Back in the the mid to late 1990s, if you wanted really good 3D acceleration for your games, there was one brand to look out for. That brand was 3DFX, but curiously, your first 3DFX product wasn't built by the company itself.
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Where did the Voodoo begin?
Zombies. Mystic sacrifice rituals. A merging of Roman Catholicism and West African mythology. All of these things have absolutely nothing to do with 3DFX's Voodoo.
3DFX's original mission with Voodoo was arcade machine graphics, but by 1996 the dropping cost of memory chip production made it feasible to offer up the design and references to external companies to produce the first PC-compatible Voodoo cards.
The original Voodoo chipset was offered in standalone PCI cards which weren't manufactured by 3DFX, and which had no 2D graphics grunt at all. They were simply add-on cards to enable better 3D graphics processing than was available at the time.
The later Voodoo Rush chipset did combine 2D graphics onto a single board, to be followed up by the Voodoo 2 (which introduced the SLI concept to the market), Voodoo 3, Voodoo 4 and Voodoo 5. Originality in board naming has never been a cornerstone of the graphics market.
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The Diamond Monster 3D / 3DFx Voodoo 1: helped bring quality graphics to the PC mainstream. (Picture credit: Konstantin Lanzet http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:KL_Diamond_Monster3D_Voodoo_1.jpg)
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Early Voodoo based boards typically only used around 4MB of RAM. To give that some perspective, the generally lousy performance seen out of onboard Intel graphics solutions today supports up to 384MB of memory, sometimes shared with main memory. High end dedicated graphics cards today easily clock up 1GB of memory, 250 times more than the early Voodoo cards. We've come a long way, in other words.
Hang on. I'm sure I've got a 3DFX produced Voodoo in the spares bin somewhere...?
You quite possibly do. While the Voodoo chipset was offered out to other manufacturers originally, 3DFX had by the late 1990s gotten into the manufacturing business itself by purchasing STB, a company that up until that time had been closely tied with Nvidia's product lines.
Whatever happened to 3DFX?
The company floundered considerably after the STB acquisition and suffered in comparison to the products offered up by Nvidia and ATI, eventually going bankrupt in 2000. The assets of the company were purchased by Nvidia.
Why was it relevant?
3DFX's work in graphics cards informs a lot of what happens in graphics processing today. There's a reason, after all, that NVIDIA bought the company out rather than let it crash and burn, legal challenges notwithstanding. 3DFX brought great quality (for the time) 3D graphics to the PC mainstream as well as introducing the first SLI solutions to the marketplace and the original Voodoo card was where it all began.
What's it worth?
Graphics cards depreciate quickly even in the normal everyday market, with today's high speed wonders often an afterthought on next year's budget office machines. We found a pair of Creative Labs produced Voodoo II 12MB cards (technically SLI capable if you were keen) on eBay going (at the time of writing) for the princely sum of $15.50.
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