Three engineers from Silicon Graphics left to put workstation-class 3D graphics into a gamer's home PC. Their company, 3dfx, built the Voodoo chip. Add-in cards using it made games like Quake look and move in ways a normal PC could not. In 1997 the 3D graphics card was a brand new product category, and 3dfx led it. When the company filed to go public that spring, Voodoo was fast becoming the name every PC gamer knew.

Silicon Graphics for the Living Room

Ross Smith, Gary Tarolli, and Scott Sellers founded 3dfx in 1994 with backing from the TechFarm incubator. Silicon Graphics machines cost a fortune. The founders bet that falling memory prices would let them build a cheap chip that did one job well: draw textured 3D triangles at high speed. They first aimed at arcade machines, then at PC add-in cards. Their Glide programming interface gave game developers a direct path to the hardware.

Voodoo to Nvidia

3dfx priced its IPO at $11 a share in June 1997. Voodoo2 followed in 1998 and kept the company on top for a while. In 1999 3dfx bought board maker STB Systems and began selling its own cards, which put it in competition with its former customers. Nvidia and ATI pulled ahead. In December 2000, Nvidia agreed to buy 3dfx's core assets, brands, and patents for $70 million in cash plus one million shares. The remaining company later went bankrupt.

Cover: Mirror View, Yosemite Valley, Mariposa County, Cal., Carleton Watkins. Art Institute of Chicago, public domain. Chosen for a stereograph of Yosemite (seeing in 3D).