3dfx Oral History Panel [video] | Hacker News Reader

3dfx Oral History Panel [video]

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I remember buying the Diamond Monster 3D based on 3DFX's voodoo 1 chipset. The hardware was a total hack job! It didn't do desktop 2D graphics at all, so you still needed a separate card for that. To avoid forcing users to swap plugs on their monitor every time they fired up a 3D application, the Voodoo included a pass-through plug. Yup. You took a short VGA patch cable and plugged the output of your 2D card right into the 3DFX card, and then your monitor into the 3DFX card! Next, games had to be written specifically to take advantage of the 3DFX API (Glide), so gaming support was far from universal. If something as unrefined as the original vooddo was released today it would probably be scoffed at.

However, it's also worth noting what a huge leap forward in quality the original voodoo card offered. The original quake was ported to GL so that it could work on the voodoo, and it was a revelation. Many games were subsequently released with wildly different software and Glide (3DFX's API) rendering modes. The original "Grand Theft Auto" in particular looked vastly better under Glide than under software. Before long, game developers started requiring Glide hardware support rather than trying to build software rendered versions of their game. The voodoo cards were such a big leap forward for gaming that they were universally adopted in spite of their problems.

After 3DFX folded and the voodoo series fell into obsolescence, it was difficult to play an entire generation of glide-only games for quite some time. Fortunately, despite the fact that Glide was proprietary, a host of different people made glide wrappers, and we can now enjoy Glide optimized games from the comfort of a standard DOSBOX install!

I'm going to say that the hardware implementation wasn't a hack job at all. Their "competitors" at the time had far worse implementations, even if it was a single VGA output (who cares?). This way 3dfx could focus on 3D, and leave 2D to people that cared.

3dfx voodoo1/2 did one thing and did it damned well. They are basically responsible for the 3D revolution in gaming, as before 3dfx you had absolute shit like Matrox and Trident with "3d accelerators" which may as well have not existed. It was as close to a hard requirement as anything at the time for gaming.

Voodoo3 was the beginning of the end for 3dfx, and I wouldn't doubt that part of that was having to switch focus to 2d performance as well as 3d.

Time to go pull out my old V1/V2/V5500's from storage :)

NVidia's G-Sync is almost as kludgy as Voodoo Graphics. In theory it can be properly taken advantage of by a well-written preexisting game engine, but there are also a ton of games out there that assume a fixed limit of 60FPS and will see no more benefit than if Direct3D were to start doing triple buffering. And the idea of ripping a PCB and power supply out of your monitor and replacing them is definitely as uglier than a VGA patch cable. Fortunately, commercial G-Sync monitors will become available a lot quicker than the 2D-capable Voodoo 3.

> a fixed limit of 60FPS

These days it's 30fps: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y1yn5OD5WbM#t=107

Tech moves fast. Sure, Moore's Law yadda yadda, but sometimes it's hard to get a sense of what that really means.

For me, what's astounding is thinking back on all these business wars in tech in the 90s that seemed so crucial at the time. Half a decade later, one or both sides were absorbed, dead, or irrelevant.

Yeah.

Palm's vs Pocket PC's. Nokia vs the world. Sega vs Nintendo.

Not many wars where decided by technology itself but other things.

Nokia trusted his middle-end low-end market share then android and iPhone came out.

Palm lost it's way when the smartphones came out.

Sega lost because bad decisions. Nintendo also had bad decision but now is staying behind because the ferocity of the fight between Microsoft and Sony.

Kodak had amazing products but it's perfectionist way to do things let them lagging behind.

Kodak and Nokia are really sad stories because both had amazing products but didn't understood the changes around them. (yeah both more recent examples)

Microsoft won their previous wars because understood the previous reality "feature complete but mediocre solutions". I mean, what the people need want but no more just the essential part. So they dethrone Lotus, Wordperfect etc.

About Kodak failure to imagine a world without analog technology : http://petapixel.com/2010/08/05/the-worlds-first-digital-cam...

Very surprising.

I don't think they failed to imagine a world without analog technology. They failed to produce a painless transition.

The had amazing technologies. I had digital cameras of samsung, Sony and Kodak and the Kodak product was the one I loved more.

Sony and Samsung were stupidly weak to sand, bad battery consumption and some other minor quirks. The Kodak camera was ugly as hell but it worked (thinking some parallel to Nokia products).

Kodak thought "our brand is what people buy so if we offer people will buy".

Fujifilm nailed it. Created a diversified products, put a hand to their patents in plastics chemicals and other things and started to sell technology. So they diversified.

Kodak released products over engineered at slow peace. They still biding in analog products, meanwhile their digital products never took off. Kodak was the mayor patent holder in its time in optical, chemical, plastic and other things. But they were a GIANT biding in sell products and never understood their clients. They never understood their technology value and never understood what the market wanted. One day they stopped to sell and Kodak went out of business.

Kodak also demoed the first professional DSLR in 1988, and released the first commercially available DSLR in 1991. In fact Kodak, with their series of Nikon based DSLRs, basically owned the professional digital photography market throughout the 90's.

This surprised me and I ended up at this nicely informative page:

http://eocamera.jemcgarvey.com/

By way of these:

http://www.dpreview.com/forums/post/4382994

http://www.digicamhistory.com/1988.html

I remember well upgrading my computer with a 3dfx voodoo card. Nothing short of revolutionary. It's hard to explain, but imagine going from what was at the time normal - incredibly pixelated, slow gameplay, to crisp, clear, and fast gameplay which up until that point never really existed. Not buying the card wasn't even an option, there was nothing remotely like it at the time.

My abiding memory of the first 3dfx cards - apart from total envy - was that you then had a spate of games that went way overboard on the coloured lighting effects, so whatever you were playing had this acid-fried psychedelia look to it.

Fortunately, Quake II was able to stick to that famous brown-on-brown palette.

Also: 640x480 being unimaginably high-resolution...

No. 16-bit, as I recall, was the upper limit for Voodoo cards. Resolution wasn't a problem. I played Unreal (the original) at 1600x1200x60hz on my old 17" CRT monitor. I had a Voodoo 3 card back then.

I still remember staying up all night playing Deus Ex on that rig.

The late 90s truly was the golden age of PC gaming.

I'm talking Voodoo 1 here. ;-)

Voodoo2 I think was 800x600, but you could push it up to 1024 if you had two chained up with SLI.

Of course, when I first got a Voodoo card, it was plugged into a 15" cheapo CRT which couldn't even handle anything north of 800x600. So it wasn't an enormous problem.

I have one of those 3dfx shirts from 1998. Some employees were handing them out at a Quake tournament I participated in. Good times.

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