For most older generation gamers, I believe they will be filled with emotion when talking about 3dfx. It is this company that truly brings our vision into the 3D world. It is a shining example of 3D acceleration equipment in the PC field. A major significance of this revolution led by the launch of Voodoo is that the PC has become the same as arcade machines. It has almost the same level of 3D processing capabilities, pioneering 3D processing technology in the PC industry. In fact, 3dfx is not the pioneer of the 3D graphics card era, it is just a latecomer.
The first generation of 3D graphics cards should be represented by S3 VIRGE and ATI 3D RAGE. The former has a slight advantage in overall performance, while the latter provides light source processing capabilities and was the most comprehensive 3D performance graphics card at the time. . S3 later launched Virge/DX, which greatly improved its 3D performance, but was weaker than S3 Trio64V2/DX in terms of high-end flat graphics. During this period, Matrox's MGA series began to make its debut.
Despite its high price, MGA's 3D performance is indeed excellent, but it is still not comprehensive compared with S3 Virge and ATI 3D RAGE. Trident 9685 is another style that integrates TV video processing on a single-chip graphics card, provides video output, is excellent in soft decompression, and has average 3D performance. IGS CyperPRO2000 integrates TV video processing and encoding chips, with performance similar to S3Trio 64V+. 3D Labs Permedia 64 performs well in 3D, but its 2D performance is low and not comprehensive enough.
The same STG is also the same specialized 3D chip, with wavetable sound effects on the graphics card. The last two graphics cards are actual 3D game cards. Although the 3D performance of graphics cards has not yet become the focus of attention at this stage, and the comprehensiveness and compatibility of graphics cards have clearly prevailed, all these entry-level 3D graphics cards have laid the foundation for the 3D wave that will soon sweep the world.
Slowly, the concept of multimedia is becoming more and more popular, and people's requirements for game graphics are no longer limited to the 2D level, especially when a number of "quasi-3D" games (such as Tomb Raider) Movies, Need for Speed, Quake) appeared, people were deeply attracted by some unprecedented 3D special effects! Graphics chip manufacturers seem to have discovered this field full of unlimited business opportunities.
Scott Sellers from SGI, Gary Tarolli and Ross Smith from Mediavision co-founded 3dfx in March 1994 with $5.5 million in venture capital. After the unremitting efforts of the three founders of 3dfx - Scott Sellers, Gary Tarolli and Ross Smith, 3dfx released its first generation, epoch-making graphics card - Voodoo in November 1995, also entering the 3D era.
I believe how important the Voodoo graphics card is in the hearts of every DIYer. This was the most powerful 3D graphics card in 1996, supporting hardware fogging; Specular Hilight, Color-Key-Transparency; Alpha Transparency, Bi-Linear filtering, Tri-Linear filtering, MIPMAP Linear ), Dithering, Perspective Correction, Animated texturing, Anti-alasing, Gouraud modulation, Sub-pixel correction and other epoch-making The 3D effect makes us feel the advent of the 3D era for the first time.
At that time, Voodoo used a very large capacity 4MB EDO memory, and the core chip worked at 50/55Mhz, making the pixel fill rate reach 45M/s. Although this speed is meaningless now, But at the time, this was the most powerful feature. In addition to outstanding hardware performance, software technology also plays an important role in Voodoo's success.
Voodoo supports all major 3D interface programs, including Glide, D3D and OpenGL. Glide is its dedicated 3D API, which not only has excellent performance, but also is extremely easy to use. Before D3D was widely accepted, 3dfx relied on this interface program and free licensing to defeat various competitors and win the favor of software manufacturers. Glide was recognized as the best 3D interface program at the time, especially its ease of use and stability, which were the favorite things among programmers; Voodoo was optimized for D3D when it was designed, and many people had no understanding of D3D. It all started with it, but after reaching DirectX 5.0, Voodoo's performance has been completely squeezed out. However, strong support for OpenGL is Voodoo's magic weapon to win.
