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There was actually not much need of drivers or firmware. 3Dfx products had a very simple and straight forward way to write commands directly to registers [1][2][3].

It's a fixed-function accelerator. They were all like that AFAIK.

As much as I loved 3Dfx (with a capital "D"!) by the time it was bought by nvidia, it was already on its downfall. It did some interesting things, but clearly, they couldn't keep up with nvidia.

I actually had some hope when nvidia bought it, but unfortunately, they killed the brand, only keeping "SLI", for something that isn't even SLI (scanline interleaving).

And yeah, open source drivers, but don't you find it annoying when you only get open source drivers for subpar hardware? It is unfortunately a recurring problem.

It was sad for everyone in the gaming industry.