in turning around that
situation. In doing so, it made 3D acceleration an absolute,
cast-iron must-have feature.
THE BIRTH OF VOODOO
3Dfx was founded in San Jose, California in 1994, by a trio
of ex-Silicon Graphics (SGI) employees, Ross Smith, Scott
Sellers and Gary Tarolli. At the time, SGI was by far the
biggest name in 3D graphics, with its enormously expensive
workstations used to create the pioneering CGI effects in
Terminator 2 and Jurassic Park.
What’s more, SGI was already involved in 3D gaming
hardware, developing the core components for what would
eventually become the Nintendo 64. At this time, however,
some of SGI’s engineers were thinking that there were
serious opportunities being overlooked in developing 3D
hardware for PCs.
One group would eventually leave to found a company
called ArtX, which would later get bought by ATI. Meanwhile,
Smith, Sellers and Tarolli founded a new startup, Pellucid, in
1992, with the intention of bringing affordable 3D hardware
to the PC.
Reflective surfaces, smooth frame rates and the pure awesomeness
of GLQuake. Stuart Andrews recalls the truly transformative effect
of 3Dfx’s Voodoo chipset on PC gaming
In 1993, Pellucid was bought by Media Vision, a company
that had grown rich from selling multimedia kits for PCs
during the CD-ROM revolution. Pellucid had proposed the
design and manufacture of a PC 3D gaming chip, and Media
Vision wanted some of that action.
Unfortunately, Media Vision had its own (mostly legal)
issues, and went out of business. However, just when the
situation looked bleak, Scott Sellers met Gordon Campbell,
founder of the pioneering graphics chip manufacturer,
Chips & Technologies. Campbell asked the trio what they
wanted to do, and helped them to find the venture capital
to do it.
With Smith working as vice president of sales and
marketing, Sellers and Tarolli used all the know-how
they’d built up at SGI and Pellucid to design a cost-efficient
3D architecture built specifically to handle the polygonal
rendering pipeline used in 3D games.Retro tech
RETRO TECH / ANALYSIS
3 DFX VOODOO 3 D
If 3Dfx needed a
killer app, GLQuake
delivered. You
could play id’s
cutting-edge 3D
title at 640 x 480
in 16-bit colour at
a smooth 30fps