Thank you for remembering me.

It always blows my mind how fast everything happened with 3Dfx. All this happened in 2-3 years. I remember reading about it years back and not really being able to wrap my head around how they went from nothing, to king, to dead so god damn fast.

Moment of silence for 3DFX... Thank you for helping in the advancement of video game graphics.

I remember when my parents bought me 3dfx Voodoo 1 card for Christmas. I had a Pentium 133Mhz with 8 megs of RAM and S3 Virge video card with 2 mb. The first game I played with 3d acceleration was Star Wars Dark Forces 2. It was amazing, ran so smooth and looked so good, I liked exploring the levels and admiring the architecture more than shooting stormtroopers. The highest resolution in which I had been able to run it smoothly before the 3dfx card was 320x240 and now I was running it at full speed in whopping 800x600 resolution. Sigh, memories.

I am really loving this series! :)

Now I'm wishing 3DFX was still around so that AMD and Nvidia had more competition.

I remember the days when 3DFX ruled the graphic cards scene in the mid to late 90's. You'd walk into any PC shop and their graphic cards were everywhere. The one thing that always struck me was the spectacular box art 3DFX's graphic cards always seemed to have.

Still using a Voodoo 1 to this day in my DOS/Win95 gaming box. Never ceases to amaze me what 3DFX was able to do with 4MB of VRAM and a PCI bus. Thank you for researching this.

in short: what happened? bad management, yet again. the person in charge was incompetent

The 90s were the Golden Age of GPUs. I remember I was so spoiled for choice. 3Dfx, Matrox, ATI, S3, Diamond, Nvidia ... so many choices! Now we just have the big 2: AMD-ATI and Nvidia. Who knew Nvidia would be the biggest fish still surviving from the old days. If I knew, I would have bought stocks in Nvidia then. Back then, all the kids in my school would get a 3Dfx Voodoo, that was the cool thing to get. The poorer kids like me ended up getting a generic S3 off the shelf that did not even come in a box , just a plastic bag.

If you had 3dfx, you were rich lol when I was a kid, 3dfx was a myth, a legend, something I never thought I would experience.. back in the day, every pc game we had included a 3dfx demonstration video, it looked so amazing 😂

Quake 2 on my Voodoo 2 card was amazing. I paid $700 for that card and got it a week after it was released. Computer geeks I didn't even know showed up at my door and asked if they could see a demo of the card. The difference between software rendering and the Voodoo 2 was incredible. Love the Tech Tales, keep them coming.

"Voodoo" is such a cool name for a graphics accelerator

i loved how they marketed 3DFX cards though, always felt exciting. something you don't see in modern cards. just some generic robot woman or something now.

I vividly remember the first 3D accelerator card I ever bought. It was a voodoo2 card. The first Nintendo 64 emulator had just come out, and it used a nifty new 'high level emulation' that basically turned commands for the N64 GPU into Glide calls. I'd been following emulator development for a few years already at that point. I had seen advertisements for 3D cards for years, but they were always expensive and I honestly didn't have much of a clue whether they even made much difference. None of my friends had one, so I'd never seen one in action at all. When the first N64 emulator came out and required such a card, I had my excuse to buy one. Holy crap. I was immediately blown away. I don't know if I have ever experienced such an immediate and gigantic improvement in performance and capability in my entire time being a computer enthusiast, either before or since. I believe the first thing I played with it was Quake 2 and it was like a completely different game. Going from pure software rendering to hardware acceleration was like switching from a BMX bike to a Lamborghini. I don't think I stopped smiling for a week. Plus, I finally got to try out Conker's Bad Fur Day which was the only N64 game I was really interested in (I never owned an N64).

Ironically, Voodoo cards are making a comeback with a vengeance among retro PC gamers. They are now very highly sought after and fetch a crazy price, like all the other older hardware. Crazy to think how much of that stuff we scrapped back then or sold for peanuts as it became obsolete, only now to really appreciate what we had. Buy 'em up while you can! I have a Voodoo1 card, 5 Voodoo2 cards and a Voodoo 5500, and still collecting.

idk why, but I have always thought that 3dfx had the best logo of tech companies in the 90s.

Thank you 3DFx that got me interested in building my own gaming machine when I was only 13 years old, which got me into IT career and become Cyber Security Architect 17 years later.

Sometimes by being the loser, you can have a bigger influence that you ever could have had as a winner.

90's? I was rocking 3DFX until 04 when I finally had to accept defeat and move on to ATi.

This was AWESOME! Loads of stuff that I'd never known! For example, the way in which 3DFx actually signed their own death sentence by publicising (part of) the deal-in-the-making with Sega. I mean, I knew this had happened, but I would have never thought this was a direct set-off for the chain of events that lead to 3DFx's end… All in all, I'd absolutely LOVE new episodes of Tech Tales. This series is my all-time favourite, along with Oddware! Mind you, I'm also enjoying the heck out of your 'regular' (DOS) Game Reviews!

