A new 3dfx

The end of an era?

On October 7th, 3dfx issued a shocking announcement: the resignation of CEO Greg Ballard. Competition for 3dfx was on the rise, with competitors hawking new products and a much ballyhooed hardware-accelerated transform and lighting technologies. 3dfx on the other hand, had just announced that they would miss the Christmas 1999 season, with unforeseen delays on their next generation Napalm series of 3d accelerators, the Voodoo4 and Voodoo5.

It looked like the company might be entering a dark age, especially with Ballard's statement:

"I truly believe that the challenges in this next phase of the Company's growth will be more technical than marketing and strategic and that 3dfx can benefit from the fresh perspective that a new CEO can bring…"

Better and faster hardware

Did this mean that 3dfx was having trouble competing against the likes of Nvidia and S3 on an engineering or design/concept side? While the two aforementioned competitors were pushing more of the graphics pipeline to hardware, 3dfx's latest generation of 3d was to move back to a multiple-chip chipset, and push the "old faithful" numbers of pixel and texture fillrate.

So is 3dfx taking a step forwards or backwards with the Voodoo4 and Voodoo5? More importantly, will this hardware be able to push the company back to the forefront of technology they enjoyed with the Voodoo and Voodoo2 accelerators? And who will lead the company to into the new age? A conference call set up for yesterday answered some of these questions for us, and introduced us to 3dfx's newly named President and CEO, Dr. Alex Leupp.