Hacker News Reader

Comment by epcoa | Hacker News Reader

Still blows my mind that it was just a flash in the pan. At the time it felt that 3dfx was certainly going to be a dominant force in computing for years. And although they lingered a bit, the whole event was barely over 2 years.

View on HN

I think everyone understood that having it be 3D-only (and requiring a separate graphics card to do normal 2D desktop graphics) was a half-solution, and 3DFX's long term success would depend on their ability to provide a full 2D/3D solution before existing competitors like NVIDIA, ATI, and Matrox could catch up with their own 3D accelerators.

At various points and machines I had a Voodoo 2 (with the VGA handbag from a 2d card), a Voodoo banshee, and a Voodoo 3.

The latter two were 2d+3d in one and well before any real competition.

Their 2D engine was incredible for the time as well, implementing 100% of the Windows GDI functions in hardware.

They really needed to buy Matrox and make multi-monitor 3D a thing.

I remember reading a historical piece where the voodoos success was partially luck. At the time the first generation cards were being developed edo ram was super expensive so most competitive designs were hamstrung trying to do things with very little ram. By luck edo ram prices crashed right as they released making them far more affordable to manufacture than 3dfx could have reasonably expected. That gave them an early and massive lead with their initial design.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com