Items tagged with 3dfx
For gamers of a certain age, the 3dfx Voodoo 5 6000 was perhaps the ultimate in graphics card excess. Developed at a time when 3dfx was facing increasing competition from the likes of NVIDIA and ATI, the Voodoo 5 6000 would have been a last-ditch effort to compete at the high-end of the gaming market. While 3dfx was able to push the Voodoo 5 5000 and Voodoo 5 5500 out the door, the Voodoo 6 6000 was never officially released (although an initial run of roughly 1,000 cards was produced). Over the years, some of these cards have wound up for sale, although they are quite expensive to procure given the limited numbers in the wild and the sheer over-the-top nature of the card. An enthusiast...
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If you want a trip down PC gaming memory lane, look no further than this MSDN blog post from this DirectX Developer Blog. DirectX has been around in one form or another since 1996, which is starting to really make us feel old. Over those 2+ decades, Microsoft's DirectX team has tested hundreds of graphics cards as they have honed their API with subsequent generations. So, what did these engineers do with the old hardware once they finished testing? Did they just toss them in the trash? Did they send them on a slow boat to China to sit at an e-waste facility? Nope, they've been stored in boxes "in someone else's office" over the years, separated by the year they were released (and/or tested)....
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A new book titled "The Legacy of 3dfx" sheds some incite on 3dfx's experimental Rampage graphics card that never saw a public release. A few pictures released early from the book reveal the results of a few benchmark tests that show how pre-production models of the Rampage GPU performed. 3dfx Interactive closed it's doors eighteen years ago, but the company is still far from forgotten. For those of you that don't know, 3dfx was once the leading developer of graphics accelerators. The company was ultimately forced to close its doors due to a couple of bad business decisions and tough competition against ATI and NVIDIA, which was then just a fledgling company in the graphics card world that would...
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The Amiga community remains one of the most passionate and inventive we have ever seen, even now, decades after Commodore’s demise. A couple of weeks back, we featured just a few recent projects that were designed to breathe new life into aging Amiga systems, or at the very least ensure they remain repairable for the foreseeable future. Our article explaining how to build a cheap Amiga emulator using a Raspberry Pi was immensely popular as well. Today, however, we stumbled across a video that encapsulates the ingenuity of many of the more technical folks in the Amiga community. What it shows is an Amiga 3000UX, equipped with a Voodoo 3 card and BigFoot Networks Killer NIC M1, running some...
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VIA announced today that it's signed an agreement to sell its share in S3 Graphics to the mobile phone manufacturer HTC. S3's GPU technology (dubbed Chrome) powers VIA's various chipsets and is paired with the company's Nano processor as part of its CPU platform. Given VIA's relative sliver of market share, this might not seem like an important transaction—but it is. It's been over a decade since S3 was a major player in the graphics display industry; the company's 2D 'Trio' series of video cards were quite popular in the pre-3D era. S3 attempted to enter the 3D market, but the company's ViRGE products performed so abysmally, they earned the nickname '3D Decelerators.' The company followed...
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Jon Peddie Research has released its Q1 2011 estimates, and the figures don't favor Nvidia. The research firm tracked strong gains for Intel and AMD (in terms of volume). AMD's total share of the GPU market rose to 24.8 percent, up from 21.5 percent a year ago (a gain of 24.8 percent total). Intel came in at 54.4 percent, 9.7 percent higher than its Q1 2010 total of 49.6 percent. Both companies' gains were at the expense of Team Green—Nvidia's share of the market fell from 28 percent to 20 percent—a significant decline. This loss of share partly reflects NV's decision to exit the integrated chipset market, but it's also an ominous sign of things to come. Sandy Bridge and Llano,...
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Oh Nvidia, why must you play with our emotions like this? The GPU maker today introduced the 3dfx Voodoo 590, saying "a group of ex-3dfx veterans at Nvidia have been leading a secret double life...working on a revolutionary graphics card based on 3dfx technology." If you're an old school PC gamer, you're thinking this is too good to be true, right? Sadly, you're correct. Today is April 1, 2011, otherwise known as April Fool's Day, and in the technology industry, that means you need to be on the lookout for goofy press releases and bogus announcements. This is one of them, no matter how much we wish it were true, but let's play along for a moment anyway. "We named it the 590 because it matches...
