The 3Dfx Era

The SST-1. The card that started the 3D revolution.

Attempt to combine 2D and 3D on one card. Slower than Voodoo1 due to memory bandwidth contention.

The monster. 3 chips (1 Pixel, 2 Texture). Supported SLI (Scan-Line Interleave) to chain two cards together.

Budget single-chip 2D/3D card. Only 1 Texture Unit, so multitexturing was slower.

The last stand. Dual VSA-100 chips on one huge AGP card. Needed external power.

The "3D Decelerator". Marketed as the first 3D accelerator for the masses, but 3D performance was often slower than software rendering. Excellent 2D though.

ATI's first serious 3D contender. The Rage Pro improved things significantly. Ubiquitous in OEM machines but gamers preferred 3dfx.

Legendary 2D quality with passable 3D. Matrox was known for the sharpest, most accurate 2D image quality. Perfect for CAD and business.

The cards that made NVIDIA. Riva 128 was fast but had poor image quality. TNT fixed that. TNT2 dominated. These cards killed 3dfx.

The first GPU. Hardware Transform & Lighting moved geometry processing from CPU to graphics card. A paradigm shift.

The first true consumer 3D accelerator. Beat Voodoo to market but lost the war. Programmable in an era of fixed function.