Founded in 1994 by Ross Smith, Gary Tarolli and Scott Sellers (all SGI alumni), with backing from Gordie Campbell's TechFarm, 3dfx released its famous Voodoo Graphics chip in 1996. The company only manufactured the chips and some reference boards, and initially did not sell any product to consumers; rather, it acted as an OEM supplier for graphics card companies, who designed, manufactured, marketed, and sold their own graphics cards which included the Voodoo.

3Dfx became popular mainly due to their great success within the arcade market. At the time, arcades were a very visible place to go visit and see the latest in 3D gaming and technology. The first arcade machine that 3Dfx Voodoo Graphics hardware was used in was called ICE Home Run Derby, a game released in 1996. Later that year they were featured in more popular titles, such as Atari's San Francisco Rush and Wayne Gretzky's 3D Hockey. 3Dfx received a lot of focus from the media because of the obvious graphical prowess of these titles, and that new game consoles such as Nintendo 64, Sony PlayStation, and Sega Saturn would be showcases for similar next-generation graphics. It generated a lot of very positive mindshare among gamers for 3Dfx. Voodoo Graphics was some of the best arcade hardware at the time, and it was coming to the home PC.

After a fortuitous drop in EDO DRAM prices due to the volatile DRAM market, Voodoo Graphics cards became feasible for the consumer PC market. The Voodoo, alongside Rendition's Vérité V1000 chip and PowerVR PCX1/2, was one of the first 3D accelerators that actually improved graphics performance; most systems of the era performed no better, if not worse, than software rendering engines (i.e. ViRGE).


The Voodoo 1, as the Voodoo Graphics would be later known, was notable for its lack of an onboard VGA controller. This meant a Voodoo equipped PC still required a separate VGA graphics card, meaning it was very expensive to have both 3D and 2D acceleration, and the user lost an extra slot. The Voodoo 1 occupied a separate PCI slot and only kicked in when the host PC ran a 3D game that had been programmed to use the Voodoo. A passthrough VGA cable daisy-chained the VGA card to the Voodoo 1, and then out to the monitor. Although this was a cumbersome arrangement that hurt the analog signal quality of the separate 2D card, hardcore PC gamers were willing to put up with it to gain what was (then) the ultimate in 3D graphics.

The Voodoo 1's main competition were PowerVR and Rendition. PowerVR produced a 3D add-on card, whereas Rendition offered an integrated (3D+VGA) single-chip solution. Neither competitor achieved the Voodoo 1's popularity among gamers and developers, or equivalent performance.

Near the end of 1998, 3dfx released the Voodoo Banshee, which used a lower price to aim at a more mainstream consumer market.
A single-chip solution, the Banshee was essentially a legacy VGA core combined with an overclocked but incomplete (only one Texture Mapping Unit) Voodoo2. The Banshee's single-chip form factor dictated a 128-bit memory bus, like the first Voodoo. Performance wise, the Banshee was a mixed bag. In scenes which used multiple textures per polygon, the Voodoo2 was substantially faster, due to the second TMU. In scenes dominated by single-textured polygons, though, the Banshee would match (or even slightly exceed) the Voodoo2 due to its higher clock speed. While it was not a hit on the scale of the Voodoo 1 or 2, the Banshee sold a respectable number of units, although 3dfx started losing some market share to NVIDIA's RIVA TNT.

While the 3D performance was somewhat of a disappointment, Banshee's 2D core was anything but. It rivaled the fastest 2D cores from Matrox, NVIDIA, and ATI. The chip was equipped with a 128-bit 2D GUI engine and a 128-bit VESA VBE 3.0 VGA core. It was perhaps the fastest MS-DOS performer released, certainly at the time. Windows performance was equally impressive. The graphics chip capably accelerated DirectDraw and supported all of the Windows Graphics Device Interface (GDI) in hardware, with all 256 raster operations and tertiary functions, and had hardware polygon acceleration. All of this helped the 2D core be able to boast near-theoretical performance with a null driver test in Windows NT. 3dfx had indisputably fixed part of the weakness of the older Voodoo Rush with its slow 3rd 2D chip.

3dfx executed a major strategy change just prior to the launch of Voodoo3 by purchasing STB Technologies, which was one of the larger graphics card manufacturers at the time; the intent was for 3dfx to start manufacturing, marketing, and selling its own graphics cards, rather than functioning only as an OEM supplier. This alienated 3dfx's OEM customers, all of whom chose to switch, and source their 3D chips from other manufacturers, rather than do business with a company who was their direct competitor at retail. With the purchase of STB 3dfx created a line of Velocity boards (a STB brand) that used crippled Voodoo3 chips, as a product to target the low-end market. The chip came with only a single functional TMU, making it similar to a Voodoo Banshee.

