Computer History Museum
3 HN recommenders · recommended in 3 months, 2017–2023
2:35:32 · 51K views · May 27, 2014
A Computer History Museum oral history panel with four 3dfx founders on the company's rise with Voodoo Graphics and Glide, and its fall into bankruptcy. It runs about two and a half hours.
Recommended as the definitive retrospective on 3dfx, with first-hand stories about engineering hacks and design philosophy.
4 comments from Hacker News
History is funny because at that time in the 90s there was a company called Bitboys Oy. That company was founded by some Finnish demoscene members and was developing a series of graphics cards, Pyramid3D and Glaze3D, with a programmable pipeline around 1997-1999 [1]. This was at around 5 years before the first commercial shader capable card was released. Even though Wikipedia classifies it as vaporware, there are prototype cards and manuals floating around showing that these cards were in fact designed and contained programmable pixel shaders, notably: - The Pyramid3D GPU datasheet: [LINK] - The pitch deck: [LINK] - The hardware reference manual: [LINK] (shows even more internals!) (As far the companies go: VLSI Solution Oy / TriTech / Bitboys Oy were all related here.) They unfortunately busted before they could release anything, due to a wrong bet in memory type choice (RDRAM, I think) and letting their architecture rely on that, then running out of money, perhaps some other problems. In the end their assets were bought by ATI. As for 3dfx, I would highly recommend watching the 3dfx Oral History Panel video from the Computer History Museum with 4 key people involved in 3dfx at the time [2]. Its quite fun as it shows how 3dfx got ahead of the curve by using very clever engineering hacks and tricks to get more out of the silicon and data buses. It also suggests that their strategy was explicitly about squeezing as much performance out of the hardware, and making sacrifices (q
This is a really great retrospective on 3dfx from four of the founders. 3dfx Oral History Panel with Ross Smith, Scott Sellers, Gary Tarolli, and Gordon Campbell (Computer History Museum) this video
You might also like watching Computer History Museums "3dfx Oral History Panel with Ross Smith, Scott Sellers, Gary Tarolli, and Gordon Campbell" this video Ross Smith, Scott Sellers and Gary Tarolli were 3dfx founders, they left Silicon Graphics to do this startup.
Creators of Voodoo (3dfx = Gary Tarolli, Scott Sellers) came from the world of fully programmable GPUs. Silicon Graphics workstations had full T&L since ~1988 ( [LINK] ). The whole point of Voodoo 1 was making it as simple and cheap as possible by removing all the advanced features and calculating geometry/lighting on the CPU. this video