Many things are shame, for example of today games and game industry look what nVIDIA make with their money and software, they make crap that look little better and run like crap on all hardware, like PhysX, Tessellation and other ones they just suck... On other hand AMD did invent Mantle and give it to the OpenGL makers, so they did make Vulkan, that is great API, compared to all other alternatives, but not many games use it and that is shame...
Shame is 3Dfx did make idiot things that ended up them dead, shame is also S3 did not have the Metal API in more games... Shame is brands like ABIT, Soyo, Aopen did die or are not anymore in the industry in the same way...
Yes the Voodoo 1 and Voodoo 2 was unmatched even without Glide, but still without Glide both V1 and V2 was going to be only faster then the competition, but the graphics was going to be the same crap as on ATi, MatroX, S3, nVIDIA...
For me (i think for many others as well) 3Dfx was the king on the GPU market from Voodoo 1 passing Voodoo 2 and last great card from them was the Voodoo 3, after that all did go on the downhill pretty fast and the things got too messed up..
The biggest mistakes of 3Dfx was they did use outdated hardware and rebrand after Voodoo 3, the purchase of STB System and the specially not using Rampage architecture in 2000 that was going to crush nVIDIA bad, as 3Dfx did have the Rampage/Specter chip and cards even in 1997, and according to some other enthusiasts the level of performance the Rampage did have was like above GEforce 3, and something on par with GEforce 4, but the stupid decisions 3Dfx founders did make after Voodoo 3 did cost them all they got.... They did try to make all in one like Intel to make their own chips, cards, API and all, but they did miss ONE very important point that Intel is giant and they have tons of resources, and they can do whatever s**ts they want (as we can see so many years what crap intel did all over the place) and still get no harm or to be close to bankrupt, 3Dfx did think they will be the only king like intel, but on video cards, but they were wrong, as the competition nVIDIA did bring the GEforce 256 that did have newer tech, umached performance by the time, and that was the end of 3Dfx as one GEforce 256 was so much cheaper to produce, while only one Voodoo 5500 was at least twice the price, not to mention the Voodoo 6000.... If only 3Dfx did bring the Specter cards and the Rampage chip they was going to rule all over, and not even need of VSA and Voodoo 4 or 5......
There are even some pissed off ppl as i did found a site where they did crap all over 3Dfx bcuz of the rebrand of the Voodoo 4 and 5, but don`t know where the site is, but at least i have one picture of it...
This is also why nVIDIA are still alive today, as they did never make the mistake to show middle finger to all board partners, and to go on their own and making all GEforces and Quadros only by themselves. Some times when someone gets too cocky and too greedy sh*t happens very fast and hit very hard, like in the case of 3Dfx. No one lives only on old glory, nVIDIA are not, intel seems did think this way, but AMD did show them previous year with Zen, that no one can rely on old glory, at least not for much long.....
Mah systems retro, old, newer (Radical stuff)
W3680 4.5/ GA-x58 UD7/ R9 280x
K7 2.6/ NF7-S/ HD3850
IBM x2 P3 933/ GA-6VXD7/ Voodoo V 5.5K
Cmq P2 450/ GA-BX2000/ V2 SLI
IBM PC365
Cmq DeskPRO 486/33
IBM PS/2 Model 56
SPS IntelleXT 8088