Wednesday, August 4th 2021
Seemingly Fake Twitter Account Claims the Return of 3dfx Interactive
Nostalgia is perhaps the most present feeling among many gamers across the globe, and someone is seemingly playing with ours as there is a Twitter account claiming the return of a company that has been dead for 20 years. 3dfx Interactive, once a giant in the graphics card industry, is allegedly returning after 20 years to give gamers a new choice of a graphics card. According to a Twitter account that claims that 3dfx Interactive is returning, we are seeing a massive amount of hype being built around the seemingly fake and bad attempt of playing with our nostalgia.
3dfx went bankrupt in 2000 and was acquired by NVIDIA, who took over the rights to trademarks and everything involved with the brand. In the latest tweet, the alleged resurrected company is claiming a return after 20 years. It says that Jansen Products, also an alleged investment firm, that we couldn't find in any database of registered firms, is now the owner of 3dfx Interactive brand and its trademarks. A simple Google search points towards a Belgian building firm, not an alleged San Francisco investment company.. Together, this is making the alleged return seem just like a joke, as someone must be playing with many gamers that used 3dfx's famous Voodoo lineup of graphics cards.
Building a modern GPU is a very difficult task, even for the folks like NVIDIA and AMD. It requires a massive R&D budget to develop a GPU that offers competitive performance, and a huge amount of highly skilled engineers to design a chip. A successful chip tapeout, along with the development of drivers and software, is also very difficult to achieve, so we are deeming this as a fake attempt to produce hype around an old brand that is no longer relevant in the fast-paced technology industry. On the other hand, we've seen brands like Commodore, Atari attempt returns, with limited success. Also it could be that the "new 3dfx" is simply another NVIDIA AIC—like MSI, ASUS, Gigabyte and others, who buy GPUs from NVIDIA and build their own boards around that, using NVIDIA's technology exclusively.
Source:
3dfx Twitter Account
3dfx went bankrupt in 2000 and was acquired by NVIDIA, who took over the rights to trademarks and everything involved with the brand. In the latest tweet, the alleged resurrected company is claiming a return after 20 years. It says that Jansen Products, also an alleged investment firm, that we couldn't find in any database of registered firms, is now the owner of 3dfx Interactive brand and its trademarks. A simple Google search points towards a Belgian building firm, not an alleged San Francisco investment company.. Together, this is making the alleged return seem just like a joke, as someone must be playing with many gamers that used 3dfx's famous Voodoo lineup of graphics cards.
55 Comments on Seemingly Fake Twitter Account Claims the Return of 3dfx Interactive
I love an good idea when it strike, I think Intek had an good idea here.
I still love SLI on my gaming rig at home 4k just runs smoother on SLI vs a single card.
ALso quieter and cooling since the load is spread across two GPU's.
Nvidia used to be cool in the days when you could SLI two cheaper cards to get same performance as one of the most expensive cards they sold.
Then they got greedy.
In a world where you would play in 320x240 software resolution any 3D games back then, 3DFx blow everything out of water with their Voodoo accelerator. The visual difference it was to huge compared to the existing software rendering back then. I had a 486 DX66 with 8MB of RAM back then and was playing all the awesome 3D games like Wolfenstein, Doom, Duke Nukem 3D, NFS1, Carmageddon, etc, and then Quake 1 came. The atmosphere and graphics of that game was and still is, the best of any game ever produced, and I was playing it on 320x400 resolution on my 15" monitor :)
Then after months, I received as a present a 3DFx VooDoo card with 6MB or VRAM. Then I've loaded QuakeGL executable for 3DFx.....
The rest is history.
This ain't the 3dfx from the 90s anymore.
Move along folks, nothing to see here.
And listing of Voodoo6 PCI is a gem on its own.
If this isn't some guy scheming in his basement, I don't what is.
And phones and smart TVs plus hardware wtaf, hell no sir your ruining 3DFX's already tarnished lore.
I expected mouse Matt's though so I suppose it's better than that.
Nvidia bought 3dfx in 2000. Last year 20 years have passed. How long does the trademark/brand name registration/protection last?
On the link you sent it says status - canceled. I don't know what that means in legal terms, but sounds like it is available.
Whoever is behind this can't even pay for a domain apparently. BTW, arcticmail doesn't respond and it's bound to expire tomorrow.
Besides, making brand new GPUs today? They'd have to get through a minefield of IP patents. Not gonna happen.
Move on, people, outside of the current GPU brands in existence (Intel, AMD, Nvidia, and whatever is happening in mobile world with Adreno/Mali and whatever the name is for Apple's own IGPs), there will be no more new GPU makers. Save for maybe that Chinese Big Island or whatever it's called.
I honestly do not believe that's the case.
It can be reactivated elsewhere once it's expired/canceled.