Hacker News Reader

Puzzling how they failed so fast. Why?

Author here. I should have been more clear about this in the article, but it was a combination of two different factors. First, the company alienated OEMs by making their own cards. Second, the cards they made were close in price to ATI and Nvidia offerings while being slightly less powerful. To make it worse, they were struggling to produce, and so while they had some interesting hardware in the works, they couldn't get it to market quickly enough.

Nvidia did sprinkle 3dfx's technologies across their products where it made sense, and many of the 3dfx folks continued at Nvidia for some time.

Both SGI (who had no hardware texture mapping at the time) and 3dfx were explored at the time DARPA SIMNET was being developed. Delta Graphics (Mike Cyrus' and Jay Beck's company - of the Cyrus-Beck line clipping algorithm fame), which did have hardware Z-buffer texture-mapping, were the incumbents, and was fielded. Gary Tarroli personally visited BBN for a chat, but I wasn't involved in that. If Abort-Retry-Fail is interested in the history of SIMNET (in addition to the first hardware texture-mapping fielded, first AI NPC, etc.), there is a lot of info available. Email me and I can provide the info.

Nice article - thanks!

I remember at the time things were moving somehow chaotically.

Also puzzling why 3dfx didn’t start to support DirectX in parallel with Glide.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com