LGR Tech Tales - 3Dfx & Voodoo's Self-Destruction

This episode covers the founding, voodoo-powered rise, and ridiculously powerful fall of 3Dfx Interactive. Join me in LGR Tech Tales, looking at stories of technological inspiration, failure, and everything in-between!

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● Background tracks are:
"Trouble" by Topher Mohr
"Tune In" by RW Smith
OST to The Sims 2 and Omikron

[Ironmano]

It always blows my mind how fast everything happened with 3Dfx. All this happened in 2-3 years. I remember reading about it years back and not really being able to wrap my head around how they went from nothing, to king, to dead so god damn fast.

[nosferadu]

I remember when my parents bought me 3dfx Voodoo 1 card for Christmas. I had a Pentium 133Mhz with 8 megs of RAM and S3 Virge video card with 2 mb. The first game I played with 3d acceleration was Star Wars Dark Forces 2. It was amazing, ran so smooth and looked so good, I liked exploring the levels and admiring the architecture more than shooting stormtroopers. The highest resolution in which I had been able to run it smoothly before the 3dfx card was 320x240 and now I was running it at full speed in whopping 800x600 resolution. Sigh, memories.

[raycocker]

Moment of silence for 3DFX...

Thank you for helping in the advancement of video game graphics.

[angryhammerite]

Now I'm wishing 3DFX was still around so that AMD and Nvidia had more competition.

[RosePhoto]

Quake 2 on my Voodoo 2 card was amazing. I paid $700 for that card and got it a week after it was released. Computer geeks I didn't even know showed up at my door and asked if they could see a demo of the card. The difference between software rendering and the Voodoo 2 was incredible. Love the Tech Tales, keep them coming.

[jermaineayivoh]

I remember the days when 3DFX ruled the graphic cards scene in the mid to late 90's. You'd walk into any PC shop and their graphic cards were everywhere. The one thing that always struck me was the spectacular box art 3DFX's graphic cards always seemed to have.

[DOSdaze]

Still using a Voodoo 1 to this day in my DOS/Win95 gaming box. Never ceases to amaze me what 3DFX was able to do with 4MB of VRAM and a PCI bus. Thank you for researching this.

[slashtiger]

This was AWESOME! Loads of stuff that I'd never known! For example, the way in which 3DFx actually signed their own death sentence by publicising (part of) the deal-in-the-making with Sega. I mean, I knew this had happened, but I would have never thought this was a direct set-off for the chain of events that lead to 3DFx's end…

All in all, I'd absolutely LOVE new episodes of Tech Tales. This series is my all-time favourite, along with Oddware! Mind you, I'm also enjoying the heck out of your 'regular' (DOS) Game Reviews!

[bangell]

God the early days at 3dfx was wild. People worked hard and played hard. I remember the software team having quake lan play at 2 in afternoon and the electric guitar playing in the dungen(area were we worked which was a converted loading dock). The hole 8 which we were next to on the golf course and having to hit the floor when a golf ball would come flying in. There there was an alpha blender in the break room for Friday mudslides. I remember the sw team sleeping under their desks as they were so engrossed in what they were doing they wouldn’t go home for days. Thank you for showing the products we worked on

[DustinRodriguez_]

I vividly remember the first 3D accelerator card I ever bought. It was a voodoo2 card. The first Nintendo 64 emulator had just come out, and it used a nifty new 'high level emulation' that basically turned commands for the N64 GPU into Glide calls. I'd been following emulator development for a few years already at that point. I had seen advertisements for 3D cards for years, but they were always expensive and I honestly didn't have much of a clue whether they even made much difference. None of my friends had one, so I'd never seen one in action at all. When the first N64 emulator came out and required such a card, I had my excuse to buy one.

Holy crap. I was immediately blown away. I don't know if I have ever experienced such an immediate and gigantic improvement in performance and capability in my entire time being a computer enthusiast, either before or since. I believe the first thing I played with it was Quake 2 and it was like a completely different game. Going from pure software rendering to hardware acceleration was like switching from a BMX bike to a Lamborghini. I don't think I stopped smiling for a week. Plus, I finally got to try out Conker's Bad Fur Day which was the only N64 game I was really interested in (I never owned an N64).

[tonystark]

I have been on an LGR kick lately. Thanks for all the knowledge man. And the back catalogue; top shelf. Loving your content prior to me becoming a subscriber. As a 35 year old man, you're hitting my nostalgia right in the bullseye my guy. 🤣🤘 Rock on.

[Ghost_Of_SAS]

LGR, you know what I'd _love_ to see? An episode dedicated to old benchmark software for video cards. I remember a Matrox (or maybe Voodoo) card had a 3D meadow software of sorts where you could move the camera around and see all the various feats the card was capable of (dynamic light maps, reflective surfaces, bump and speculars, the works) and another card had, I believe, a monster truck minigame only available as a benchmark,

I think that may be an interesting episode, if you ever managed to track those CDs down.

[CYOND]

I seem to come back to this video annually. Feels very comforting :)
One of my favorite tech tale episodes.

[hulkamana]

Thanks LGR for this Tech Tale!

I miss 3dFX. My first PC was an eMachines like the one in your video. It cost $100 plus a year of AOL, which my parents already had. I equipped that eMachine PC with a Voodoo 3 2000 graphics card (ran HL1 like a champ), which I later replaced with 3dFX's swan song, the Voodoo 5 5500.

Wish I still had that card, or one of the developer 6000 model cards that are still floating around. Sold mine to a friend for $50, and replaced it with Nvidia's Geforce 3, and my first custom built PC.

[SIedgeHammer]

Thank you 3DFx that got me interested in building my own gaming machine when I was only 13 years old, which got me into IT career and become Cyber Security Architect 17 years later.

[twiddler]

I had several of these cards, and I remember the game Unreal. It blew everyone away when used with a voodoo graphics card. What really killed 3DFX was the lack of 32bit color. By the time the Voodoo 3000 came out many other manufactures were touting 32bit color 3d graphics, and that put sales of Voodoo cards way behind.

[Col_Crunch]

idk why, but I have always thought that 3dfx had the best logo of tech companies in the 90s.

[TheWolf]

in short: what happened? bad management, yet again. the person in charge was incompetent

[SavageGerbil]

I was watching one of your other videos, and went to see if anyone had posted a rundown on the whole 3dfx story. I think that sequence of events obligates me to subscribe

[oliverhilton]

"Voodoo" is such a cool name for a graphics accelerator