This article has been combined with the other two articles for one long resource, please see:

http://www.sudhian.com/index.php?/articles/show/3dfx_voodoo_5_6000_review/  

A Fallen Titan’s Final Glory, Part I:  Setting the Stage

This is the first section of a three part article discussing 3dfx and the company’s final (and unreleased) product, the Voodoo5 6000.  Part I will give a historical overview of the company its product designs, and its ultimate collapse. Part II will focus on the card itself (and its performance), and Part III will concentrate on Rampage development, scenarios that might’ve saved the manufacturer, and a single decision that may have doomed it (the last being a theory of our own).

The decline and collapse of 3dfx in the waning months of 2000 was an untimely end for the company that had virtually invented and popularized the consumer-level 3D accelerator.  Once considered a virtually-unassailable market giant, 3dfx’s fa硤e of invulnerability hid major stress points that, through a mixture of external competition and internal mistakes, ultimately fractured and brought the company down.  The collapse was so dramatic it caught the entire market by surprise; while 3dfx did appear to be in trouble, not many people thought the situation was as bad as the events of December 2000 showed them to be. 

The Voodoo5 6000 (for those six of you who don’t know) was 3dfx’s last major product, and, though it was never released, it was the last to be manufactured in any kind of volume.  From its inception it was an attention-grabber, though its mammoth physical design and external power source would attract as much criticism as praise throughout its short and unofficial lifetime.  Based on the VSA (Voodoo Scaling Architecture) 100, the V5 6K was the ultimate over-the-top product; a 128 meg card when 32 meg was standard and 64 extravagant, a 4 chip architecture when other cards used only one (two at the most) and, inevitably, a (proposed) price tag that could choke a donkey.

It’s not possible to discuss the V5 6000 (and the entire VSA-100 product series) without also discussing the market conditions and historical events (can events from seven years ago BE historical?) that led to the ultimate demise of 3dfx.  Pay attention?there will be a quiz later.

The Dawning of a New Era:  1996-1997

Prior to 1996 and the introduction of the 3dfx Voodoo architecture, the world of computer gaming was a vastly different place.  Although primitive 3D environments were used in some games, even the fastest modern processors were unable to render these environments in high resolutions (for the time) while maintaining acceptable frame rates.  Even Quake, which was id’s first 3D game that allowed for jumping, climbing, and point-of-view rotation, couldn’t be run in a basic 640x480 resolution without looking like a slideshow.

This was a situation that benefited CPU giant Intel immensely.  With game performance dependent on processor performance, Intel could count on a steady crop of gamers buying or upgrading CPU’s, especially as games continued to demand more and more power in order to run smoothly.  Computers that’d whizzed by on Doom only a few years earlier choked on Quake; locking gamers into an upgrade cycle that distinctly benefited Santa Clara?until 3dfx introduced the original Voodoo architecture and torpedoed Intel’s carefully laid plans.

The original MMX instruction set (which boosted multimedia and video performance) was partially designed to increase game performance (and further boost sales).  By providing CPU’s with support for instruction sets that would increase 3D and multimedia performance Intel was both distancing itself from competitors like Cyrix, IDT, and AMD by offering features these companies did not possess, and introducing a feature set for which it could charge additional premiums.  MMX might’ve been only the first in a long line of instruction sets designed to boost 3D performance (and Intel profits)?if 3dfx hadn’t come along.

The Voodoo wasn’t the first 3D accelerator on the market, but it was the first 3D card on the market worth using.  The S3 Virge, in fact, performed so badly that it earned itself the nickname 3D "Decelerator" while Rendition’s Verite technology offered competitive video performance to a bowl of lukewarm tapioca?some of the time.  The Voodoo, in contrast, was fast, powerful, packed a whopping 4 meg of RAM on board, and was offered as an add-on card to a user’s primary video adapter.  Since many users invested in high-end 2D video cards at that time, releasing the Voodoo as a 3D add-in card actually made a great deal of sense, and didn’t force 3dfx to incur additional expenses by building a capable 2D engine or force users to choose between top-of-the-line 2D and gaming 3D performance.

For readers wondering just how much of a performance difference an original Voodoo could make we’ve included numbers gleaned from older sites where data is still available on GLQuake vs. ordinary Quake performance.  A Pentium 200 MMX system averaging a frame rate of 41 fps in Timedemo1 in Quake 1 (run in 320x200) rockets to 70 fps in GLQuake when a Voodoo card is used, for a whopping 70% boost in performance.  In 512x384 (probably the highest marginally playable resolution for this time period) we see Quake running at 21.2 fps on the Pentium 200 in software mode.  When we introduce the Voodoo we see performance jump no less then 300%, topping out an amazing 62 fps. 

Given these kind of results it’s easy to see why Voodoo cards sold hand over fist?and why Intel would have reason to be less than happy about these developments.  Although CPU power would continue to be an important factor in 3D performance, the emergence of the Voodoo knocked it firmly into second place when it came to determining just how fast a system would run in a given game. 

1996 and 1997 saw the mass adoption of the Voodoo, the introduction of 3dfx’s proprietary 3D API Glide (which came very close to dominating the market) and the establishment of 3dfx as *the* premiere 3D accelerator.  Most of 3dfx’s competitors (Matrox, ATI, S3, and Rendition) hadn’t really fielded seriously competitive products.  NVIDIA’s RIVA128 came on the scene in the fall of 1997 and became a popular low-cost option for OEMs, though it failed to make much of a dent in the higher-cost video market.

In February of 1998 NVIDIA launched the RIVA 128ZX, an upgraded version of the original with an 8 meg frame buffer.  The card took two slot spaces to install, was exceptionally loud, and offered only mediocre performance compared to its?.whoops.  Wrong card.  The RIVA 128ZX didn’t have many improvements beyond a larger frame buffer, but NVIDIA did have a full OpenGL ICD ready to go at launch.

3dfx did attempt to go after the 2D / 3D market (which would’ve put them in more-direct competition with NVIDIA), but their product of choice was the ill-fated Voodoo Rush.  Based on an out-sourced 2D design coupled with 3dfx Voodoo technology the card was plagued with compatibility problems and ultimately failed to have much market impact. 

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• The Golden Age (0 of 4)
• The Throne Trembles (0 of 4)
• The Storm Breaks (0 of 4)
• A Titan Falls (0 of 4)