Submitted via IRC for TheMightyBuzzard
Today's startup companies seem to have a certain arc to them—they get some seed funding, they launch, they draw some interest for their good idea, they keep growing, and maybe they become a part of the fabric of our lives ... or a part of the fabric of a significantly larger company. Strangely, 3Dfx didn't so much draw interest as blow the lid off of a trend that redefined how we think of video games. Its graphics processing units were just the right technology for their time. And, for that reason, the company was everywhere for a few years ... until it wasn't. So, what happened—why did 3Dfx turn into a cautionary tale? Today's Tedium sifts through all the polygons and the shaded textures. — Ernie @ Tedium
Source: https://tedium.co/2018/02/14/3dfx-history-failure/
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 19 2018, @04:44PM (7 children)
The 3dfx timeline gives you an idea of how much the computer field has slowed down and consolidated. Voodoo was released in 1996, into a market with half a dozen competitors. Voodoo 2 in 1998, the same year as the first viable NVIDIA card (Riva TNT). NVIDIA released the GeForce 256 in 1999, cementing its dominance. 3dfx released its last card in 2000, just four years after its first. NVIDIA is now still dominant, 18 years after establishing dominance with the GeForce.
Think back on how much consumer computing changed from 1996 to 2000. Four years back from the present, in contrast, is the Haswell-based Macbook Pro and iPhone 5s (a perfectly fine setup today).
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 19 2018, @05:01PM
There fixed that for you.
Slashdot really did rule back in the day.
Suppose soylent does suck, but more in the way that primus does than say metallica.
(Score: 2) by crafoo on Monday February 19 2018, @05:08PM (2 children)
PC innovation has slowed because the hardware and firmware is closed off; proprietary.
The PC exploded because the standard was open and the hardware was documented. Without this it would have been a complete flop.
Graphics hardware will continue to crawl along as long as the graphics systems are closed, proprietary systems. The current market incumbents will use their position in the market to choke the air out of any upstart innovators. Enjoy.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 19 2018, @05:19PM (1 child)
Not really, having multiple standards caused it's own share of headaches. Most games would have one API that was really supported and anything else would be either missing features or not as smooth. It's still a bit of a problem, but it's typically nowhere near as bad as it used to be. 3DFX had a pretty massive advantage when they started because the price of RAM dropped significantly and they became a standard of sorts. So, most, if not all, popular games would include glide and make use of the advanced features even if they didn't support the various other APIs for other manufacturers chips.
Accelerator APIs are mature enough now that there's not a whole lot that is missing that would improve gameplay other than more powerful hardware.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Tuesday February 20 2018, @12:06AM
Mmm... Yes and no.
3d api's standards: DirectX, OpenGL/GLES [wikipedia.org], Vulkan [wikipedia.org], Metal [wikipedia.org] and that's only on PC and major mobiles (haven't look on consoles).
Yes, they may be mature, but for game developers it is not different from what web developers had to put up with during early browser wars era.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 19 2018, @05:15PM
I was really disappointed when PowerVR didn't come back to the PC after their first cards. They had some limitations to them, I wish they would have allowed a lower screen resolution so that we could have higher frame rates, some parts of Quake would run at 20fps or a bit less because of it. But, there was no passthrough cable and when it was working well, it was beating the snot out of 3DFX for much less money.
Right now in particular it would be great to have more options. The cost of GPUs has gotten out of hand with all the idiots mining cryptocurrency and having just two viable options makes it tough.
But, OTOH, having so many options caused all sorts of problems as they'd each use their own proprietary API to get the most out of the games and the game you wanted to play may or may not have supported the card you had, which would lead to a less than stellar experience. Still a bit of a problem, but nowhere near as much of a problem now that games use a combination of OpenGL or DirectX for pretty much everything.
(Score: 2) by forkazoo on Tuesday February 20 2018, @12:24AM (1 child)
In 1983, The 128k Macintosh, Windows 1.0, and the original Amiga were all distant futuristic fever dreams.
In 1996, The Voodoo allowed fairly decent real time 3D graphics on ordinary desktop computers.
That 13 year span is truly stunning when you look back on it, in terms of how fast stuff wa smoving. 13 years ago today was 2005, and that was the year you could get a dual core 64 bit Athlon64 x2. Not terribly impressive by modern standards, but you really wouldn't be shocked to see somebody still using it as a daily driver if it had a bunch of RAM and a SSD upgrade. Now imagine still using an Apple II when everybody else has moved onto PowerPC Macs with Voodoo cards -- it skips over the entire history of 68k Macs!
