Well, the Avenger chip is nothing more than an extension of the Banshee core. The Banshee was created in an attempt to capture the OEM market and the Voodoo3 is a die-shrunk Banshee core, with a 2nd TMU, higher clocks and I believe some fixes for the 2D core AFAIR.
It was a relatively easy product to launch. VSA-100 was delayed a lot, so they definitely run into some hurdles. They could have maybe launched it in late 1999 or 2000, had they not ever done Voodoo3, but at this point they would have been slaughtered by TNT2, M64, Matrox G400, Rage 128 Pro and later GeForce 256. Who's to say they would have survived that?

You should also keep in mind that the Voodoo3 was a very cost-effective card for 3Dfx. Their only other performance alternative at this time would have to have been the Voodoo2 SLI. No matter how much they could have slashed the prices, they would still have been relatively high since you'd have to buy two cards.

I think 3Dfx's greatest blunder was the acquirement of STB. They lost a ton of money and never really managed to see the profits from this deal. 17 years later and no one still has done anything this bold, Nvidia and AMD are still selling chips to vendors and vendors produce videocards.

It was a good idea if you consider OEMs, which they wanted to get via the Banshee. The Dell my dad bought in 1997 I still have has an STB Riva 128.
So their idea was to make that into an STB Banshee but they failed to realize OEMs aren't dumb and are just gonna go directly to ATi or Nvidia from that point on, and hell if they're gonna fight that- that's perfect for them. And then the Banshee also sucked, and welp.

F2bnp wrote:

Well, the Avenger chip is nothing more than an extension of the Banshee core. The Banshee was created in an attempt to capture t […]
Show full quote

Well, the Avenger chip is nothing more than an extension of the Banshee core. The Banshee was created in an attempt to capture the OEM market and the Voodoo3 is a die-shrunk Banshee core, with a 2nd TMU, higher clocks and I believe some fixes for the 2D core AFAIR.
It was a relatively easy product to launch. VSA-100 was delayed a lot, so they definitely run into some hurdles. They could have maybe launched it in late 1999 or 2000, had they not ever done Voodoo3, but at this point they would have been slaughtered by TNT2, M64, Matrox G400, Rage 128 Pro and later GeForce 256. Who's to say they would have survived that?

You should also keep in mind that the Voodoo3 was a very cost-effective card for 3Dfx. Their only other performance alternative at this time would have to have been the Voodoo2 SLI. No matter how much they could have slashed the prices, they would still have been relatively high since you'd have to buy two cards.

I think 3Dfx's greatest blunder was the acquirement of STB. They lost a ton of money and never really managed to see the profits from this deal. 17 years later and no one still has done anything this bold, Nvidia and AMD are still selling chips to vendors and vendors produce videocards.

Yeah I also think that the Voodoo3 was cost effective and in a moment where they still had the high end V2/V2-SLI advantage over the others so basically they pushed at the max an older architecture but I always imagine that the Voodoo3 should have been sold with another name to live no more than a year or so (like Banshee 2?).
ATi did build their own cards until the Radeon right?

SRQ wrote:

It was a good idea if you consider OEMs, which they wanted to get via the Banshee. The Dell my dad bought in 1997 I still have has an STB Riva 128.
So their idea was to make that into an STB Banshee but they failed to realize OEMs aren't dumb and are just gonna go directly to ATi or Nvidia from that point on, and hell if they're gonna fight that- that's perfect for them. And then the Banshee also sucked, and welp.

But considering what the TNT showed, the Rage 128 chip, the Savage 4.. they all began to use feature that was important on paper (32bit, high res textures..), why then release a VSA-100 in 2001 that still was a Directx6 Voodoo based solution?
I think that the original idea (at least from old announcement as much I remember) of releasing the V3 2000 at 125mhz and the 3000 at 183Mhz was definetely better if still another chip was soon to be released.

Because they were years behind in the worst possible time to be so.

SRQ wrote:

Because they were years behind in the worst possible time to be so.

Yeah that's the point I think. But still after that all the time spent on the quad vsa solution... incredible..thinking also that others were making Dx8 DDR solutions...

SRQ wrote:

Because they were years behind in the worst possible time to be so.

They had Rampage and thought that they at least had a chance but sadly time ran out just when development was making good progress.

