The Fall of 3Dfx and The Rise of Two Giants
With the turn of the century the graphics industry bore witness to further consolidation.
The pro market saw iXMICRO leave graphics entirely, while NEC and Hewlett-Packard both produced their last products, the TE5 and VISUALIZE FX10 series respectively. Evans & Sutherland also parted ways with the sale of its RealVision line to focus on the planetaria and fulldome projection systems.
In the consumer graphics market, ATI announced the acquisition of ArtX Inc. in February 2000, for around $400 million in stock. ArtX was developing the GPU codenamed Project Dolphin (eventually named “Flipper”) for the Nintendo GameCube, which added significantly to ATI’s bottom line.
ATI GameCube GPU
Also in February, 3dfx announced a 20% workforce cut, then promptly moved to acquire Gigapixel for $186 million and gained the company’s tile-based rendering IP.
Meanwhile, S3 and Nvidia settled their outstanding patent suits and signed a seven-year cross-license agreement.
VIA assumed control of S3 around April-May which itself was just finishing a restructuring process from the acquisition of Number Nine. As part of S3’s restructuring, the company merged with Diamond Multimedia in a stock swap valued at $165 million. Diamond’s high-end professional graphics division, FireGL, was spun off as SONICblue and later sold to ATI in March 2001 for $10 million.
3DLabs acquired Intergraph’s Intense3D in April, while the final acts of 3dfx played out towards the end of the year, despite 2000 kicking off with the promise of a better future as the long-awaited Voodoo 5 5500 neared its debut in July. The latter ended up trading blows with the GeForce 256 DDR and won the high-resolution battle.
Where 3dfx was once a byword for raw performance, its strengths around this time laid in its full screen antialiasing image quality.
But where 3dfx was once a byword for raw performance, its strengths around this time laid in its full screen antialiasing image quality. The Voodoo 5 introduced T-buffer technology as an alternative to transformation and lighting, by basically taking a few rendered frames and aggregating them into one image. This produced a slightly blurred picture that, when run in frame sequence, smoothed out the motion of the animation.
3dfx’s technology became the forerunner of many image quality enhancements seen today, like soft shadows and reflections, motion blur, as well as depth of field blurring.
3dfx’s swan song, the Voodoo 4 4500, arrived October 19 after several delays – unlike the 4200 and 4800 that were never released. The card was originally scheduled for spring as a competitor to Nvidia’s TNT2, but ended up going against the company’s iconic GeForce 256 DDR instead, as well as the much better performing GeForce 2 GTS and ATI Radeon DDR.
On November 14, 3dfx announced they were belatedly ceasing production and sale of their own-branded graphics cards, something that had been rumoured for some time but largely discounted. Adding fuel to the fire, news got out that upcoming Pentium 4 motherboards would not support the 3.3V AGP signalling required Voodoo 5 series.
Voodoo5 5500 AGP box art
The death knell sounded a month later for 3dfx when Nvidia purchased its IP portfolio for $70 million plus one million shares of common stock. A few internet wits later noted that the 3dfx design team which had moved to Nvidia eventually got both their revenge and lived up to their potential, by delivering the underperforming NV30 graphics chip powering the FX 5700 and FX 5800 cards behind schedule.
Full Story: History of the Modern Graphics Processor, Part 3 – TechSpot.