3dfx: So powerful it’s kind of ridiculous
My first video accelerator was the Nvidia NV-1 because a friend of mine was on the design team and he assured me that NURBs were going to be the dominant rendering model since you could do a sphere with just 6 of them,  whereas triangles needed like 50 and it still looked like crap. But Nvidia was so tight fisted with development details and all their &quot;secret sauce&quot; none of my programs ever worked on it.<p>Then I bought a 3DFx Voodoo card and started using Glide and it was night and day. I had something up the first day and every day thereafter it seemed to get more and more capable. That was a lot of fun.<p>In my opinion, Direct X was what killed it most. OpenGL was well supported on the Voodoo cards and Microsoft was determined to kill anyone using OpenGL (which they didn&#x27;t control) to program games if they could. After about 5 years (Direct X 7 or 8) it had reached feature parity but long before that the &quot;co marketing&quot; dollars Microsoft used to enforce their monopoly had done most of the work.<p>Sigh.