FiringSquad has posted an article looking at the demise of 3dfx, creator of the Voodoo chipsets and videocards. Supposedly this comes from an insider, who spills the beans on why products were delayed and such.

Here is a cute article looking at the 3dfx Rampage card that could have been. There are a few specific details about what the technology included. Trivia of the day, the Rampage card actually taped out just days before 3dfx closing. So close!

For the few of you still stuck with the ol' Voodoo 4 or Voodoo 5, there are new drivers out, released by a company called AE Software Technologies. These drivers work in Win2k and WinXP. Thanks 3dxtreme.

Specter let us known that GamersHQ @ Madonion has word of some new drivers by x3dfx for those of you who still have a V3/4/5 card. These are for Win9x/ME only.

Many of you may recall a little while back we revealed (and had confirmed) that the 3dfx next-gen Rampage card was actually completed just a day or so before the company sold out to NVidia. The Rampage never saw the light of day. We did manage to smuggle out these pictures of it though. Well guess what, a bunch of ex-3dfx employees have been secretely working on a new company called 3DPower headed up by Scott Sellers. According to theinq they are "on the verge" of releasing a card based on that tech under the new company. Thanks Tissen

3DPower has joined with Absolute Multimedia, formerly a manufacturer of Nvidia based cards. The word is that Absolute won't be the exclusive manufacturer of the 3DPower chip, with many familiar names producing cards based on the chip

update Jack - It turned out to be bullshit.

A flood of people have been sending in a couple of pictures of the 3dfx Rampage card. Several ex-3dfx guys had actually mentioned to me that the next-gen Rampage card had 'taped out' just a couple of days before the NVidia buyout of the company. A bit too late for the investors though as they had decided to close up shop. So it's basically the card that never was. Here are the pictures that have been floating around [picture1] and [picture2]. Also here are the last known specs of the card that we got around November or so of last year:

4 way SLI (2 Rampage chips and 2 T&L units)
32-512 MB memory support (200MHz DDR)
12.8GB/sec memory bandwidth
1.6Gigapixel fill rate (core clock at 200MHZ)
150 million triangles/polygons per second
AGP4x, 0.18 micron, 32 bit rendering
Full DirectX 8.0 Features
Advanced T-buffer, Hardware T&L, Curved Surfaces, Full Pixel Shader, Quad texturing Photorealisitic rendering, Photoshop effects H2 2000

Thanks Mookz, JayZee, Eric Smith, and Matthew Conrad. Btw in case anyone had a doubt about if the card was real, our man Andy was contracting for 3dfx and confirmed it.

For those of you still with the 3dfx cards, there is a 3dfx Windows XP FAQ on NT Compatible where they show that even though there won't be any new driver release, you should be able to use your Voodoo card in XP using Windows 2000 drivers.

You guys remember 3dfx? Those brave souls who helped start the 3D acceleration revolution for gaming? Here is a retrospective on 3dfx looking at what they were, and what they never finished. Rampage.

The xdfx team have released new Voodoo 4/5 drivers that fix the FSAA problem of the previous release and add some DirectX8 features, as noted in this forum post. Thanks Stomped.

Here is an interesting article looking at the defunct Voodoo5-6000 card that never did see the light of day in the retail channel. It was gonna be fast and stuff.

HardOCP got a hold of an image of a document that has been distributed to several EB stores claiming that NVidia has decided to continue support for old 3dfx products.

The x-3dfx team (former 3dfx employees) have release some unsupported, unofficial Voodoo 3/4/5 drivers for Win9x and Win2k. This will probably be the last driver release. Ctrl-Alt-Del has them as well if the x-3dfx site is slow.

In what will probably be the last update to the 3dfx news ticker, form 8-K! Basically 3dfx cleaning up shop and tying up loose ends. Trying to pay people what they owe etc. Thanks for the good times 3dfx, RIP.

The 3D Pulpit has three 3dfx technology demos that show off the T-Buffer technology, FSAA, Motion Blur, Soft Reflectance and Depth-Of-Field. Nice for the Voodoo5 5500 owners that probably won't be seeing any more of these tricks.

