Some thoughts on nVidia and 3dfx

I remember ´back in the day´, when I thought that it just couldn´t get any better than my dual Diamond Monster 3D 2´s, in SLI mode. I was a huge initial fan of 3dfx, and I think we all owe them more than a little gratitude for raising the bar for quality and performance. Before the Voodoo line, the graphics quality of PC games was feeble compared to those on the various console systems. The PC had far more overall horsepower, but no real way to exploit it without quality 3D hardware. Certainly, one could pay thousands of dollars for a high end workstation graphics adapter, but there was really no software in the gaming/entertainment arena written to those cards. People don´t spend the price of an entire PC on a graphics card to play DOOM, they do it to use CAD software, or to do complex molecular modeling, etc. You get the point. For those of you who don´t; 3dfx opened the door to a whole new level of rich, 3D graphics content on the PC.