Holy shit news of the day; looks like 3dfx is going out of business. In a press release just issued, the company is recommending that shareholders agree with a sale of the assets to NVidia so they can dissolve the company

``After aggressively pursuing a wide range of options that take into consideration the interests of our creditors, our shareholders, our employees and our customers,'' said Alex Leupp, president and CEO, 3dfx Interactive Inc., ``we strongly believe that to reduce expenses, sell our assets and dissolve the company provides the highest return to our creditors, shareholders, and employees.''

``We expect that the combined technologies of 3dfx and NVIDIA will continue the legacy that 3dfx began in 1994,'' Leupp continued. ``NVIDIA is the number one supplier of graphics technology to the OEM market. With the addition of 3dfx's high-quality technology that leads the retail market, we believe the combination of the two will result in even greater PC graphics leadership.''

NVidia is paying $112 million for the assets. Thanks stiki figgaz.

update: NVidia has put up a FAQ on their website answering several questions about the acquisition.

Voodoo Extreme has a Voodoo5 6000 preview complete with benchmarks and all. Of course, this card will probably never make it to retail but you can see what we are missing (or not).

3dfx has released new Voodoo3 drivers for the V3 3500 TV. They are release candidate 1, and still in beta.

Whoops! 3dfx had some items in their technology glossary that some people on the fools boards noticed (thanks Rod). Those items have since been deleted - Take that as you will. Here are those glossary items, and notice they're referring to something called Spectre. I left out or pared down some definitions, click the links for the full ones:

- M-Buffer™ : "M" stands for multi-sample. ... in the multi-sampling method, used by Spectre, only one texture lookup per *pixel* (so that all subsamples use the same texture lookup value) is required. ...it reduces the amount of texture lookup by a factor of 4 compared to the VSA-100 method...
- Recursive textures : Texturing flexibility by supporting N (8 for Spectre) independent, unique textures applied per pixel in a single rendering pass... Also reflection on water.
- Overbright (52-bit color) : Increased internal precision of 52-bits (signed 13-bits per RGBA color component), generating rendered images of substantially higher quality. The higher dynamic range reduces darkening resulting in more vibrant and realistic images.

update Steve: I squeezed down the stuff a bit more. What does this all mean? Um.. Well word is that this is the name of the card that the Rampage chipset will be using.
another update: As this post goes up, it looks like this stuff is being deleted everywhere. Apparently 3dfx *really* didnt want this info to get out just yet.

Here's another interesting tidbit on the P4 situation (thanks Kyle Bridges). The Register is reporting that Voodoo 3 and Voodoo 5 AGP cards do not work on Pentium 4 motherboards. Voodoo 4 owners can breathe easy though, because those parts work. Here's a small FAQ on 3dfx's site showing nice pictures to demonstrate the problem and how to know if your hardware will work.

Apparently, Intel's mobo's are breaking the AGP spec (that they wrote) and not putting a 3.3V connecter on the AGP slot. It seems though that no other graphics cards except for the AGP Voodoo 3 and Voodoo 5's have this problem. So basically, this puts 3dfx up shit's creek. It'll be 3dfx screaming "Hey, why didn't you support the standards?" and Intel screaming back "Why didn't you design your boards the same way as everyone else?"

Hrm, so is it too late for 3dfx? I sure hope not, the more competition the better. If you just look at hardware the V5-5500 should really be getting higher benchmarks than it has been in the past. Well the latest 3dfx driver release has a new option called remove hidden surfaces. The result? Benchmarks moving up quite a bit, and actually becoming competitive? Well, almost. If anyone has a V5 handy and feels like giving it a try let us know.

FiringSquad is probably the last out of the gate with their Comdex wrap-up. The special part about this warp-up though is that they managed to get some benchmarks of the ill-fated 3dfx V5-6000. Very fast, yow.

As there was some speculation still going around about the V5-6000 coming out in some form by 3dfx, I got an email from 3dfx stating clearly this: "3dfx will not be bringing the Voodoo5 6000 to retail. What Q3D does is up to them...". But, while on the topic Brandino snagged this picture of the V5-6000 box.

HardOCP has some leaked 3dfx Rampage specs. Supposedly, rumored numbers from Comdex are similar to these. Back in March we posted some specs as well. It looks now that there will be three different cards. Here's a look at the specs for the mid level config

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

Of course, unconfirmed. But it's always fun to see this pop up from time to time.