However, in order to avoid head-to-head confrontation with established players such as Matrox, ATi, S3, etc., 3dfx decided to present its products in the form of add-on daughter cards (which need to be combined with other 2D graphics cards to work). Even so Voodoo The cost of the daughter card was more than twice that of the most expensive graphics card at the time. However, fortunately, memory prices plummeted at that time (1996), which made the previously high-priced Voodoo graphics card much more acceptable. With Diamond's strong support at the time, the first graphics card with Voodoo as the 3D core - Diamond Monster 3D was launched just like that.
At the same time, 3dfx also introduced a unique 3D API—Glide, establishing 3dfx as the king of 3D acceleration. Eidos' "Tomb Raider" first adopted this API. It was precisely because of the success of "Tomb Raider" that 3dfx became the best 3D graphics card at the time. Later, 3dfx was supported by Quake, and now Voodoo was out of control and became the true king of graphics cards at the time. Game industry leaders such as EA (Electronic Arts) were attracted by Voodoo's powerful functions and the temptation of Glide's free license, further consolidating 3dfx's position.
Although Voodoo has made 3dfx, a newcomer in the field of graphics cards, a huge success, 3dfx has also seen that it cannot monopolize the graphics card market with just a pure 3D accelerator daughter card. Integrating 2D/3D is the future of graphics cards. The direction of development, so Voodoo Rush was launched. If you look at purely technical indicators, Voodoo Rush is definitely better than Voodoo.
Because it not only had the best 3D performance at the time, and was equipped with 6MB (4MB 3D, 2MB 2D) or 4M (2MB 3D, 2MB 2D) video memory, but also integrated Alliance's AT3D graphics chip. Provides 2D functions so that it can work alone without the cooperation of a 2D daughter card. This provides the functions of hardware MPEG-I decoding, software MPEG 2 decoding and TV-OUT output. However, although Voodoo and Voodoo Rush both use 3DFX's own chips, Rush must integrate the 2D chip and the 3D chip. Therefore, its control chip must be modified to drive 2D and 3D functions.
However, the integration between Alliance AT3D and Voodoo chips does not seem to be very good, resulting in mediocre 2D display performance, while the 3D part has compatibility issues with some software. This is because the Rush control chip is in a certain Some modifications have been made to these instructions in order to be compatible with 2D chips. As a result, some games that support 3dfx graphics cards can run normally on Voodoo, but may not be compatible on Voodoo Rush. Therefore, Voodoo Rush ended hastily after a short-lived appearance.
After 3dfx released Voodoo, many display chip manufacturers saw the vitality of the future 3D market. Soon S3, Trident, 3Dlabs, Number Nine, Matrox, Cirrus Logic, nVIDIA, ATi and other companies successively released their respective 3D display chips. Everyone wants to get a piece of this wonderful 3D world. In order to maintain its leading edge, 3dfx launched its second-generation product-Voodoo 2 in November 1997. For its time, Voodoo 2 was still an incredible piece of hardware.
The working frequency of the Voodoo 2 graphics card reached 90Mhz (the filling rate reached 90M/s, twice that of Voodoo). Although it was not as high as the TNT later launched by NVIDIA, it was still outstanding at the time. In addition, the operating frequency of its RAMDAC is 135Mhz, which was also very good at the time. The "single cycle dual texture" technology and "SLI (staggered interconnection)" technology that it first proposed made Voodoo 2 a qualitative leap in performance compared with the previous two generations of products.
The Voodoo 2 graphics card has three display chips, one is the 3dfx 500-0009 chip responsible for pixel processing, and two 500-0010 chips are responsible for the material. Finally, it is composed of a main chip. Control chip to coordinate the work of these three chips. This design has one advantage: it can make up for many shortcomings of the core when the core efficiency was low at the time. At that time, the FPS game Quake 2 was popular all over the world. Voodoo 2 became the speed king of 3D games with its "single cycle dual texture" technology, and became the standard configuration of FPS games at that time.