This strategy change was one of the main contributors to 3dfx's downfall; the company did not sell any Voodoo 4 or 5 chips to third party manufacturers. The company was also presumably distracted by the need to focus both on the retail market as well as the OEM market, selling cards to computer manufacturers. The latter was hard-won business, but provided a steady income to fund subsequent development. A significant requirement of the OEM business was the ability to consistently produce new products on the six month product refresh cycle the computer manufacturers required; 3dfx did not have the methodology nor the mindset to the focus on this business model. In the end, 3dfx opted to focus on the retail business using its own manufactured and branded products.

The Voodoo 3 was heavily hyped as the graphics card that would make 3dfx the undisputed leader but the actual product was below expectations. Though it was still the fastest by a small margin, the Voodoo 3 lacked 32-bit color and large texture support, features that fledging rival NVIDIA included in the competing RIVA TNT2. While at the time, few games supported large textures and 32-bit color, and those that did generally were too demanding to be run at playable framerates, the features "32-bit color support" and "2048x2048 textures" were much more impressive on paper than 16-bit color and 256x256 texture support. The Voodoo3 sold relatively well, but was disappointing compared to the first two models and 3dfx gave up the market leadership to NVIDIA.

As 3dfx attempted to counter the TNT2 threat, they were caught off guard by NVIDIA's GeForce 256, which took the performance crown by a wide margin, making it superior to the Voodoo 3 in all respects (except price). 3dfx missed a product cycle as they attempted to match the GeForce.

The company's next (and as it would turn out, final) product was code-named Napalm. Originally, this was just a Voodoo3 modified to support newer technologies and higher clock speeds, with performance estimated to be around the level of the RIVA TNT2. However, Napalm was delayed, and in the meantime NVIDIA brought out their landmark GeForce 256 chip, which shifted even more of the computational work from the CPU to the graphics chip. Napalm would have been unable to compete with the GeForce, so it was redesigned to support multiple chip configurations, like the Voodoo2 had. The end-product was named VSA-100, with VSA standing for Voodoo Scalable Architecture. 3dfx was finally able to have a product that could defeat the GeForce.

However, by the time the VSA-100 based cards made it to the market, the GeForce 2 and ATI Radeon cards had arrived and were offering higher performance at that price point. The only real advantage the Voodoo 5 5500 had over the GeForce 2 GTS or Radeon was its superior anti-aliasing implementation, and the fact that it didn't take such a large performance hit (relative to its peers) when anti-aliasing was enabled. 3dfx was fully aware the Voodoo 5's speed deficiency so they touted it as quality over speed, which was a reversal of the Voodoo 3 marketing which emphasized raw performance over features. 5500 sales were respectable but nowhere as good as 3dfx needed to stay afloat.

The Voodoo 5 5000, which had 32 MB of VRAM to the 5500's 64 MB, was never launched, as the smaller frame buffer didn't significantly reduce cost over the Voodoo 5 5500.

The only other member of the Voodoo 5 line, the Voodoo 4 4500, was as much of a disaster as Voodoo Rush, because it offered performance well short of its value-oriented peers combined with a late launch. Voodoo 4 was beaten in almost all areas by the GeForce 2 MX — a low-cost board sold mostly as an OEM part for computer manufacturers — and Radeon VE.

One unusual trait of the Voodoo 4 and 5 was that the Macintosh versions of these cards had both VGA and DVI output jacks, whereas the PC versions only had the VGA connector, and lacked DVI. Also, the Mac versions of the Voodoo4 and 5 had an Achilles' heel in that they did not support hardware-based MPEG2 acceleration, which hindered the playback of DVD's on a Mac that was equipped with a Voodoo graphics card.


The Voodoo 5 6000 never made it to market, due to a severe bug resulting in data corruption on the AGP bus on certain boards, and was limited to AGP 2x. It was thus incompatible with the then-new Pentium 4 motherboards. Later tests proved that the Voodoo 5 6000 outperformed not only the GeForce 2 GTS and ATI Radeon 7200, but also the faster GeForce 2 Ultra and Radeon 7500. In some cases it was shown to compete well with the GeForce 3, trading performance places with the card on various tests. However, the production cost of the card, particularly the 4 chip setup and 128 MB of VRAM, would have likely hampered its competitiveness.

In late 2000, not long after Voodoo 4's launch, several of 3dfx's creditors decided to initiate bankruptcy proceedings. 3dfx would have had virtually no chance of successfully contesting these proceedings, and instead opted to be bought by NVIDIA, ceasing to exist as a company. Most of the design team working on "Rampage" (the successor to the VSA-100 line) was transferred to the team working on what has since become the GeForce FX series.