They were miles ahead with voodoo1 and voodoo2 when they came out. Voodoo3 would have been ''ok'' if they would have hit 183mhz but they couldn't get it stable enough.
By the time they could the card was absolete and too expensive. Adding a TV function was nice but not worth the premium. There were simply better options, and glide became less special.
It was still a good card and they still sold a lot of voodoo3's, but it wasn't the best so no price premium.

They were playing ''catch up'' after that as Nvidia was ramping up and did exellent marketing! People really believed that real agp functions were important and 32bit was better. It is but not back then: 3dfx's pci functions with agp bus speed was more than enough and 32bit colors with low framerate was still nothing compared to 16bit/22bit at good framerates. But it looked great on the box and 3dfx didn't have it.

Vsa-100 was way to late again and they were back at 166mhz clocks...... Finally they had 32bit color and at least did AA right the first time. But needing sli on a single card to even come a bit close to the competition was way to expensive. Even if they were a year earlier and hit the market straight away with the v5-6000 they wouldn't have survived, it was a dumb idea as the market moved on to better solutions.

I think they would have been around a little longer if Nvidia didn't release ''the final blow''. Geforce2mx was an amazing card for the money in it's day. It was my first Nvidia after many years of 3dfx pleasure, Voodoo4 was nothing compared to that card. Voodoo5 was to rich for me but i would have chosen a geforce2gts anyway.

But to this day i say: the voodoo1 was the best computer upgrade i ever did, only matched years later by my first ssd which was a comparable leap that blew me away.

Ironically every single voodoo3 i have today can do 183mhz without a problem. They just needed to add a fan!!! 🤣

Voodoo 3 was great when it came out in April 1999, but only as a stop gap. VSA-100 needed to come out later the same year. GeForce 256 obsoleted TNT2 & V3 in October, and 3dfx's successors were nothing but crazy talk for eight months. They weren't agile enough and the acquisition of STB probably didn't help any, besides also ending up wrecking financials.

386SX wrote:

But considering what the TNT showed, the Rage 128 chip, the Savage 4.. they all began to use feature that was important on paper (32bit, high res textures..), why then release a VSA-100 in 2001 that still was a Directx6 Voodoo based solution?

VSA-100 was 32-bit DX7 and out in the second half of 2000. They were too late, but not that late, and the feature they lacked, HW T&L, wasn't really pressing yet.

firage wrote:

Voodoo 3 was great when it came out in April 1999, but only as a stop gap. VSA-100 needed to come out later the same year. GeForce 256 obsoleted TNT2 & V3 in October, and 3dfx's successors were nothing but crazy talk for eight months. They weren't agile enough and the acquisition of STB probably didn't help any, besides also ending up wrecking financials.

386SX wrote:

But considering what the TNT showed, the Rage 128 chip, the Savage 4.. they all began to use feature that was important on paper (32bit, high res textures..), why then release a VSA-100 in 2001 that still was a Directx6 Voodoo based solution?

VSA-100 was 32-bit DX7 and out in the second half of 2000. They were too late, but not that late, and the feature they lacked, HW T&L, wasn't really pressing yet.

If we consider the lack of T&L it wasn't a real Dx7 solution. T-Buffer could have been good if would not need the programmer to specifically write code for it but still, maybe in the 1999. Maybe the single VSA-100 as soon as the NV10 was released, could have done more and also to release the double-VSA solution as soon the DDR NV10 was out. But even in this theory the switch to DDR ram, real GPU and the abandon of the Voodoo original idea based on Glide, was a must to survive imho.

All they needed imho was to run fast with a whole new architecture even if that would mean let behind the owner of Voodoo2 and 3 cards. They needed somethign like the R100 ATi gpu maybe mantaining only a (maximun) double SLI solution cause power wattage was beginning to go up already too much with 0,18u.

Well, AFAIK there is no official "DX7 hardware requirements" from MS like multitexturing for DX6. So - can't say VSA-100 is or isn't DX7 hardware...

Gamecollector wrote:

Well, AFAIK there is no official "DX7 hardware requirements" from MS like multitexturing for DX6. So - can't say VSA-100 is or isn't DX7 hardware...

Ok. 😉

I think they felt too confident with voodoo 5
They should have made a few better decisions and then Spectre would have been out in time and I really think that things would have been way different today.

