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Company: 3Dfx

Description: Three former employees of the computer manufacturing firm Silicon Graphics, Inc. were responsible for founding 3Dfx Interactive in 1994. The founders Scott Sellers, Ross Smith, and Gary Tarolli successfully put up the company with the financial backing of TechFarm via the facilitation of Gordie Campbell. The company initially made a name for itself in the arcade gaming market.

Voodoo Graphics chip was the initially product of 3Dfx which the company launched in 1996. The customers of this graphic chip were primarily manufacturers of graphic cards that functioned as Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM) suppliers. Subsequently, the Voodoo Graphics product line was made commercially available for desktop computer systems. This ground breaking product was later on renamed to Voodoo 1.

The successful deployment of the Voodoo Graphics card required the presence of a separate VGA card in order to implement acceleration for both 2D and 3D graphic sets. The Voodoo card also occupied its own PCI board interface wherein the VGA card would only commence operation once a specific 3D game (previously programmed to execute in relation to Voodoo) was launched by the user.

The immense popularity gained by the Voodoo 1 card line prompted the development of the Glide APIs which were designed to support the graphic card’s functionality. Glide allowed the handling of tasks like chip initialization while ensuring an error prone implementation by the programmer. The application featured built-in check functions to filter out instructions the graphics card cannot process. Midway Games and Atari developed arcade games (coin operated) initially benefited from this development with games like Hydrothunder and NFL Blitz making the most out of the technology. The API also found usage in the Tomb Raider game from Eido.

MiniGL driver was the main application associated with the 3Dfx product. This technology primarily to support the hardware acceleration requirements of the Quake game developed and marketed by id Software. MiniGL was dedicated to the implementation of the OpenGL subset generated by the Quake computer game.

A breakthrough in 3Dfx technology came in August or 1997 with the release of the Voodoo Rush chipset. This product release effectively eliminated the need for an accompanying VGA card by incorporating a 2D chip along with the Voodoo chip within the same graphics board. The following year Voodoo 2 was released and featured the addition of a second unit for the handling of texturing functions. The Voodoo2 utilized three chips along with the VGA card.

Upon acquisition of STB Technologies, 3Dfx launched the Voodoo 3 card to the computer market and was one of the first lines of Voodoo cards to be sold directly to its end users. The last release of the 3Dfx graphic card line came with Voodoo 5, subsequently after which the company was taken over by Nvidia.

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