LGR, you know what I'd _love_ to see? An episode dedicated to old benchmark software for video cards. I remember a Matrox (or maybe Voodoo) card had a 3D meadow software of sorts where you could move the camera around and see all the various feats the card was capable of (dynamic light maps, reflective surfaces, bump and speculars, the works) and another card had, I believe, a monster truck minigame only available as a benchmark, I think that may be an interesting episode, if you ever managed to track those CDs down.

Just a few bad decisions is all it takes to topple a giant. I wonder how further 3Dfx could have gone if they kept their shit in check.

i like your tech tales these are awesome videos

Never had a 3dfx card, but I remember well in the 90's all the marketing and fame that they had back then, I couldn't open a PC gaming magazine without a voodoo card ad in it. Fortunately not everthing was lost, there's the nGlide wrapper to allow us to test those graphical enhancement on past games.

Every time I got a new voodoo card I always saved the box and proudly displayed it on my desk

I have been on an LGR kick lately. Thanks for all the knowledge man. And the back catalogue; top shelf. Loving your content prior to me becoming a subscriber. As a 35 year old man, you're hitting my nostalgia right in the bullseye my guy. 🤣🤘 Rock on.

I remember Christmas 98 when my dad offered me a brand new Voodoo 2 and a brand new 19" CRT VGA monitor. Oh boy, this was a revolution...

I remember going into a computer store shortly after Christmas 2000, looking for a Geforce2 MX card. I was surprised how many people I saw rushing to buy the 3Dfx Voodoo5 and Voodoo4 cards on clearance. At the time I thought those people were silly. Today my Geforce2 MX is worthless. A Voodoo5 is worth serious money. It's not only because it's 3Dfx's final product. It's also because it's the fastest card that can run native Glide. *Anything* that runs native Glide is rising in value today, but the Voodoo5 is at the top of that list and gets the "best of breed" premium.

My Voodoo 2 made Unreal look amazing back in the day. Great memories. Thank you 3Dfx.

I seem to come back to this video annually :) One of my favorite tech tale episodes.

I had several of these cards, and I remember the game Unreal. It blew everyone away when used with a voodoo graphics card. What really killed 3DFX was the lack of 32bit color. By the time the Voodoo 3000 came out many other manufactures were touting 32bit color 3d graphics, and that put sales of Voodoo cards way behind.

You have an amazing narrating voice!

Thanks LGR for this Tech Tale! I miss 3dFX. My first PC was an eMachines like the one in your video. It cost $100 plus a year of AOL, which my parents already had. I equipped that eMachine PC with a Voodoo 3 2000 graphics card (ran HL1 like a champ), which I later replaced with 3dFX's swan song, the Voodoo 5 5500. Wish I still had that card, or one of the developer 6000 model cards that are still floating around. Sold mine to a friend for $50, and replaced it with Nvidia's Geforce 3, and my first custom built PC.

God the early days at 3dfx was wild. People worked hard and played hard. I remember the software team having quake lan play at 2 in afternoon and the electric guitar playing in the dungen(area were we worked which was a converted loading dock). The hole 8 which we were next to on the golf course and having to hit the floor when a golf ball would come flying in. There there was an alpha blender in the break room for Friday mudslides. I remember the sw team sleeping under their desks as they were so engrossed in what they were doing they wouldn’t go home for days. Thank you for showing the products we worked on

You forgot one huuuuge factor in the story... NVidia's fraudulent campaign of lies against 3dfx (almost resembling the DeLorean case, minus the drugs). While 3dfx' arrogance was part of their undoing. Nvidia's lies (on performance and features) were equally damaging.

Oh man, to this day this story brings a tear to my eye :( I remember being on the official 3dfx message boards while all of this was going on, those were sad times...

I remember buying my first voodoo card and damn that was a amazing expierence... time flies.

I got a Voodoo 2 back in '96 or so. Came with Incoming and Monster Truck Madness. It was a secondary card though - you still had to have a regular SVGA card installed and then you'd run a pass through cable to the Voodoo and then connect your monitor to the Voodoo. It was similar to my first CD drive (Creative) where you had to have a card just for the CD drive and then you'd wire it up to your Soundblaster card. Ah how far we've come.

I'll miss you, 3DFX. You were the first video card I successfully installed myself (the Voodoo 2).

I love 3dfx, I remmeber having an amdk6-2 pc with a voodoo 2. hexen 2, sin, heretic 2, quake 2 all looked amazing.