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In a surprising turn of events, NVIDIA-built graphics cards have begun popping up at Best Buy stores across the nation. This is decidedly odd for a company that's made billions of dollars designing GPU products while leveraging board partners to bear the cost of manufacturing and marketing them, but NVIDIA confirmed that this new Best Buy partnership is a new direction for the company. "NVIDIA and Best Buy are working together to offer PC customers the opportunity to experience firsthand the latest in PC technologies right inside Best Buy stores," a company representative said. "As part of this broad initiative, NVIDIA is supplying to Best Buy specific GeForce models built and supported by NVIDIA....
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NVIDIA's Chief Executive Jen-Hsun Huang has been in federal bankruptcy court for the last few days defending his company's move to buy one-time rival 3dfx. During his testimony, Jen-Hsun has made some interesting statements regarding his motivation for the acquisition, including his thoughts on 3dfx's engineers. "He said he'd been very interested in snaffling up the engineering expertise. "That was my primary interest all along," he confessed. To this end he said he decided to ensure 3Dfx paid off its creditors so that those involved in the graphics chip maker could, "wind down their company in a graceful way." He hoped such goodwill...
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For anyone out there still running a 3dfx board and looking for a modern driver, it seems that good fortune is smiling down upon you today. "First of all, it is nearly incredible that enthusiast community managed to support an operating system which was still in the works. Secondly - it is incredible that drivers that support both 32- and 64-bit Windows have just came out." No Vista drivers...yet....
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The post is not in english, the hardware was never sold at retail, and the company who designed it as long been deceased, but it's still cool to see someone modding a Voodoo5 6000. Seems like the modder didn't have that much success, however. He only hit 183MHz core and memory clocks (they ran syncronously back then). My bet is he was held back by the RAM. :) "Every heatsink is linked to fan control: so it's possible to modulate power voltage of each fan and to raise rotation speed if thermal conditions require it. Author used copper heatsinks by Thermaltake for each ram chip (look this photo)."...
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OK folks! Listen up! We've got some great new breaking news for you here! Today we had a little chat with Brian Burke PR-SupaFly-Man of 3dfx! Check it... Thanks for taking time out of your busy schedule to speak with the us. We'll let you get back to more critical tasks ASAP. We Voodoo 3 Freaks wouldn't want to take you off the product launch of the V3-3500 board for too long. Uh... Brian... can you stop the Wide Screen-Quake 3-Frag Fest for a minute???? Put down the Twinkies too! (man... it must be tough...) Just kidding Bri! :-) (I'd better back off here...) -Dave -- Anyway, a few weeks back we got a glimpse of an early version of the Voodoo3-3500 board at the E3 show. Needless...
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The VSA-100 - Voodoo4 & 5 Dispelling The Myth A discussion with 3dfx Interactive Thanks for stopping by folks. Tonight, we decided to have a little chat with our friends at 3dfx Interactive, Brian Burke P.R. Manager and Peter Wicher, Director of Product Marketing. It seems there has been some fairly serious debate around the net and in the industry about the architecture of 3dfx's next generation technology. Some believe that the next step for the Voodoo platform is not much more than an increase in clock speed with a few extra bells and whistles. We decided it was high time to get to the bottom of this debate and get some direct feedback from the people who are really...
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Setting Standards In 3D Graphics THE Technology Summit Report! - July 30, 1999 So how is that for fan fare?! The good folks at 3dfx invited us to their Super-Top-Secret Technology Summit on Tuesday, July 27th. Several Webmasters and Technical Writers from various web sites were invited down to this exclusive little party inside the ultra cool confines of 3dfx Headquarters in San Jose California. A big thanks go out to our gracious hosts Scott Sellers - Chief Technical Officer, Marla Kertzman- Direcfor of Public Relations and our good buddy Brian Burke - Public Relations Manager! Since I was in the process of moving Hot Hardware Headquarters to our new home base location, our on the scene...
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Setting Standards In 3D Graphics THE Technology Summit Report! - July 30, 1999 Roadmaps and Miles Stones - The history and future of 3dfx Once upon a time, this little spin off / start-up out of Silicon Graphics, invented a great new 3D only graphics chip called Voodoo. -Yesterday Without getting into too much fairy tale talk, lets just say that Voodoo1's revolutionary RGBA Rendering and Frame Buffer along with its Real-Time Perspective Correct Texture Mapping, amazed PC Gaming enthusiasts from all walks of life. Never before had we seen the PC able to render scenes the likes of which only consoles could produce. All these great graphics with the functionality, complexity...
