The Voodoo Banshee

October, 1998: 3dfx releases Banshee

After the stunning failure that was Voodoo RUSH, 3dfx probably felt like they had something to prove with Banshee. This was the first in-house, single chip design that 3dfx had ever shipped, so it would serve as a proof of concept. 3dfx was promising world class 2D, and 3D that would be faster than even the Voodoo 2, thanks to a slightly higher clock rate. All of this in a modern, single-chip design, so costs could be kept low. Sounds great, doesn't it?

But something very unfortunate happened along the way: the world caught up with 3dfx.

In order to prevent cannibalizing sales of the flagship Voodoo 2 card, 3dfx stripped a very important feature from the Banshee: multitexture. Unfortunately for 3dfx, Nvidia's TNT chipset had just hit retail shelves a few weeks before-and it included multitexture, as well as a number of other features that the Banshee did not have. Furthermore, the price difference between the two cards was very small.

Banshee was something of a watershed product for 3dfx. The industry was rapidly moving away from expensive multiple chip, add-on 3D cards. While 3dfx was spending a lot of time re-engineering their product into a single-chip solution with a brand new in-house 2D core, their competitors were already there-and with brand new architectures.

Banshee was a pretty good product, and it delivered. But it wasn't good enough to justify replacing a Voodoo 2 card, and what serious gamer didn't already have a V2? Banshee always felt like a placeholder product to me, a proof of concept so that 3dfx could say "Hey, we do single-chip designs, too!"