From time to time, I wondered what actually happened with 3dfx, since they were everywhere in 3D games in the late 90s, but it's quickly forgotten, so I never actually looked it up. It's quite interesting how such a such a successful venture can fall so hard and quickly. It's also kinda amusing how we went from graphic cards with 3D support built-in, over dedicated 3D accelerator cards and back to graphic cards that do everything. Although that's pretty unavoidable when 3D became more normal and advanced.

Great video! I'm a big fan of your Tech Tales series, and I hope you are able to keep making them as time allows. The format is great; not an overly long video, humorous, but not filled with tedious gags, and best of all, thoroughly educational and a great starting point for any computing historian!

Love the Tech Tales on this channel. All of your stuff is awesome, but, the Tech Tales are my favorites. Keep 'em coming!

Fun video. :)

I had voodoo banshee, almost cried playing tomb raider with it

Tech Tales and Odd Ware are my favorite parts of the Channel. Keep those up!

5:56 awwww yeah! That pic of the vice clip is legendary

I love these Tech Tales. Very informative.

At 3:20 I squealed. I had that card. Was my second graphics card, with the Matrox Mystique which had 4 MB of onborad RAM. I played the Jedi Knight "Pathway to the force" so often. :D I think the CD is still among my box of Star Wars things. Orchid Righteous was a great card. So great I even bought Orchid Righteous-2 a couple of years later with the Voodoo 2. 12 MB version of course. My last 3Dfx card was the Voodoo 3-3000 AGP with 16 MB (1999), which I constantly tuned and adjusted and even overclocked. I had it until I shifted to Riva TNT2 in 2001 and the Gefore Ti 4800 around 2003. After that, I think I had a Radeon, then a Geforce, then shifted permanently to laptops and stopped keeping tabs on the hardware development on desktop-graphics, only looking up graphics, when buying a new laptop.

I really love this series of yours Clint! You have something really unique here and it's done very well. I watch all your vids anyway as a fan but this series particularly stands out!

Man, another great episode, I like how you keep things short, simple and to the point.

I had a Voodoo Banshee 3dfx card..... oh that takes me back. Thanks for the video!

Very much my cup of tea :)

This is a great series you've started. Really enjoying it so far and lots of neat info to hear about. I'm not sure what topic I'd ask you to check out next but whatever you happened to do I'll be curious to listen!

as I know the history of 3dfx quite well, I was curious about this video (as I'm your fan) and I must say: very well done,sir! keep on the good work, we'd like more of these.

I remember seeing heaps of Adverts for 3Dfx cards in my old PC powerplay magazines. Those where the days :)

best movie trailer voice 11/10 ign

I love this series so much. It's super informative and interesting for a lot of reasons. I see video cards all the time at my work and I'm always interested in the old technology and the history about them.Keep up the quality stuff, Clint. I hope to see more of this in the future.

I've always been into computer technology and IT is my career path. This, Gaming Historian and TVGY are some of my fav web shows because it gives me a chance to learn more about video game and computer history. Keep up the great work sir!

Glide is great, I still use a wrapper for it for n64 emulation, Glide64Napalm

I think this has become one of my favorite one of my favorite LGR segments in no time flat!

Loving these tech tales videos. Keep them coming.

I was watching one of your other videos, and went to see if anyone had posted a rundown on the whole 3dfx story. I think that sequence of events obligates me to subscribe

Diamond monster 3d. The best card and package ever

3DFX was great . i still have one it still works

Excellent video! I purchased the Orchid Righteous 3D as soon as it was available. I got it via mail order from the States (I live in Canada) and will never forget how excited I was to install it and experience 3D accelerated graphics for the first time at home!

This is such a well researched and presented series. Great work bud!

What i remember being the downfall of 3DFX was the inflexibility of their products. Sure, in their heyday, they were the best performers, but that performance came with inflexibility and compromises. Their first cards were 3d only add-in cards that had to exist along side your normal video card and use a pass through cable. This wasn't the biggest deal but nonetheless it was an inconvenience. More importantly they had more rigid restrictions on how the memory on the card was allocated, in that only certain amounts could be used for texture storage and only certain parts could be used as frame buffer. That meant that in many games (those that used Z-buffering), if you only had a single Voodoo 2 card, you were limited to ONLY 640x480 or 800x600. The only way to go higher, like 1024x760 was to have 2 cards in SlI and then the same textures had to stored redundantly on both cards. So, while going to 2 card SLI increased performance and/or increased the resolution of rendering, higher resolution textures could not be used. In addition to this 32 bit rendering WAS NOT SUPPORTED, only 16 bits max! These issues later wound up being significant bottlenecks on their products and Nvidia eventually beat them by supporting things like larger texture maps and 32bit rendering, Also their use of the Glide API eventually hurt them as well. Yes, Glide was initially better because it gave them better performance, but developers hate having to develop multiple versions of games to support proprietary APIs. Also their OpenGL support was through a "mini-GL" DLL that was more like a wrapper with just enough functionality to support the most popular OpenGL games at that time. This meant they never really developed a more full featured OpenGL support in their driver. When you played an OpenGL game on a Voodoo card, you really were NOT using OpenGL. You were just using a wrapper that didn't fully support OpenGL. If you tried to actually run real OpenGL apps they'd either crash or fail to run. Anyway, there was a time in the PC gaming market when all these limitations and inflexibilities were an acceptable trade off for most gamers to get the level of performance the 3DFX hardware delivered. However, that time passed and the industry moved forward. When that happened the companies that were more forward thinking, like Nvidia, became much better options. That's what killed 3DFX. Just like in evolution, a species can be too well adapted to a specific set of conditions and circumstances that exist in one moment in time, such that when things change they die off. The same can happen to a company and their product. Flexibility is often more important to long term survival than anything else!