Rampage was their first new architecture since Voodoo1. I recall reading that the project was a mess of feature creep and was originally planned to be released much sooner (without D3D 8 features). VSA-100 was a stop gap to have something new-ish to sell in the meantime, another extension of the Voodoo architecture.

Yeah, Banshee/Voodoo3 were their attempt to get OEM sales and it worked pretty well. Voodoo Rush was basically their first attempt at that but Rush was awful. I think Voodoo3/Banshee were as good or better an option as i740/Riva 128/TNT/G200/G400/Rage 128/Savage in most cases. Glide support was very useful at the time, and in general you knew the games were tested with Voodoo cards. 32-bit color was almost useless with those other cards (even GeForce 256 was iffy IMO), and the Voodoo 256x256 texture size limit wasn't a huge issue yet.

swaaye wrote:

Rampage was their first new architecture since Voodoo1. I recall reading that the project was a mess of feature creep and was originally planned to be released much sooner (without D3D 8 features). VSA-100 was a stop gap to have something new-ish to sell in the meantime, another extension of the Voodoo architecture.

Yeah, Banshee/Voodoo3 were their attempt to get OEM sales and it worked pretty well. Voodoo Rush was basically their first attempt at that but Rush was awful. I think Voodoo3/Banshee were as good or better an option as i740/Riva 128/TNT/G200/G400/Rage 128/Savage in most cases. Glide support was very useful at the time, and in general you knew the games were tested with Voodoo cards. 32-bit color was almost useless with those other cards (even GeForce 256 was iffy IMO), and the Voodoo 256x256 texture size limit wasn't a huge issue yet.

I never understood why they didn't push it more in the clock side. I can imagine maybe it was difficult to have enough chip running stable at that freq but the 3500 having it (on a TV multimedia all in one card?) had not much sense to me imho. I remember my V3 2000 with a fan went up to 181Mhz stable but no more. A Voodoo3 3000 at that freq would have maybe convinced more of the choice of the "fastest until the next model" idea.

386SX wrote:

swaaye wrote:

Rampage was their first new architecture since Voodoo1. I recall reading that the project was a mess of feature creep and was originally planned to be released much sooner (without D3D 8 features). VSA-100 was a stop gap to have something new-ish to sell in the meantime, another extension of the Voodoo architecture.

Yeah, Banshee/Voodoo3 were their attempt to get OEM sales and it worked pretty well. Voodoo Rush was basically their first attempt at that but Rush was awful. I think Voodoo3/Banshee were as good or better an option as i740/Riva 128/TNT/G200/G400/Rage 128/Savage in most cases. Glide support was very useful at the time, and in general you knew the games were tested with Voodoo cards. 32-bit color was almost useless with those other cards (even GeForce 256 was iffy IMO), and the Voodoo 256x256 texture size limit wasn't a huge issue yet.

I never understood why they didn't push it more in the clock side. I can imagine maybe it was difficult to have enough chip running stable at that freq but the 3500 having it (on a TV multimedia all in one card?) had not much sense to me imho. I remember my V3 2000 with a fan went up to 181Mhz stable but no more. A Voodoo3 3000 at that freq would have maybe convinced more of the choice of the "fastest until the next model" idea.

Powercolor made a Voodoo 3 card clocked at 183MHz and Falcon Northwest allegedly had a 200MHz version.

386SX wrote:

swaaye wrote:

Rampage was their first new architecture since Voodoo1. I recall reading that the project was a mess of feature creep and was originally planned to be released much sooner (without D3D 8 features). VSA-100 was a stop gap to have something new-ish to sell in the meantime, another extension of the Voodoo architecture.

Yeah, Banshee/Voodoo3 were their attempt to get OEM sales and it worked pretty well. Voodoo Rush was basically their first attempt at that but Rush was awful. I think Voodoo3/Banshee were as good or better an option as i740/Riva 128/TNT/G200/G400/Rage 128/Savage in most cases. Glide support was very useful at the time, and in general you knew the games were tested with Voodoo cards. 32-bit color was almost useless with those other cards (even GeForce 256 was iffy IMO), and the Voodoo 256x256 texture size limit wasn't a huge issue yet.