The Register and a Gamecenter 3dfx interview both mention that despite what some might have thought (myself included), 3dfx will not cease make videocards. Yes, it will be selling it's plant in Mexico but that's to reduce cost since the plant isn't fully used. They will just be using other manufacturers to produce the cards for them, and will continue to sell their own line of videocard products. So don't expect a Creative Voodoo 5 any time soon.

Alex Leupp, 3dfx's president and CEO, said the move was being made to reduce the company's costs. "The sale of our Juarez facility will allow us to continue selling add-in-board products to the retail channel, with significantly reduced fixed costs," he said in a statement.

The plan should allow 3dfx to maintain its own brand of graphics cards and doesn't force the company to go cap in hand to the add-in board partners it annoyed back in 1998 when it decided to focus on the retail space by manufacturing its own cards. That move was cemented by the acquisition of board maker STB Systems.

update Jack - And do I get credit for saying this would happen two and a half months ago? "...the conference call had the info that 3dfx will be selling their board manufacturing business and sub-contracting it." Noooooo, of course not... :-)

With 3dfx announcing it's gonna sell chips to 3rd parties again, here is an article speculating at just where it went wrong for the company.

Well its official now, 3dfx has decided to change their business plan (As mentioned yesterday). 3dfx was pretty heavily criticized for their buyout of STB a while back and for once it seems the critics were right. (Or got lucky). This is good news for the rest of us really, assuming 3dfx's next-gen card is competitive which most sources say it will be.

... plans to maintain its dominant retail position, expand into the OEM PC business, and to license its core graphics technology, code-named Mosaic, into non-PC markets. [...] to reduce expenses where possible in order to become more competitive in all of its key markets. The company has decided to outsource its board manufacturing to third party manufacturers and to sell its Juarez, Mexico facility.

``As we expand into new markets, 3dfx Interactive must focus on its core competency - developing leading-edge graphics technology,'' said Alex Leupp

Mosaic eh? I'm assuming thats the stuff from Gigapixel. They've also got that whole Rampage thing going on too.

Already mentioned somewhat during the announcement of the previous quarter results, 3dfx is going to change its strategy, going back to their roots: just make chips. They are going to shut down their card manufacturing plant in Mexico and will just make chips that it will sell to 3rd party manufacturers, which is a pretty significant change. Knowing that that might not be enough, they are also going to be making products for set-top boxes, cellular phones, game consoles and handheld PCs. Will it get them back at the top (making money at least heh) ? Thanks Robert McGovern.

Who knows what Quantum3D might do with this: there's a petition to get Quantum to release the 4-way SLI based card to retail. This for people who were planning to buy a Voodoo5 6000. Saw that on Stomped.

Saw this press release mentioned a couple of times today, where 3dfx announced it's licensing their 4-Way SLI Technology to Quantum3D. While I thought great, that's some impressive SLI, I noticed it mentioned "will not be available in the retail channel", so so much for mentioning it here. However, this SLI technology is described as being "based on the Voodoo5 6000 AGP project" and 3dfx is "sympathetic to the disappointment this may cause to a small number of our loyal gaming consumers" (the fact that it won't be released to retail), which makes it assumable the Voodoo5 6000 project is in fact, dead. Another explanation of this might be, that I am, in fact, retarded.. which could quite well be possible. For the record, the 4-Way SLI that 3dfx is showing off at Comdex is producing 60+FPS at 1600x1200x32 in Quake3.

3dfx has released some new Voodoo5 drivers that include compatibility with DirectX8 and some other fixes. You can grab the Win98 or Win2K dealies.

Some new drivers from 3dfx for all the Voodoo 3 2000/3000 owners. For Win9x/ME and Windows2000. They fix several game related issues so you should probably get it.

There's an interview with 3dfx's Gary Tarolli on the 3D Pulpit, where the Chief Technical Officer talks about the T-Buffer, FSAA, 3dfx's future technology, and a lot more related to 3dfx and video graphics technology.

According to this press release 3dfx plans on showing something interesting at COMDEX. I've heard rumors of it being the Rampage but thats highly doubtful. Something also interesting though is this website seems to be already selling the V5-6000 in Australia?

A little bit more follow-up on that rumor of NVidia and the 3dfx buyout, a statement by a 3dfx employee says it best. "We're not for sale". Thanks ArsTechnica