Before nVidia released Riva TNT, there was no graphics chip that could compete with Voodoo 2, and 3dfx ushered in its peak moment! Products from other manufacturers were eclipsed by Voodoo 2. In the words of the media at the time, Voodoo 2 was simply in a desperate situation!
At that time, Pentium 2 plus Voodoo 2 was a dream configuration that many gamers dreamed of. If you feel that such 3D acceleration is not enough, you can add another one and run it in SLI mode to have double the 3D performance. The features of Voodoo 2 are basically similar to its predecessor Voodoo, but it also provides Z buffering also has anti-aliasing capabilities. However, Voodoo 2 still cannot get rid of the same shortcomings of Voodoo - Voodoo 2 is still just a daughter card and requires the support of a 2D card to implement 3D functions.
Although 3dfx failed to launch its first-generation graphics card Voodoo Rush, 3DFX did not give up the idea. After launching Voodoo 2, 3DFX released its second-generation display chip integrating 2D/3D engines—Voodoo Banshee (the famous Voodoo Banshee). Like Rush, it integrates a 2D/3D engine, supports up to 16MB of video memory, a core frequency of 100MHz, a memory frequency of 125MHz, and a RAMDAC frequency of up to 250Mhz. 3DFX reduces the two rendering pipelines of the Voodoo 2 graphics card to one.
So although Banshee surpasses Voodoo 2 in terms of indicators (fill rate reaches 100M/s, triangle generation rate of 3 million per second, Voodoo 2 is 1.8 million per second, but due to the reduction of The rendering pipeline reduced Banshee's performance in games. However, due to the built-in 2D engine and good overclocking capabilities, Banshee finally achieved good results in the market. With Voodoo 2 and Voodoo Banshee, 3dfx once again proved to the world. At this time, nVIDIA announced its revolutionary product TNT, which had a filling rate of 180M pixels/second and supported 32-bit image rendering. It gained certain recognition in the market with its excellent performance! NVIDIA has released a new generation graphics processing chip - TNT2, which has more powerful functions and supports more special effects. It has the potential to replace 3dfx's dominance in the field of graphics chips.
But 3dfx does not seem to pay enough attention to nVIDIA.
Because it felt that if it did not own a graphics card production line, it would be restricted by graphics card manufacturers from time to time, 3dfx acquired the famous graphics card manufacturer STB in early 1999, and since then began a self-produced and self-sold development route. More than half a year after TNT2 was released, 3dfx released its third-generation product, Voodoo 3, and Voodoo 3 was also the first product of the STB factory. However, although it was released later than nVIDIA's TNT 2, Voodoo 3 did not bring new breakthroughs in terms of technology and support for special effects—it can generally be regarded as a combination of Voodoo 2+Banshee.
The Voodoo 3 core uses 0.25 micron technology and a 128-bit data channel design, supporting the video memory capacity to 32MB for the first time (but all products are basically 16MB). However, Voodoo 3 adds the feature of material compression for the first time, so that better results can be obtained in scenes with large texture maps. However, since it does not support the DIME process of AGP, the effect of material compression is not great.
First of all, Voodoo 3 has two models, Voodoo 3 2000 and Voodoo 3 3000. The difference between the two is only the working frequency (the RAMDAC is also different, the former is 300Mhz and the latter is 350Mhz.) , the working frequency of 2000 is 143Mhz, while the 3000 is 166Mhz, and according to some unofficial channels, the core of Voodoo 3 2000 and Voodoo 3 3000 is the same. Voodoo 3 3000 is an overclocked version, so it covers large heatsink, and has very little overclocking capability.
Voodoo 3 2000 is different. By improving the heat dissipation of the graphics card, Voodoo 3 2000 can easily work at the frequency of Voodoo 3 3000. Therefore, the sales volume of Voodoo 3 2000 on the market is much higher than that of Voodoo. 3 3000. Of course, in addition to the price factor, overclockability is also an important factor.
