3dfx Interactive, Inc. was an American computer hardware company headquartered in San Jose, California, founded in 1994, that specialized in the manufacturing of 3D graphics processing units, and later, video cards.

[2] The company was founded on August 24, 1994, as 3D/fx, Inc.[1] Ross Smith, Gary Tarolli and Scott Sellers, all former employees of Silicon Graphics Inc.

The chip is a VGA 3D accelerator that features rendering methods such as point-sampled texture mapping, Z- and double buffering, Gouraud shading, subpixel correction, alpha compositing, and anti-aliasing.

[6] The company stated that Glide's creation was because it found that no existing APIs at the time could fully utilize the chip's capabilities.

The first arcade machine that 3dfx Voodoo Graphics hardware was used in was a 1996 baseball game featuring a bat controller with motion sensing technology called ICE Home Run Derby.

The MiniGL translated OpenGL commands into Glide, and gave 3dfx the advantage as the sole consumer chip company to deliver a functional graphics library driver until 1998.

[11] Towards the end of 1995, the cost of DRAM dropped significantly and 3dfx was able to enter the consumer PC hardware market with aggressive pricing compared to the few previous 3D graphics solutions for computers.

PowerVR produced a similar 3D-only add-on card with capable 3D support, although it was not comparable to Voodoo Graphics in either image quality or performance.

While these cards, such as the Nvidia NV1, Matrox Mystique, S3 ViRGE, Vérité V1000, and ATI 3D Rage, offered inferior 3D acceleration in terms of image quality, performance, or both, their lower cost and simplicity often appealed to OEM system builders.

[21] Sega chose to use NEC's PowerVR chipset for its game console,[22] though it still planned to purchase the rights to 3dfx's technology in order to prevent competitors from acquiring it.

According to Dale Ford, senior analyst at Dataquest, a market research firm based in San Jose, California, a number of factors could have influenced Sega's decision to move to NEC, including NEC's proven track record of supplying chipsets for the Nintendo 64 and the demonstrated ability to be able to handle a major influx of capacity if the company decided to ramp up production on a moment's notice.

[citation needed] "This is a highly competitive market with price wars happening all the time and it would appear that after evaluating a number of choices—and the ramifications each choice brings—Sega went with a decision that it thought was best for the company's longevity," said Mr.

"[citation needed] Sega quickly quashed 3dfx's "Blackbelt" and used the NEC-based "Katana" as the model for the product that would be marketed and sold as the Dreamcast.

The company hired hardware and software teams in Austin, Texas to develop 2D and 3D Windows device drivers for Rampage in the summer of 1998.

The hardware team in Austin initially focused on Rampage, but then worked on transform and lighting (T&L) engines and on MPEG decoder technology.

The Nvidia RIVA TNT was a similar, highly integrated product that had two major advantages in greater 3D speed and 32-bit 3D color support.

Prior to the STB merger finalizing, some of 3dfx's OEMs warned the company that any product from Juarez will not be deemed fit to ship with their systems, however 3dfx management believed these problems could be addressed over time.

[citation needed] The acquisition of STB was one of the main contributors to 3dfx's downfall; the Voodoo 3 became the first 3dfx card to be developed in-house rather than by third-party manufacturers, which were a significant source of revenue for the company.

3dfx, as a whole, would have had virtually no chance of successfully contesting these proceedings, and instead opted to sell its assets to Nvidia, effectively ceasing to exist as a company.

Others accepted employment with ATI to bring their knowledge to the creation of the X series of video cards and the development of Crossfire, their own version of SLI.

Many games were transitioning to Direct3D at this point, and the announcement caused many PC gamers – the core demographic of 3dfx's market – to switch to Nvidia or ATI offerings for their new machines.

[48] A typical Voodoo Graphics PCI expansion card consisted of a DAC, a frame buffer processor and a texture mapping unit, along with 4 MB of EDO DRAM.

The method used to engage the Voodoo's output circuitry varied between cards, with some using mechanical relays while others utilized purely solid-state components.

Like the Voodoo Graphics, there was no interrupt mechanism, so the driver had to poll the Rush in order to determine whether a command had completed or not; the indirection through the 2D component added significant overhead here and tended to back up traffic on the PCI interface.

Later, Rush boards were released by Hercules featuring 8 MiB VRAM and a 10% higher clock speed, in an attempt to close this performance gap.

Despite some shortcomings, such as the card's dithered 16-bit 3D color rendering and 800x600 resolution limitations, no other manufacturers' products could match the smooth framerates that the Voodoo2 produced.

[55][58][59][60] Near the end of 1998, 3dfx released the Voodoo Banshee, which featured a lower price achieved through higher component integration, and a more complete feature-set including 2D acceleration, to target the mainstream consumer market.

However, in scenes dominated by single-textured polygons, the Banshee could match or exceed the Voodoo2 due to its higher clock speed and resulting greater pixel fillrate.

The GeForce was a single-chip processor with integrated transform, lighting, triangle setup/clipping (hardware T&L), and rendering engines, giving it a significant performance advantage over the Voodoo3.

[66] As game developers switched to DirectX and OpenGL, which respectively had become the industry standard and were becoming increasingly popular, 3dfx released its Glide API under the General Public License on December 6, 1999.