3Dfx Interactive, Inc.

3Dfx was a graphics card manufacturer for the IBM PC and its compatibles from 1994 until 2002. Initially they manufactured only the 3D accelator chips which they sold to graphics card companies. Towards the end of 1996 the cost of EDO RAM dropped significantly, enabling 3Dfx to enter the consumer PC market with a full product.

Their main product was the Voodoo Graphics - an add-in card that accelerated 3D graphics. The hardware accelerated only 3D rendering, relying on the PC's current video card for 2D work. Despite this limitation, the Voodoo Graphics product and its follow-up, Voodoo2, were popular. It became standard for 3D games to offer support for the company's "Glide" API.

3Dfx' main competition was from Rendition and PowerVR, who also produced 3D-only accelerator chips. Once 3D graphics rendering was becoming more mainstream in PC games, 3Dfx saw further competition from Matrox with their Mystique, S3 with the ViRGE, and ATI's 3D Rage. All these cards offered inferior 3D acceleration to a 3Dfx card but their low cost and the fact they were both 2D and 3D cards combined often appealed to OEM system builders.

They had thus far relied upon selling their chipsets to other vendors. However, in 1998 they purchased STB Microsystems who had a strong OEM relationship with PC builders. The acqusition put a lot of financial pressure on 3Dfx who were already struggling in the market. Prior to this acquisition/merger, 3Dfx had been working with most of the other graphics card manufacturers including Guillemot and Diamond Multimedia. With the merger, the plan was to create their own cards and sell them through STB's long list of OEM partners. Unfortunately this meant leaving their previous partnerships out in the cold. So what did these now rival companies do? They all went to 3Dfx's main competitor at the time, nVidia, to build cards for them instead!

3Dfx continued to lose ground as the OEM market failed to materialise in their favour. To compound things, Microsoft had finally made DirectX more robust and developers began to move away from OpenGL and 3Dfx' own GLiDE API.

Click here for a list of games that support 3Dfx cards.

Here's a list of 3dfx cards in chronological order:

PCI Cards	AGP Cards
Voodoo Graphics (1996) Voodoo Rush (1997) Voodoo2 (1998) Voodoo Banshee (1998) Voodoo3 2000 (1999) Voodoo3 3000 (1999) Voodoo4 4500 (2000) Voodoo5 5500 (2000)	Voodoo Banshee (1998) Voodoo3 1000 (1999) Voodoo3 2000 (1999) Voodoo3 3000 (1999) Voodoo3 3500 TV (1999) Voodoo4 4500 (2000) Voodoo5 5500 (2000)