 |
 |
 By Geoffrey Keighley Designed by James Cheung
 raphics is fashion," says Steve Mosher, Vice President of Creative Labs' Graphics Business Unit. If it is so, then 3Dfx Interactive is the Armani of the 3D graphics industry. The Silicon Valley start-up has built an empire with its pret-a-porter 3D accelerator, the Voodoo graphics chip, the most vaunted piece of technology in the business.
The numbers tell the story. Some twenty million 3D accelerated graphics cards are installed in home PCs - and six million of those are 3Dfx-based. There are more games written for GLIDE, 3Dfx's proprietary graphics protocol, than for any competing standard, by far.
And in case you hadn't noticed, as we enter 1999, there are plenty of entities vying for their affection. Nvidia, ATI, 3D Labs, S3, and a host of others are all seeking to narrow - or eliminate altogether - the gap between their products and 3Dfx's, and to claim the high ground as king of the 3D hill. It's ironic but true that today, at the very pinnacle of its success, 3Dfx faces threats on more fronts and from more competitors than it has at any previous time in its history. One faux pas on the part of 3Dfx might be all that's needed to shake their hold on the market. There's no room for hubris. Can they withstand the challenge? It depends on who you ask. Critics claim that 3Dfx got lucky once and hasn't innovated since. Supporters retort that 3Dfx is the first company to understand that brand and content mean as much as or even more than price and performance, and that their investment in developing both will serve them well in the years ahead. Whatever you believe, if you want to make an intelligent guess as to where 3Dfx is heading, you have to understand where they've been. And so, in this, our inaugural Behind the Games feature, we'll explore the history of 3Dfx. We'll talk to the developers, technologists, and entrepreneurs who made 3Dfx what it is today, and examine the critical events that allowed it to achieve such astounding success. Then we'll look to the future, to the competing companies and technologies that threaten to bring 3Dfx back down to earth. It's a fascinating story. Here's how it begins...
Next:
Once Upon A Time |
|||||||||||||||
