3Dfx Voodoo: The Game-changer
Launched on November 1996, 3Dfx’s Voodoo graphics consisted of a 3D-only card that required a VGA cable pass-through from a separate 2D card to the Voodoo, which then connected to the display.
The cards were sold by a large number of companies. Orchid Technologies was first to market with the $299 Orchid Righteous 3D, a board noted for having mechanical relays that “clicked” when the chipset was in use. Later revisions utilized solid-state relays in line with the rest of the vendors. The card was followed by Diamond Multimedia’s Monster 3D, Colormaster’s Voodoo Mania, the Canopus Pure3D, Quantum3D, Miro Hiscore, Skywell (Magic3D), and the 2theMAX Fantasy FX Power 3D.
Voodoo Graphics revolutionized personal computer graphics nearly overnight and rendered many other designs obsolete, including a vast swathe of 2D-only graphics producers. The 3D landscape in 1996 favoured S3 with around 50% of the market. That was to change soon, however. It was estimated that 3Dfx accounted for 80-85% of the 3D accelerator market during the heyday of Voodoo’s reign.

Diamond Multimedia’s Monster 3D (3dfx Voodoo1 4MB PCI)
Around that time VideoLogic had developed a tile based deferred rendering technology (TBDR) which eliminated the need for large scale Z-buffering (removing occluded/hidden pixels in the final render) by discarding all but visible geometry before texture, shading and lighting were applied to that which remained. The frame resulting from this process was sectioned into rectangular tiles, each tile with its own polygons rendered and sent to output. Polygon rendering commenced once the pixels required for the frame were calculated and polygons culled (Z-buffering only occurred at tile level). This way only a bare minimum of calculation was required.
The first two series of chips and cards were built by NEC, while Series 3 (Kyro) chips were fabricated by ST Micro. The first card was used exclusively in Compaq Presario PCs and was known as the Midas 3 (the Midas 1 and 2 were prototypes for an arcade based system project). The PCX1 and PCX2 followed as OEM parts.
The 3D landscape in 1996 favoured S3 with around 50% of the market. That was to change soon, however. It was estimated that 3Dfx accounted for 80-85% of the 3D accelerator market during the heyday of Voodoo’s reign.
Series 2 chip production initially went to Sega’s Dreamcast console, and by the time the desktop Neon 250 card hit retail in November 1999, it was brutally outclassed at its $169 price range, particularly in higher resolutions with 32-bit color.
Just before the Neon 250 became available, Rendition’s Vérité V1000 became the first card with a programmable core to render 2D + 3D graphics, by utilizing a MIPS-based RISC processor as well as the pixel pipelines. The processor was responsible for triangle setup and organizing workload for the pipelines.
Originally developed towards the end of 1995, the Vérité 1000 became one of the boards that Microsoft used to develop Direct3D. Unfortunately, the card required a motherboard chipset capable of supporting direct memory access (DMA), since the Rendition used this method to transfer data across the PCI interface. The V1000 fared well in comparison with virtually every other consumer graphics board prior to the arrival of the Voodoo Graphics, which had more than double the 3D performance. The board was relatively cheap and offered a good feature set, including edge antialiasing for the budget gamer and hardware acceleration of id Software’s Quake. Game developers, however, shied away from the DMA transfer model all too soon for Rendition’s liking.
Full Story: History of the Modern Graphics Processor, Part 2 – TechSpot.