5:16 Loving that sims 2 music! The song is full of nostalgia! I'm really enjoying this series...As an 18 year old, I find it so interesting to learn about older computers, games and programs I've never experienced. I could seriously watch these videos for hours at a time; I get lost in these timeless pieces of tech. (:

Awesome video sir, I was hoping you'd cover this topic! Can't wait until the next Tech Tales, great job :D

I remember browsing through old PC gaming magazines and looking at Voodoo ads. It looked AWESOME. I love this series, keep it up!

Voodoo 1 was a huge upgrade in comparison to software-rendered 3D. However, it did not play nice with my 2D card (picture from the 2D card was out of sync), I had to physically switch monitor connector each time 3D was activated. It might be worth mentioning Voodoo 1 produced only 16-bit colour 3D output. Voodoo 2 and even 3 still had this limitation (when the competition had already advanced to full 32-bit). I think Voodoo 2 was the moment 3Dfx began to lag behind, although the SLI mode helped it a bit.

Hey Clint, do you think you'll ever do an LGR Tech Tales on the early days of id and the two Johns?

Love this channel, and this series! Keep em coming! I'll keep watching. good job and thank you!

Short, sweet, and oh, so, incredibly informative. Thank you for this series. 4 episodes in, and I can't wait to see more!

I like how you use the music from Omikron: The Nomad Soul in these Tech Tales videos. Do you ever plan to review that game? It seems like the kind of obscure but cool thing that you'd have on your channel.

i bought the 3dfx 5500 days before the company sank

Yay!!! I've been waiting for the next installment of Tech Tales. Thank you sir.

Love these in depth look backs. You're a pro!

I remember having an nVidia Riva 128 back in 1997 and being sooo jealous of my friends who had Voodoo cards.

How about an LGR tech tales on the rise of and fall of Sega's consoles?

Pls keep this series up, great work.

Love Tech Tales, you do an excellent job Clint! Love your work!

NFS 2 looked fucking amazing on voodoo!

So without 3DfX there won't be SLI for NVIDIA ?

I think you're awesome. I can spend hours watching your videos. Thanks man!

This series is great! Keep 'em coming!

Who remembers the Voodoo2 SLI?

You should make a video about ATI. I owned several of their cards back then and Radeon used to be pretty sweet. I don't think the company operates anymore, either. I wonder what happened to them.

:D - another great episode, well done Clint!

This was awesome. I had a Voodoo2 card and then a Voodoo3 card back in the days of Quake 1, Tomb Raider, NFS, etc. This brings back old memories of the early days of computer gaming!

I agree with other people that these could be longer. Even if the talking was just a little slower or had more pauses, it feels the subject is being rushed through. I know the average attention span is probably about 10 mins for a youtube vid, but with a documentary I think we would be willing to sit through longer. Great stuff anyway.

Do LGR tech tales ATI!

This is short, succinct and nicely paced. This is a nice enough niche in the KZfaq market you've placed yourself into. Well done.

So happy. I suggested this on one of your videos a while ago. I'm sure a million other people did too, but thanks for keepin' it real, man!

Do i hear sims 2 build mode music? :) yeah i played that game way too much XD

I so remember Voodoo being just as magical as it sounded. I'm glad we at least got OpenGL out of it, though it seems like DirectX has taken the lead in the gaming arena again. It's amazing how far we have come.

Awesome! 3DFX and their Voodoo graphics cards are a part of my gaming childhood. Bring on the next part in the series!

Awesome Video, sir, excuse my english, I'm watching you from Uruguay. We got this can of tech many years later than the US and things wasn't so mainstream as they are now. I remember going to a friends house, he owned the Vodoo 3 and was using bleem, i was amazed. Completly unreacheable hardware for a kid like me back in the days. This video got me nostalgic of that time. Keep the series going, man. Greetings.