What made the first Voodoo card different in 1996?
3dfx Interactive started in 1994 in San Jose, California. Three engineers from Silicon Graphics, Ross Smith, Scott Sellers and Gary Tarolli, built the company with chip industry veteran Gordon Campbell, who backed them through his incubator TechFarm. All four told the story themselves in an oral history panel recorded at the Computer History Museum in 2013.
Their first product, Voodoo Graphics, reached buyers in late 1996 inside boards built by other companies, the best known being the Orchid Righteous 3D. The card did not replace the graphics card already in the PC. It sat next to it, with a passthrough cable carrying the 2D desktop from the old card to the monitor and handing control to the Voodoo only when a 3D game launched.
The arrangement was awkward. Two cards, an extra cable, and a relay that clicked audibly when a game took over. It also worked. A mid-1990s Pentium could not draw filtered, textured 3D at playable speed in software, and the Voodoo could, at 640x480 with smooth texture filtering instead of the blocky, shimmering surfaces software renderers produced. For anyone who saw both running side by side, the argument was over in about ten seconds.
Why did game studios write for Glide instead of OpenGL?
3dfx shipped its own programming interface, Glide, and gave it to developers at no cost. Glide was a thin layer over the Voodoo hardware rather than a general standard, which made it fast to learn and fast to run. Studios that had spent years hand-tuning software renderers could get a Glide path working in weeks.
The turning point was id Software. GLQuake, the accelerated build of Quake, ran on Voodoo hardware in 1997 with colored lighting and clean textures that the software version could not touch. Descent II, Jedi Knight, Unreal and Tomb Raider followed with Voodoo support, and a Glide logo on the box became a reason to buy the game.
The market followed the software. TechSpot's retrospective on the company puts 3dfx at 80 to 85 percent of the 3D accelerator market at the height of the Voodoo years, a share almost no consumer hardware company has held since. By 1998 the Voodoo2 and its dual-card Scan Line Interleave mode were standard equipment on the LAN party circuit, where a second card was the difference between winning and watching.
What did buying STB Systems cost 3dfx?
In December 1998, 3dfx agreed to buy STB Systems, a Texas board manufacturer, in a stock swap valued at about $141 million. The logic was control. Instead of selling chips to Diamond Multimedia, Creative Labs and the rest, 3dfx would build and sell finished Voodoo boards itself and keep the whole margin.
The cost showed up immediately. Every board partner that had been selling Voodoo cards was now a competitor, and those companies had somewhere else to go. Nvidia was signing them within months. 3dfx also inherited a factory and a foundry relationship that could not match the cost or the output of the contract manufacturers its rivals used.
The founders were blunt about it afterwards. In the 2013 Computer History Museum panel, Scott Sellers described the plan to own chips, boards and manufacturing at once as a strategy where "it really was a we're-going-to-do-it-all kind of strategy," and added that when the next generation slipped, "we ran out of time." Vertical integration multiplies profit for a market leader. It multiplies losses for everyone else.
How did Nvidia's GeForce 256 take the market?
Nvidia released the GeForce 256 in 1999 as a single card that handled 2D and 3D together, spoke Microsoft's Direct3D natively, and moved geometry work onto the chip. No passthrough cable, no proprietary interface, and boards available from a dozen manufacturers who no longer had a reason to love 3dfx.
3dfx answered with the Voodoo3 in 1999 and the Voodoo5 5500 in 2000, both late and both short on the features reviewers had started demanding. The Voodoo5 6000, the four-chip flagship, never shipped at all. Revenue collapsed while inventory sat unsold.
On December 15, 2000, the company gave up. It sold its graphics assets to Nvidia and told shareholders it would dissolve. "We have experienced a significant slowdown in demand for our products, especially the Voodoo 3 and Voodoo 5 boards," chief executive Alex Leupp said in the announcement reported by EE Times that month. The terms were $70 million in cash plus one million Nvidia shares, valued at roughly $112 million at the time, in exchange for the patents, pending applications, trademarks, brand names and chip inventory. The staff was let go the same week, and a bankruptcy filing followed in 2002.
Is 3dfx still in business in 2026?
No. 3dfx has not operated as a company since December 2000, and nothing carrying the 3dfx or Voodoo name has shipped since. Nvidia holds the patents, trademarks and brand names it bought in that sale and has never revived them, beyond reusing the SLI initials for its own multi-card setups. Claims of a 3dfx comeback surface online every few years and none has produced hardware.
What survives is the hardware and the people who maintain it. In August 2026, patches from developer Daniel Palmer were merged for the Linux 7.3 kernel that let the tdfxfb driver initialize Voodoo 3, 4 and 5 cards without the PC video BIOS ever running, as Phoronix reported. That matters on machines that have no PC BIOS at all: Palmer's test system was an Amiga 4000 with a PCI bridge. A card that stopped receiving vendor drivers in 2001 got new kernel support twenty-five years later.
"We expect that the combined technologies of 3dfx and NVIDIA will continue the legacy that 3dfx began in 1994," Leupp said in December 2000. He was right in the narrowest sense. Nvidia kept the patents, hired part of the engineering team, and now sells the chips that the Voodoo made a category. The brand itself went into a drawer and stayed there.
Where to find one today
Voodoo boards trade as collector hardware, and price depends almost entirely on which one it is. At the top, a Voodoo5 6000 prototype that never reached retail sold at auction for $15,000 in 2021, as Tom's Hardware reported. Common Voodoo2 and Voodoo3 cards sell for a small fraction of that, though working examples with the original box and cable command the most. Vintage PC hardware sellers list them on Etsy. If the goal is playing the games rather than owning the silicon, skip the hardware: the Glide era titles run fine on current machines, and the steps are in our guide to running 90s PC games on Windows 11.
Frequently Asked Questions
Does 3dfx still exist in 2026?
3dfx Interactive no longer exists. The company sold its graphics assets to Nvidia on December 15, 2000, dismissed its staff, and filed for bankruptcy in 2002. Nvidia has owned the 3dfx patents, trademarks and the Voodoo brand names since that sale and has not released a product under them.
Why did 3dfx fail?
3dfx failed because it bought board maker STB Systems for about $141 million in December 1998, turning its own customers into competitors, and then shipped the Voodoo3 and Voodoo5 too late to answer Nvidia's GeForce 256. Founder Scott Sellers summarized it in a 2013 Computer History Museum panel: "we ran out of time."
Can you still use a 3dfx Voodoo card today?
Yes, with effort. 3dfx Voodoo cards stopped getting vendor drivers after Nvidia ended support in 2001, but community drivers and wrappers keep them running on period PCs, and Linux 7.3 gained kernel patches in August 2026 that initialize Voodoo 3, 4 and 5 cards without a PC video BIOS. Most people play Glide era games on modern hardware instead.