SharkyExtreme has an interview and tribute about the NVidia / 3dfx buyout. I eagerly anticipate the future pricing of videocards. Purty please ATI make the Radeon2 super-duper-fast0r?

Well this is interesting, according to a memo sent to all BestBuy stores around the nation, NVidia has requested that all current 3dfx 3D cards be pulled from the shelves and to not be sold. Due to the sale of 3dfx to NVidia. Here's a bit of it from VoodooExtreme:

... 3dfx will discontinue techincal support after Feb. 15th. Concidering the nature of this product, we feel that continuing  to provide this product to our customers will jeopardize their satisfaction with both BBY and the product long term.

We are asking that you pull all 3dfx skus listed below off of your shelves and hold in the warehouse. ...

Also, FiringSquad has an interview with 3dfx folks.

Its aftermath time for the NVidia buyout of 3dfx. If you're interested in reading some of the impacts and speculation about how this will impact the market here you go. Check out stories at MotleyFool , ZDNet (and more) , WallStreetJournal , Forbes , and Brian Hook even. Oh, and here's an audio bit of analysts patting asses.

Nvidia looks to boost its market share with the deal. Thanks to 3dfx's technology and customer base, Nvidia expects to garner between 60 percent and 70 percent of the retail market share for graphics boards. Nvidia also will likely continue 3dfx's Voodoo brand name. Even so, "We haven't completely sorted out all of the brand positioning," Huang said. "Where we could really take advantage of the Voodoo brand...is in the retail market all over the world."

Also, GamersDepot interviews 3dfx about future product support.

CNN Financial has another story on the 3dfx buyout, more technical. Thanks Rosewood. NVidia will have a webcast at 10am EST about it.

Of course, with the whole 3dfx buyout story, developers have their own opinion about it too. Voodoo Extreme got in contact with The Carmack, who had this to say

.. It was painful to watch 3dfx slip from the archetypical kick-ass technology start up to where they wound up.
I think I would have been happiest to have the PC market divided up between three strong players that all had their act together, but at this point, I'm not too unhappy with the market simplification resulting from 3dfx exiting.

Evil Avatar has posted the thoughts of Epic programmer Tim Sweeney

... 2. This shows the huge importance of keeping up with competition, in terms of cost, features, and product schedule. From a gamer's perspective, the Voodoo's are approximately as good as the GeForce's on average. The GeForce had T&L but few games took advantage of it; the Voodoo had a fill rate advantage. But this was NOT enough. NVidia's cards outsold 3dfx's by a huge margin (especially to OEMs) because of cost advantages, feature advantages (even though no games took advantage of those features at the time), and predictable product schedules.
3. This shows that a company can't "market" its way around core deficiencies -- at least, not for long. The 3dfx guys did an admirable job of hyping up the T-Buffer and FSAA, and if you read the typical magazine reviews, you might have concluded that 3dfx was on par with NVidia's products. But marketing isn't reality -- they were getting their butt kicked by T&L and 32-bit color ...

Well guys, remember a little while back we posted a story about a possible NVidia buyout of 3dfx? People balked... (Jack was wrong) Hell, I thought no way. I figured ATI or someone else would step in. Then yesterday it happens, 3dfx gets gobbled up by the mighty NVidia. Well here are a couple of interviews on it at FiringSquad and GamersDepot 

What exactly have you bought from 3dfx, and do you now own Gigapixel?

A: Their core assets, which includes their patents, patent pending applications, trademarks, branding, and inventory related to the graphics business. Gigapixel was a company who was purchased by 3dfx. We have purchased 3dfx's core assets, so that means we have access to whatever technology might've been developed by either company.

update Jack - In my defense, a lot can change in a quarter. For instance, this quarter, gross profit was -$21.7 (that's right, a loss). Their net loss for the quarter was $178.6 million. That means for 2000, 3dfx had lost a total of $291.5 million. With losses like that, it became easily affordable for nVidia to get some good IP, maybe pluck some key 3dfx people from the company, and just get 3dfx out of the market for good.