Items tagged with 3dfx
Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you know that 3dfx has been making headlines for the past week. Although it seems likely that the whole exercise is one big publicity stunt, we have even more enticing 3dfx news for you today that is definitely more in the realm of reality. Earlier this year, we brought you a faithfully re-engineered Voodoo 5 6000 graphics card constructed with a custom PCB and four functional original 3dfx VSA-100 chips. Today, Its creator, who goes by the name Anthony, is at again with a follow-up to his original design, and it looks simply gorgeous. This latest example features a redesigned PCB that is now colored in a Stormtrooper-esque white. According to...
Read more...
Believe it or not, the 3dfx Interactive account on Twitter that has created some buzz over a supposed comeback made its promised announcement today, and we have not been Rick Rolled! However, we might as well have been. The punchline to what we're 99.999 percent sure is a joke (who are we kidding, let's make it 100 percent) fell flat with what looks to be a fake a presentation. It appears whoever is behind this account wants to keep the gag going, rather than offer up one final tip of the hat to the iconic company that helped pioneer 3D graphics acceleration. My first ever dedicated graphics card was a Voodoo product, and like many old school geeks, I have a fond appreciation of the 3dfx brand....
Read more...
Will they or won't they? That's the big question surrounding 3dfx, which over that past week burst back onto the scene via a suspect Twitter account. Interest first sparked via a tweet over the weekend, which claimed that 3dfx would make a return this Thursday after a 20-year absence. Yesterday, Falcon Northwest got in on the action, showing one of its PC gaming rigs with a power brick from a 3dfx Voodoo 5 6000 in the foreground. Today, the "official" 3dfx Interactive Twitter account is whetting our appetites again with a statement on its return. "Jansen Products is proud to announce that 3dfx is returning after 20 years," the statement reads. "[Jansen Products] acquired the assets of 3dfx Interactive...
Read more...
In all likelihood, someone with a bit of free time on their hands is trolling by teasing a 3dfx comeback story, with an announcement supposedly right on the horizon. And I am totally fine with that, honestly—3dfx is such a legendary brand that I welcome the nostalgic reminder of an earlier era. It is fitting, then, that the legendary PC builders at Falcon Northwest, an OG boutique that is still going strong, is getting in on the fun with a Twitter post of its own. For those who need catching up on the situation, a new Twitter account called @3dfxofficial recently popped up, and purports to be "the official Twitter handle for 3dfx." It has amassed several thousand followers in a matter of...
Read more...
While it may not have been the first 3D accelerator to market, the 3dfx (then, 3Dfx) Voodoo Graphics PCI was the add-in card that kickstarted the 3D gaming revolution. The company made its name on Voodoo graphics, but ultimately could not weather the storm of speedy cards that could process both 2D and 3D graphics. Eventually acquired by NVIDIA in late 2000 as an escape from bankruptcy proceedings, it was thought that the company and its intellectual property would never resurface in any sort of consumer-facing way. That is, until a mysterious Twitter account appeared this week, perhaps. A Twitter account masquerading as @3dfxofficial, which joined the social networking service this week, has...
Read more...
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...
Read more...
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)....
Read more...
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...
Read more...
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...
Read more...
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...
Read more...
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,...
Read more...
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...
Read more...
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....
Read more...
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...
Read more...
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....
Read more...
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)."...
Read more...
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...
Read more...
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...
Read more...
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...
Read more...
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...
Read more...
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...
Read more...
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...
Read more...