(Score: 2) by kazzie on Tuesday February 20 2018, @01:19PM
Yeup. Case in point: my IBM X61s Thinkpad (vintage 2007) is still my daily driver at home / out and about, but with 4GB RAM and a beefy hard drive.
It's going to be retired by a slightly newer X-series this year, mainly because the chassis is starting to give in after a decade of being carted about. The thing I'm really looking forward to is a better (IPS) display; the rest will be just incremental improvements.
My wife, on the other hand, is hoping to get a few more years out of her ~2011 Macbook yet.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Knowledge Troll on Monday February 19 2018, @05:24PM (1 child)
I got a Voodoo2 when they were new and it absolutely shocked me with the difference in quality between software rendering and GL Quake. Much like getting my first SSD I have regret: regret that there will be few other instances in my life where replacing a single piece of hardware has such a drastic increase in the quality of the computing experience.
We need more of that.
(Score: 2) by tibman on Tuesday February 20 2018, @01:40AM
VR (Vive) feels that way to me. I didn't think it would have that big of an impact. But it's like getting my first graphics card, the Voodoo 2 3000. Going from software rendering to the voodoo really changed my gaming life. Discovering linux for the first time was incredible. VR has me captured now. It's not just taking a 3d game and making it VR. It's a whole new experience. Like the first time you launched a web browser and discovered the internet. The VR landscape still looks a bit like the wild west. Competing headsets, formats, platforms and lots of indie content. Good time to jump in! (if you can get over the unfortunately high cost barrier)
SN won't survive on lurkers alone. Write comments.
(Score: 2) by TheRaven on Monday February 19 2018, @05:29PM
I don't entirely trust the argument about convincing Carmack. The release notes for GLQuake described a bunch of features that didn't work with 3dfx cards but only with a 'proper' 3D workstation. The 3dfx version used the 'mini-gl' driver: an implementation of a subset of OpenGL in Glide (3dfx's API). If you had a Windows NT machine with a high-end workstation GPU, it looked a lot better. If you waited a few years and use an nVidia Riva TNT or an early GeForce, then it also looked better.
3dfx had a very high performance rasteriser, but didn't accelerate any of the transform and lighting parts of the OpenGL pipeline, so you quickly pushed the bottleneck back onto the CPU with their cards. For the PC games market, the original 3dfx VooDoo was a game changer: it was the first serious 3D accelerator (though it could only handle 640x480). The GeForce was the next one.
sudo mod me up
(Score: 4, Interesting) by ese002 on Monday February 19 2018, @06:02PM
According to people I know who worked at 3DFx, it was Second-System Effect. 3DFx had one big hit with Voodoo a couple of variations on the same design. They had an ambitious fresh design in the pipeline but the process kept dragging out, consuming additional resources as it did. Eventually Voodoo wasn't good enough and it's presumed successor still had not taped out when 3DFx shut down. Nvidia, on the other hand, executed. They may not always have the most interesting designs but they consistently ship product.
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Monday February 19 2018, @09:52PM
What happens about 98% of the time is they get some seed funding, they scramble for a year or two based on their mediocre ideas, and fail to launch. In the unlikely event that they manage to launch, they're likely to not actually make the splash they and their investors wanted them to, and thus fail to "keep growing".
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 19 2018, @11:09PM
https://tech.slashdot.org/story/00/12/21/1810239/3dfxgigapixel-where-did-it-go-wrong [slashdot.org]
https://tech.slashdot.org/story/02/09/26/1156217/the-last-days-at-3dfx [slashdot.org]
still remember these good old threads on industrial history...
there are more but dont have so old links, and spnd only 10 sec on a google search... =)
-zug
(Score: 2) by dltaylor on Monday February 19 2018, @11:21PM (1 child)
They destroyed 3dfx by, IMO, patent-trolling over an inherent feature of PCI, "block moves".
Voodoo 3 still runs in my SAM 440 (AmigaDOS, Debian PPC).
I kept a couple of 3s when I parted ways with the 5s, because I thought the legacy support for the 3s was likely to last.
(Score: 2) by chewbacon on Tuesday February 20 2018, @04:59AM
I get so nostalgic thinking back to building my first computer and opening the box of the Voodoo3 3500. That thing was a beast... at the time. Loved watching TV on it, too.