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As news of 3dfx' buyout by NVIDIA sweeps through the gaming community, several game developers spoke to VoodooExtreme about this shocking development. All of them agree that 3dfx was responsible for the revolution in 3D graphics, but their missed product cycle was mainly responsible for their demise. Here is id Software's John Carmack's take on the situation:

John Carmack: I have been on 3dfx's technical advisory board for a long time now, and it has been pretty frustrating. We had been meeting quarterly since before Voodoo2 shipped, and the product features we had been discussing the entire time still haven't shipped in a product (rampage).

It was painful to watch 3dfx slip from the archetypical kick-ass technology start up to where they wound up.

I think I would have been happiest to have the PC market divided up between three strong players that all had their act together, but at this point, I'm not too unhappy with the market simplification resulting from 3dfx exiting.

Evil Avatar has also posted the lengthy remarks of Epic Games' Tim Sweeny (Unreal Tournament). Sweeny brings up several good points concerning 3dfx' downfall and also has some harsh words for Gigapixel's tile-based rendering technology.

NVidia needs to bury the whole Gigapixel chunking architecture they're inhereting. It was a horrible idea. Capturing all your geometry and buffering it up in RAM for later rendering in little chunks was a horrible idea when VideoLogic ran it into the ground; it was a horrible idea when Gigapixel ran it into the ground; and it was still a horrible idea when 3dfx ran it into the ground.

John Carmack on 3dfx (VE)

Tim Sweeny on 3dfx (Evil Avatar)

Brian Hook on 3dfx (VE)

George Broussard on 3dfx (VE)

Joby Otero on 3dfx (VE)

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