I never understood why they didn't push it more in the clock side. I can imagine maybe it was difficult to have enough chip running stable at that freq but the 3500 having it (on a TV multimedia all in one card?) had not much sense to me imho. I remember my V3 2000 with a fan went up to 181Mhz stable but no more. A Voodoo3 3000 at that freq would have maybe convinced more of the choice of the "fastest until the next model" idea.

Perhaps because GPU fans weren't really used very much in those days? Only CPUs used active fans in those days.

They didn't have lots of experience with this, maybe also because they never build the cards themselves (iirc some Banshees maybe had active cooling?).

386SX wrote:

swaaye wrote:

Rampage was their first new architecture since Voodoo1. I recall reading that the project was a mess of feature creep and was originally planned to be released much sooner (without D3D 8 features). VSA-100 was a stop gap to have something new-ish to sell in the meantime, another extension of the Voodoo architecture.

Yeah, Banshee/Voodoo3 were their attempt to get OEM sales and it worked pretty well. Voodoo Rush was basically their first attempt at that but Rush was awful. I think Voodoo3/Banshee were as good or better an option as i740/Riva 128/TNT/G200/G400/Rage 128/Savage in most cases. Glide support was very useful at the time, and in general you knew the games were tested with Voodoo cards. 32-bit color was almost useless with those other cards (even GeForce 256 was iffy IMO), and the Voodoo 256x256 texture size limit wasn't a huge issue yet.

I never understood why they didn't push it more in the clock side. I can imagine maybe it was difficult to have enough chip running stable at that freq but the 3500 having it (on a TV multimedia all in one card?) had not much sense to me imho. I remember my V3 2000 with a fan went up to 181Mhz stable but no more. A Voodoo3 3000 at that freq would have maybe convinced more of the choice of the "fastest until the next model" idea.

The reasons for not clocking higher would be:

-AGP current limit on many boards were under what spec was supposed to be 5A vs. 6A
-Memory clocks were low and tied to the Core Clock, Price of memory with high clocks
-No fan used like many cards of the time.

From what I remember learning a few years ago about 3Dfx was that they wasted tons of money on parties/lunches and the purchase of STB. They were supposed to release the Rampage sooner than even the VSA-100 but kept messing that up. They had a deal with the Sega Dreamcast that fell through aswell.

Back in the day I had a Voodoo 1 and then a Banshee, to a Voodoo 2 eventually paired with a TNT-2. After I got the TNT-2 I stayed with nVidia to this day! I helped 3Dfx go under! 🙁

I did not play with the V3/V4/V5 till a couple of years ago, I gained respect for the Voodoo 3 but not much more the V4 or V5 as I learned by the time the V4/V5 released that the Glide API was kicked aside for Direct-X and OpenGL which nVidia really passed them by.

RogueTrip2012 wrote:

Back in the day I had a Voodoo 1 and then a Banshee, to a Voodoo 2 eventually paired with a TNT-2. After I got the TNT-2 I stayed with nVidia to this day! I helped 3Dfx go under! 🙁

I did not play with the V3/V4/V5 till a couple of years ago, I gained respect for the Voodoo 3 but not much more the V4 or V5 as I learned by the time the V4/V5 released that the Glide API was kicked aside for Direct-X and OpenGL which nVidia really passed them by.

My brother bought a Voodoo 3 2000 PCI and it blew me away on his P-200 MMX system, so I bought one for my Gateway P2-400 (had integrated Velocity 128 8MB, which is better than I realized) and was equally impressed. When it came time to upgrade a couple years later and I was rocking an Athlon Slot 1 750Mhz on a Tyan KX133 board (yay, I finally had an AGP slot!) I had drooled over the Voodoo 5 for quite a while, and I remember looking at the 3dfx website at the time and imagining how awesome it was... but seeing the benchmarks of the Geforce 2 GTS in PCGamer Magazine sold me on that instead. It was cheaper, faster and had more features. So I bought a Visiontek Geforce 2 GTS 32MB... and my what an upgrade that was!

I certainly didn't help 3dfx any, but I'm pretty sure that at that point it was already obvious that they were doomed. If I'd known how decent the seemingly worthless "integrated junk" Riva 128 was (with the right drivers), I would have probably considered going with nvidia even sooner. I'm glad I had some time with the Voodoo 3 though. It was a great card and I still have the retail box, and one of the cards (my brother's).

After several years of collecting, I now have 3dfx cards coming out my ears... but that doesn't do them any good now. 🤣