Soon 3dfx launched Voodoo 3 3500. Voodoo 3 3500 is a multi-function graphics card that has a TV receiver that can provide video reception and output functions, and this TV tuner is also the first product to use a single-chip design. If compared with TNT2, Voodoo 3's biggest shortcomings are that it does not support 32-bit rendering, does not support large texture maps, and does not support direct memory calls. This also makes 3DFX technically lag behind its opponents for the first time.
This is not the most fatal, but the biggest mistake is 3dfx’s market strategy. The arrogant 3DFX believed that it owned a graphics card production factory. Even though DirectX almost dominated the world, it still insisted on not opening up the source code of Glide, causing its former allies to switch to nVIDIA. Coupled with the insufficient production capacity of STB, The market for 3DFX has shrunk sharply.
nVidia subsequently released the GeForce 256, which dealt a fatal blow to 3DFX—GeForce 256 adopted a newly designed architecture and was the first display chip to support hardware geometry and light and shadow (T&L) conversion. nVidia It was also at this time that the concept of GPU was introduced. At this time, 3dfx finally woke up and began to take corresponding countermeasures, such as opening the license for the Voodoo 3 2000 graphics card, and preparing to launch the Voodoo 3 4000 with 32-bit color and 4X AGP support, but it was too late, and Voodoo 3 4000 also stays on paper forever. Faced with the increasing pressure from NVIDIA, 3dfx had to launch a newer generation of products. After several delays, 3dfx finally launched its fourth-generation product—Voodoo 4 4500. At this time, 3dfx introduced its original VSA-100 architecture for the first time. The full name of VSA is: Voodoo Scalable Architecture, which means the scalable Voodoo architecture. This architecture allows for more flexible graphics card design. Its architecture supports up to 32 cores for co-processing at the same time.
The VSA-100 chip uses a 0.25 micron manufacturing process, inherits 1.4 million transistors, has a built-in 350MHz RAMDAC, operates at a frequency of 166MHz, and supports up to 64MB of video memory. VSA-100 finally brings 3DFX into the ranks of 32-bit rendering. It supports advanced T-Buffer function (but it must have a paired chip to achieve), and Depth of Field Blur, Soft Shadows ), soft reflections (Soft Reflections) and other special effects.
Since the market positioning of Voodoo 4 4500 is for the mid-to-low-end graphics card market, it adopts a more cost-effective single VSA-100 chip solution, so it does not support the T-Buffer function and low fill rate. Not a match for TNT 2. Therefore, the Voodoo 4 4500 disappeared from the market after a short period of time. (Note: Voodoo 4 4500 has three different versions of 32MB, 16MB and 8MB video memory.)
In response to the shortcomings of Voodoo 4 4500, 3dfx soon released Voodoo 5 5000 using two VSA-100 chips. Equipped with two VSA-100 chips, Voodoo 5 5000 can achieve twice the frame rate and T-Buffer of Voodoo 4 4500, and adopts a PCI interface design, which is still very marketable in workstations. However, Voodoo 5 5000 consumes a lot of power and requires an external power supply to operate normally. It also only supports 32MB of video memory, which is also a shortcoming of Voodoo 5 5000 (because the two VSA-100s can only use 16MB of video memory capacity each).
Subsequently, 3dfx released Voodoo 5 5500 with 64MB of video memory. This product is not very different from the Voodoo 5 5000 in terms of technology. It still uses the VSA-100 architecture. The difference is that it uses 64MB of video memory and uses AGP as the bus interface. The performance of Voodoo 5 5500 has been improved due to the use of AGP interface and larger video memory. In the early stage of its launch, Voodoo 5 5500 still achieved certain market results. However, the production capacity of the STB factory in 2000 was very low and was far from meeting market demand. Therefore, in the end, it could not change the final fate of 3dfx.
