The 3Dfx Saga
It all started a few years ago when 3dfx stunned gamers with their first product, namely Voodoo(1). It had blazing 3D graphics that would run up to 640x480 in full-screen mode, and there was no other video card at that time which could even touch the Voodoo chipset's 3D performance/quality. Over the next year, many attempts were made at de-throning the king of 3D gaming, but many of them fell flat on their face due to compatibility and performance issues.
Then 3dfx tried their luck at an integrated 2D/3D solution, the Voodoo Rush. The main problem that plagued the Voodoo Rush was that its speed performance was well behind that of Voodoo(1). Since 15 inch monitors were the standard of the time, 2D performance wasn't a really important factor in upgrading so Voodoo(1) still remained the best choice.
After the failure of the Voodoo Rush to deliver the goods, Voodoo2 entered the scene in March of last year. It was probably the most anticipated video accelerator to this date. It's performance level was incredible as compared with the Voodoo(1), and its 8-12MB allowed for resolutions up to 800x600. If you could afford a second Voodoo2, you could hook them up in SLI (Scanned Line Interleave) which gave a huge increase in performance and allowed the maximum resolution to increase to 1024x768.
The Banshee was a second attempt by 3dfx to integrate an all-in-one solution 2D/3D graphics accelerator. Just like the Voodoo Rush, It fell short of expectations mainly due to the fact that it didn't support mutli-texturing. In games that utilized multi-texturing capabilities, it severely lagged behind the performance of Voodoo2. A couple of other problems were the fact that it only supported 16-bit rendering while other contenders in the 3D graphics market were offering 32-bit rendering with reasonable speed, and only supporting a maximum resolution of 1024x768.
So all in all, we have a successful 3D add-on card followed by a 2D/3D solution that falls short. Which category does the Voodoo3 fall into? Lets find out...
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