Awesome! Lots of brain power there.

Still haven't managed to watch all of it (about half an hour remaining), but this is a pretty cool video. Many thanks for sharing, it's really nice to see these guys together again talking about the old days and what eventually went wrong inside 3Dfx.

I watched the whole thing, interesting to hear some of their story.

They purchased STB with a $141 Million STOCK swap, and most likely used whatever money STB had on hand to fund 3dfx operations. I don't like how they bad mouthed STB as a company and blamed them for 3dfx's ultimate failing.

3DFX had a killer setup when they came out with the Voodoo 1, but by the time the Voodoo 3 came out (after the STB purchase) they had pretty much lost the bleeding edge. The original TNT chip was pretty fast, one of the first AGP cards, single chip, and 32 bit. Once Nvidia worked out the bugs (and there were many I snagged a TNT1 when it first came out and the original drivers were almost worthless) they pretty much owned the high end. The only thing saving 3dfx at that point was GLIDE was still around and it would take some time for most game makers to dump it for Directx or Opengl.

They did mention the fact that getting new chips out fast enough was their headache, and buying STB probably did slow down the rollout of the Voodoo 3 since they were the only ones making and selling 3dfx cards at that point. The Voodoo 4 was so late and slow they had to make the Voodoo 5 (2 x voodoo 4 chips using double the memory of competing cards) to get decent speed, that probably wasn't a cost effective way to sell an inferior product. The original GeForce 1 DDR pretty much wiped the floor with every other card at the time.

The story that I heard was that 3dfx lost most of their OEM business because of the STB acquisition. OEM's were worried that production from the plant in Mexico would be subpar and result in a lot of warranty claims so they went with nVidia and ATi instead.

It is interesting to note though that the 3dfx/STB built cards seem to be pretty reliable and stable.

I do believe that 3dfx should have focused on designing chips and not building the entire boards, obviously STB wasn't their only downfall though.

Very interesting video, thanks for posting it!