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Setting Standards In 3D Graphics THE Technology Summit Report! - July 30, 1999 Hooray For Hollywood! No this isn't a Broadway show, this is the real deal. Or perhaps, depending on your perspective, the digitally animated artificial deal! :-) Regardless, 3dfx will bring to your PC these new features which will take your experience to more much realistic levels. Motion Blur Otherwise known as Temporal Anti-Aliasing, Motion Blur gives the user a sense of speed and movement. Images will move smoothly in transition from one frame to the next. The "T Buffer" will take multiple samples of a scene or an object in a scene, at various points in time, to bring in this effect. An...
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Setting Standards In 3D Graphics THE Technology Summit Report! - July 30, 1999 Soft Shadows and Reflections Let's face it, the shadows that are drawn in today's games via today's hardware, are a little lame. Nowhere in nature does any object cast a shadow that is perfectly symmetrical, sharp or even squared off and boxy. Today's PC 3D Graphics Cards draw a very unnatural shadow and similarly unnatural reflections. Reflections and shadows bend slightly and warp depending on where the source lighting is coming from, in the event of a shadow or what the angle of the object versus what is casting a reflection of it, in the event of a reflection. This effect is currently achievable with...
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3dfx Selling Core Graphics Assets To nVidia Corp. One step closer to complete domination, nVidia moves to assimilate the competition NVIDIA To acquire 3dfx core graphics assets SANTA CLARA, CA - DECEMBER 15, 2000 - NVIDIA® Corporation (Nasdaq: NVDA) today announced that it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire certain graphics related assets of 3dfx Interactive (Nasdaq: TDFX), a pioneer and a recognized leader in graphics technology. These graphics related assets include, but are not limited to, patents, pending patent applications, trademarks, brand names, and chip inventory related to the graphics business of 3dfx. In addition, 3dfx and NVIDIA have agreed to stay the patent infringement...
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The 3dfx/STB Voodoo3 3000 Hey... Do you see that? What synergy we have here! These colors look great on us! Hot Hardware and Voodoo3. Black and Orange, an unlikely combination but oh sooo pretty! :-) We were one of the lucky few sites that got first dibs on a the first retail run of Voodoo3 3000 boards. I would like to thank Brian Burke at STB/3dfx and Megan Prest for keeping us on "the short list". You are the best! First let's give you some background on our approach to this review. We feel these are some of the most exciting times ever for the Computer and Gaming Industry. New products...
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The 3dfx Voodoo3-3000 PCI Leading Edge Technology For The Trailing Edge User As we all know with any business, you go where the market is. The old adage, "if you build it, they will come" works only in the movies. Not long ago the PC platform standardized on the next generation PC Graphics Bus Interface, known as AGP. The promise of increased bandwidth and performance was ushered in along with yet another variation in motherboard expansion slots. As a result, many users who had just purchased a pre-built PC with on board graphics, may have been left out in the cold. In addition, many of the new PCs being released still came equipped with on...
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The 3dfx Voodoo5 5500 PCI 3D Graphics for a legacy system adds leading edge performance By Dave "Davo" Altavilla 8/4/00 These days technology moves so fast that there is almost as much of an available market opportunity supporting older platforms, as there is producing for the "bleeding edge" market segment. PCI is an interface that has been in the PC architecture for years, as well as in the embedded space. You can also bet your last buck that it will remain in the PC for many more years to come. It is only fairly recently that AGP became the mainstream bus interface for 2D/3D Graphics cards. There are still plenty of folks out there with out an AGP...
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The 3dfx Voodoo 5 Incarnate Up close and personal with 3dfx's next generation product By Dave "Davo" Altavilla and Marco "BigWop" Chiappetta 4/4/00 We packed our gear... Digicam, Notebooks, Laptop, Breath Spray, Cheeze Wiz, Rolaids... all the stuff that a good journalist should come prepared with to any important Tech Conference. We were headed to the Big Apple, New York City. This was a "Power Meeting" and we were ready. We met down town at the Intercontinental. The guys from 3dfx travel in style. Marco kept trying to tip the Doorman but the Cheeze Wiz wasn't going over too well. Room 623, we knocked on the door. ...
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