3Dlabs was formed from a management buy-out of DuPont Pixel Systems in the UK in April 1994 and went public on Nasdaq in October 1996.

In February 2006, 3Dlabs announced that it would stop developing professional 3D graphics chips and focus on embedded and mobile media processors.

The new media processor business was developed out of the original UK R&D center with most of the workstation graphics teams that came from Intense3D and Dynamic Pictures having been hired by Intel and NVIDIA.

It claimed the new company was to offer processors and complete market-ready hardware and software platforms to consumer OEMs and ODMs.

The ZMS processors are based on a low-power multicore architecture including dual ARM cores for handling traditional CPU tasks plus a closely coupled, fully programmable SIMD array processor to do the heavy lifting for intensive media processing tasks such as; 2D graphics, 3D graphics, video decode/encode, image processing and floating point (32-bit IEEE).