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3dfx Mac Team Disbanded
4:07 PM | Michael Eilers | Comment on this story
Former 3dfxemployee Ray Swartz, one of the members of the Mac driver development team, has seemingly confirmed that Mac development has already ceased at 3dfx following their acquisition by NVIDIA. In a post on MacCentral's forums, Ray responded to a thread discussing any future Mac OS X support for the Voodoo4 4500 and Voodoo5 5500 2D/3D cards. His reply was to the point, and heartbreaking for many Mac gamers: Yes, I was one of five engineers on the Mac Team. We are now unemployed. We also spoke to Duane Johnson, a Mac programmer (you might know him as the author behind Mac Elite Force and many other key projects) who was just hired by 3dfx mere weeks before this development. In his reply he noted that 3dfx's decision to sell their assets and dissolve was a shock, and seemed to confirm that his job had also been terminated. Here's an excerpt:First, this was a total shock, we (the grunt level employees) know that
the finances were not rosy, but had no idea they were that bad. And I
have to say they were quite irresponsible in their hiring practices,
they brought on two new people in Austin just two weeks ago & most of
the Mac team were in some stage of relocating to Austin.
They showed a keen interest in acquiring my debugging skills at Aspyr
world. And had some fantastic products in works that were going to be
great to work on. The Austin location was also a big plus.
There is a new driver that is basically ready to go, Stephane has some
speed improvements, Ray has some RAVE bug fixes, & I have fixed the
screen shot bug. We'd like to make it available, but don't know who has
control of such things.
There has been no new news out of NVIDIA about their Mac plans. In the
financial conference call this morning they mentioned picking up around
100 engineers from 3dfx. But there is no info about what that make up
is.
Hopefully, more information will be made public soon. If the Mac drivers are indeed frozen in development, it seems unlikely the V4 and V5 cards will ever have Mac OS X compatibility, a serious blow to gamers who were looking forward to that platform. We'll keep you informed of other developments, but as of now the future of 3dfx cards on the Mac OS seems grim.
 MacCentral Forum Post by Ray Swartz
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