Add-in 3D cards make the personal computer a serious games machine

What happened

The first Voodoo boards did nothing at all until a game asked them to. They handled no two-dimensional display, sat alongside an existing graphics card and passed the ordinary desktop picture through a short cable, waking up only when a compatible program took over the screen. Buyers tolerated that oddity because the difference was so obvious. Smoothed textures replaced the blocky crawl of software rendering, frame rates roughly doubled or better, and effects such as fog and transparency arrived at no cost to the processor.

Adoption depended on developers, and 3dfx supplied a programming interface simple enough that they actually used it. Accelerated versions of existing games appeared, most influentially a shooter released that summer, and the improvement was dramatic enough to sell boards by word of mouth alone. A market that had never existed before, upgrading a working computer purely to make games look better, appeared within about a year, along with the magazine culture of benchmarks and frame-rate charts that goes with it.

The company's advantage did not last. Its proprietary interface became a liability once industry-standard alternatives matured, competitors integrated two-dimensional and three-dimensional functions onto a single chip, and 3dfx made a series of manufacturing and acquisition decisions that went badly. Its assets were bought by a rival at the start of the next decade. The habit it created outlived it, since a graphics card is now the component enthusiasts replace most often, and that upgrade cycle still drives a substantial industry.

The world at the time

Through 1995 and early 1996, three-dimensional graphics on a home computer were drawn by the main processor, one pixel at a time. Workstation vendors sold accelerated hardware to engineering firms for tens of thousands of dollars. Arcade boards used custom silicon that never left the cabinet. Nothing in between existed at a price an ordinary person would pay for entertainment.

What it changed

A graphics card industry formed around the new demand and consolidated within a few years into a small number of large firms. Standard programming interfaces displaced proprietary ones. Console makers began buying graphics hardware from those same companies, which eventually made consoles and computers close technical relatives, and the accelerators themselves grew into general-purpose processors used far outside games.