GeForce vs. Voodoo5

NVIDIA launches GeForce

While all this was developing, NVIDIA was coming on strong. They had released their GeForce256 chip, which took a nice performance lead over Voodoo3. As a follow up, NVIDIA brought the GeForce2 to market. These two parts offered a considerable number of additional features that 3dfx did not provide with Voodoo5. While 3dfx did offer anti-aliasing that was considerably superior to NVIDIA’s, they had a tough time selling it due to NVIDIA’s aggressive marketing and technology demos. From this, 3dfx lost the majority of their developer support and a considerable amount of consumer confidence.

Voodoo5 6000 problems

In the end, Voodoo5 was a fairly successful product. However, the high-end board, Voodoo5 6000, was forever delayed. There were many happenings with this board, but it boils down to this: 3dfx did not consider the design well enough before the board was announced.

The AGP specification simply was not designed with this type of product in mind. Many attempts were made to work around this, even completely changing the board design and the bridge chip used. Yet in the end, Voodoo5 6000 was canceled in the last weeks of 3dfx.

The specific issue that resulted in the final cancellation was an AGP issue with certain motherboards. While most motherboards did function, there were several that did not quite meet AGP spec, resulting in the boards not functioning. While a BIOS fix on these boards would have likely resolved the issue and though the incompatible boards were few in number, 3dfx chose not release the product. And thus they again failed to retake the performance crown they so badly wanted and lost even more consumer confidence.

While all these events were occurring, 3dfx was losing money. The board manufacturing plant in Mexico was never at capacity, reducing profits on each graphics board sold by roughly 10% from the intended 25% margin. Only in 3dfx’s final months did management decide to start selling out the remaining factory space, filling the product lines. This brought the board plant to near profitability on its own, but this was just one change that was too little, too late.