3dfx Video Cards

3DFX Interactive was one of the most important semiconductor firms that established the principles of computer 3D processing, still used in the design of today’s top video cards.

Their first product was a simple PCI card, equipped with a Voodoo Graphics chip, meant to help the primary graphics card in 3D processing. This was way back in 1996, when computer graphics was starting to address the issue of displaying 3D on a flat screen.

This card featured 4MB of EDO DRAM and a 50MHz graphics chip, which were responsible for post-processing the original video signal by adding textures and filters. Although the 3DFX Voodoo PCI was very powerful, other manufacturers – like Matrox, S3 and ATI – delivered much cheaper products with 30-50% of the Voodoo’s performance.

Voodoo 2, 3, 4 and 5 card designs followed, but were also unsuccessful on the market. IN 2002 3DFX Interactive had to declare bankruptcy and most of its assets were bought by nVidia.

One of the technologies developed by the original 3DFX team, SLI is still used by nVidia for linking more graphics cards together in one computer system. Scan-Line Interleave was first used to connect two Voodoo2 cards, each responsible for processing half of the screen, but it had the same fate as all 3DFX cards.

Today SLI stands for Scalable Link Interface, a technology derived from the original 3DFX SLI. From the outside it seems that it does the same thing; SLI allows two or more video cards (or more graphics processors on one card) to work together in one computer. It no longer divides the screen between the video cards, but the workload itself. This means doubled, tripled and quadrupled post-processing power squeezed into one professional gaming computer.

nVidia isn’t the only graphics chip manufacturer today, in fact AMD (formerly known as ATI) made much more efficient cards in the last two years (2009-1010). Today we have inefficient, but faster nVidia cards and highly efficient, a bit slower AMD video cards. For more information on the best currently available video cards, check out the AMD and nVidia websites.

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