According to the original plan, 3dfx will also launch a Voodoo 5 6000 product to the market. Voodoo 5 6000 uses up to 4 VSA-100 chips, equipped with 128MB SDRAM memory at 183 MHz, with a fill rate of 1.33-1.47 gigapixels/second, and also requires an external power supply. In terms of performance, Voodoo 5 6000 supports a better T-buffer function and supports a record-breaking 8x anti-aliasing function. However, due to the complex design, the production cost remains high (the selling price at the time was expected to be around US$600), and Due to component shortages and 3dfx's financial reasons, this monster graphics card was not released after several delays. Due to the poor performance of Voodoo 4 and the high price of Voodoo 5, the support rate of 3DFX has dropped sharply. By 2000, nVIDIA's wings were full, and 3dfx was unable to stop nVIDIA's progress. Faced with this unfavorable situation, 3DFX placed all its hopes on Microsoft - preparing to acquire Gigapixel Company for US$180 million, hoping to obtain orders for graphics chips for Microsoft's upcoming XBOX.
However, Microsoft finally chose to cooperate with nVIDIA and successfully released XBOX. 3DFX's stock fell again, and the planned RamPage was also shelved indefinitely! The lifeless 3dfx was eventually acquired by NVIDIA for a low price of only US$100 million, and the acquired 3dfx company will be dissolved. Its brand will no longer be retained in the future, and its intellectual property rights will be fully acquired (so NVIDIA developed its own API technology ), so far 3dfx company has come to an end! Since then, a legendary display chip manufacturer has only remained in the minds of many hardware enthusiasts! 3dfx reborn - Voodoo 590 (April Fool’s Day joke on April 1, domestic novices should not believe it)
On April 1, 2011, NVIDIA suddenly dropped a bombshell and announced that it would be based on Voodoo The new card "Voodoo 590" based on the same architecture has an astonishing 233 cores and is "absurdly powerful."
NVIDIA stated that in the more than ten years since 3dfx was acquired, there has actually been a team of former 3dfx experts living a secret life within NVIDIA. During the day, they are NVIDIA employees, designing, manufacturing, and promoting GeForce. Graphics card, I spent my free time developing a revolutionary graphics card based on 3dfx technology with the company's tacit approval. After a decade of living double lives, they are finally ready to show the world what they have made.
Gary Tarolli, one of the founders and chief scientists of 3dfx, who is still at NVIDIA, said: "We never intend to give up. Voodoo technology has endless potential. The world has never realized its true potential. Strength."
He then showed off the "Voodoo 590" and explained: "We named it 590 because it is comparable to the GeForce GTX 590 in terms of fill rate, which is a key metric for graphics performance. Both cards can fill 77.7 million pixels per second. The only difference is that the Voodoo 590 is built using 3dfx technology from ten years ago. This ancient architecture extends to the same height as the NVIDIA Fermi architecture. How advanced!”
From the architectural diagram, Voodoo 590 integrates 233 VSA-100 chips (3dfx’s last work, Voodoo 5 5500, only had two), and the core frequency is still 166MHz. Both have two pixel pipelines, and the entire card is equipped with 7456MB of embedded SDRAM memory, 32MB per core, and a Tile Distributor.
In terms of technology, the card does not have T&L, Shader and other useless things, and fully supports Glide API, 3dfx T-Buffer cache, 466x RGSS rotating grid super sampling anti-aliasing and patented one-way single loop Multiple textures.
It even introduces a new SLI mechanism, which allows two or even four cards to be connected in parallel, which means it has 932 VSA-100 cores at the same time, but the technical details are kept confidential for the time being.
Tony Tamasi, the former 3dfx product marketing director, also revealed that in fact, Voodoo 590 also introduced some NVIDIA technologies. For example, the cooling solution was derived from NV30 and was appropriately expanded, but no one was willing to discuss the power consumption. explain.
Tarolli declared: "There are many ways to implement programmable shaders. T-Buffer technology can achieve CGI-level depth of field, dynamic blur and anti-aliasing, and only requires enough sampling. Voodoo 590 has 233 With one VSA-100 core, there are 466 samples, and the final graphics quality is enough to surpass Pixar animation.”