3dfx Voodoo Graphics Cards

In 1994, 3dfx Interactive was founded in San Jose by ex-Silicon Graphics engineers Ross Smith, Scott Sellers and Gary Tarolli, soon joined by TechFarm's Gordie Campbell. The Voodoo Graphics arrived in October 1996, and it was a revolution in a box. It didn't do 2D at all; it accelerated 3D only, daisy-chained between your existing video card and your monitor via a pass-through VGA cable. Installing one and booting a game meant watching your PC switch over to smooth, filtered, high-resolution 3D — a genuine before-and-after moment.

By the end of 1997, the Voodoo was by far the most widely adopted 3D accelerator among both consumers and developers. Games talked to it through 3dfx's own Glide API, and the combination defined what PC gaming could look like. The Voodoo2 arrived in March 1998, adding a second texture unit and introducing SLI — Scan-Line Interleave — which let two cards split the screen's scan lines between them for even more speed.

Then came the missteps. In December 1998, 3dfx bought board-maker STB Systems for $141 million and started building its own cards, alienating the partners who had built Voodoo boards in the first place. The Voodoo3 (1999) shipped without 32-bit color support. Meanwhile, Microsoft's Direct3D was eroding Glide's advantage, and Nvidia's GeForce 256 (1999) proved faster. In December 2000, Nvidia acquired 3dfx's intellectual property and roughly 100 of its engineers; the company filed for bankruptcy in 2002.

For about three years in the late '90s, "Voodoo" was synonymous with PC gaming itself. The rise was steep and the fall was swifter — and the cards remain collector items, souvenirs of the exact moment home PC graphics crossed the threshold.