3dfx Oral History Panel with Ross Smith, Scott Sellers, Gary Tarolli, and Gordon Campbell
Why Hacker News recommends it
Recommended as the definitive retrospective on 3dfx, with first-hand stories about engineering hacks and design philosophy.
What it is
A Computer History Museum oral history panel with four 3dfx founders on the company's rise with Voodoo Graphics and Glide, and its fall into bankruptcy. It runs about two and a half hours.
Recommended by 3 HN commenters across 2 different months, 2017 to 2023.
What Hacker News said
Strong rec djmips · 2023-03 · on “3dfx: So powerful it’s kind of ridiculous”
This is a really great retrospective on 3dfx from four of the founders. 3dfx Oral History Panel with Ross Smith, Scott Sellers, Gary Tarolli, and Gordon Campbell (Computer History Museum) [this video]
Strong rec aldrich · 2023-03 · on “3dfx: So powerful it’s kind of ridiculous”
History is funny because at that time in the 90s there was a company called Bitboys Oy. That company was founded by some Finnish demoscene members and was developing a series of graphics cards, Pyramid3D and Glaze3D, with a programmable pipeline around 1997-1999 [1]. This was at around 5 years before the first commercial shader capable card was released. Even though Wikipedia classifies it as vaporware, there are prototype cards and manuals floating around showing that these cards were in fact designed and contained programmable pixel shaders, notably: - The Pyramid3D GPU datasheet: [LINK] - The pitch deck: [LINK] - The hardware reference manual: [LINK] (shows even more internals!) (As far t
Recommends rasz · 2018-02 · on “Fall of Voodoo”
You might also like watching Computer History Museums "3dfx Oral History Panel with Ross Smith, Scott Sellers, Gary Tarolli, and Gordon Campbell" [this video] Ross Smith, Scott Sellers and Gary Tarolli were 3dfx founders, they left Silicon Graphics to do this startup.
Cites rasz · 2017-05 · on “Volta: Advanced Data Center GPU”
Creators of Voodoo (3dfx = Gary Tarolli, Scott Sellers) came from the world of fully programmable GPUs. Silicon Graphics workstations had full T&L since ~1988 ( [LINK] ). The whole point of Voodoo 1 was making it as simple and cheap as possible by removing all the advanced features and calculating geometry/lighting on the CPU. [this video]