I know it's just an April Fool's Day joke, but man, what if it wasn't?
https://www.dsogaming.com/news/3dfx-re-enters-the-gpu-market-shows-off-an-rtx4090-killer-with-30gb-of-vram-at-1000/
I have such fond memories of 3DFX. It really was a top-of-the-line
card, and truly transformative for gaming. I actually jumped onto the
3DFX bandwagon fairly late; I got stuck for a while on VLB cards
(anyone else remember the short-lived Vesa Local Bus craze?), and then
mucked about with 3DFX competitors, like Matrox and Diamond. (My logic
being that surely those companies, having released their products
/after/ 3DFX, were offering a better product).
But eventually I acquired a Canopus 3DFX (with a whopping SIX
megabytes of video memory, a whole 3MB of which were dedicated solely
to textures, wowie-zowie!), and it really was a night-and-day
difference. The first game I tried with that new card was, of course,
Quake. It wasn't just the smoother framerates that impressed me,
although being able to jump from a jittery 512x384 to a buttery smooth
800x600 (an unbelievable resolution for games at the time) was
impressive. But glQuake also /looked/ better, with nicer textures and
colors. And it while Quake was the first game to prove the value of my
3DFX card, it wasn't the last; every game - Mechwarrior 2, Tomb
Raider, Screamer - looked and played better with that hardware.
It wasn't too last, of course. Video hardware was advancing in leaps
and bounds, and any PC gamer who wanted to stay relevant had to
upgrade frequently... often, it felt, on a monthly basis. I skipped
the Voodoo 2; the main advantages of that card were built-in 2D
rendering and my Canopus 6MB was almost as fast in 3D. But I knew that
my next card was going to be a Voodoo 3. Which, as much as I loved it
(so much so that I kept it for twenty years and it's now powering my
recently built Windows98 PC), it was also a disappointment almost from
day one.
Oh, sure, the Voodoo3 was fast enough... although it didn't quite have
the insane edge over its competitors as did its predecessors. But that
16-bit color limitation became increasingly apparent as newer games
hit the market. "Quake II" ran without hiccough, but it never looked
quite as nice as those screenshots of the game running on TNT (it was
most obvious when the game used transparent effects like smoke or
glass).
Still, even if I started lusting after those new-fangled 'GeForce'
cards from nvidia pretty quickly, that Voodoo3 served me faithfully
for several years. When I finally parted with it (jumping to a GeForce
2), it wasn't without a tinge of regret. Had I known that 3DFX's time
was limited, I might have kept that card a bit longer... or maybe
jumped to a Voodoo5 just to keep that feeling of 3DFX magic a bit
longer.
I can't help but imagine a future where 3DFX was still a working
concern in today's gaming industry. They helped transform PC gaming
into the weird and wonderful thing we have today, and who knows what
other wonders they might have pushed through had they a bit more
business sense. So, sure, today's announcement might be nothing but an
April Fool's Day joke, but between the nostalgic vibe it brings, and
allowing me to imagine a better, alternate timeline, it's a welcome
joke.
Now tell me that Gravis is making a comeback too. ;-)
--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)