Screaming Penguin - Source Does Matter

Well, the end has come for 3Dfx. On Friday they agreed to sell to NVidia Corp for USD $70M and 1M shares of NVidia stock, totalling about USD $107.4M. There has been talk about the end of 3Dfx, makers of the ground breaking Voodoo line of 3D accellerator cards, but I was almost in a state of denial.

When the first Voodoo chipset cards came out, I remember seeing OpenGL Quake on a PC look so amazing, you would have thought it a sota SGI box. Since then I have been through every generation of the Voodoo cards. Very soon I will likely upgrade to their 5th generation series and have been immensely pleasef with every product.

The greatest part of the Voodoo line has been 3Dfx's unwavering support for Linux with each new rev. They have maintained driver support on a par with their Win32 offerings, and the Voodoo line has become the defacto standard for OpenGL on Linux machines. The GLide drivers on the Win32 platform have consistently smoke the MS Direct3D drivers that other cards have offered, and have been supported out of games by everyone from id Software through Sony.NVidia has off and on held the performance title with the GEForce series of cards, however, Linux support has been lacking. It is my hope that the effects of 3Dfx with trickle up through NVidia, and not the other way around.

I still carry my keychain with the Voodoo 1 chip on it I got at E3 a few years ago, and will continue to do so. I am truely saddened to see another of my favorite technology companies go the way of Netscape.