swaaye wrote:It was probably their suicidal bad decision making and stuff.
What they needed to do was double down on Rampage and get that done a year earlier. Voodoo3 was a tweaked budget chip and VSA 100 was a stop gap because Rampage was going nowhere fast. Unfortunately, getting Rampage out when it was needed would probably have required major reworking of however they were running the company. Less feature creep or whatever was going on.
In that context, having a Voodoo5-like implementation of the Voodoo 3 GPU series probably would have served as a much better stop-gap than the rather late release of the Voodoo 4 and 5, since they'd already lost a lot of market share by that point (and their top-end performance standing).
As it was, the Voodoo 4 and 5 GPU cores were only moderately better performers than the Voodoo 3 in general, and so late to market that they weren't compelling for mid-rage or high-end sectors. Whereas an SLI'd voodoo 3 (single and/or multi-board) derivative very well may have made a good high-end market leading product for the same high-performance niche as the Voodoo 1 and 2 has originally served.
Sure, if Rampage development was still lagging, the Voodoo 3 and SLI counterpart would have fallen behind by the time the Voodoo 4/5 were released in reality. However, unlike the 4/5, those cards could have been already established and much more popular (not to mention in high volume production), and perhaps aging at least somewhat gracefully into the mid-rage and low-end, leaving much less of a gap in the high-end market than having the Voodoo 3 alone (and late Voodoo 5) did.
Tetrium wrote:
I suspect that has something to do with graphics cards moving to AGP (only 1 AGP slot per motherboard (there are exceptions)) and iirc AGP had difficulties with multi-GPU graphics cards
The Voodoo 5 did just that though (dual GPUs on a single card), and wasn't the Rage Fury MAXX the only other dual-GPU card of that era at all? (albeit using AFR rather than SLI, and its problems weren't so much AGP specific as OS/driver specific)
On the multi-board end of things, they could have stuck to PCI or used mixed PCI/AGP with AGP-specific functions disabled. (if 3DFX cards even took advantage of that)
So, what I meant to say is 3DFX could have done with the Voodoo 3 what they later did with the 4 and 5 (in terms of lower-end single GPU models and high-end multi-GPU boards), if not continuing with the Voodoo 2's multi-board SLI support as well.