March 10, 2023
A developer advocate is someone who promotes the interests of developers and helps developers make it easier for them to use software to achieve their goals. According to job search site ZipRecruiter, a developer in this role is the voice of the developer community with insights related to improving or changing a product, listens to the problems developers face, finds solutions to them, and helps companies solve these problems. serves as an aerator. ⓒ Getty Images Bank
Becoming a Developer Advocate requires years of experience in application development and user experience. You also need to understand the challenges developers may face when using a particular platform. Other than that, you need strong communication skills, the ability to listen to other people’s concerns and develop actionable plans to solve them. To find out how to become a Developer Advocate, I spoke with Hubert Nguyen, Senior Developer Advocate at MongoDB, a database software company. start of career
Nguyen studied computer science for two years with an emphasis on databases at HEIG Marnes La Vallee, a private school near Paris, France. The US government recognized Nguyen’s French degree in 1995 and four years of professional experience in France as equivalent to a bachelor’s degree in computer science in the United States. “I learned this while preparing to immigrate to the United States and getting help from an immigration lawyer with the translation and evaluation of my diploma,” Nguyen explained. MongoDB Senior Developer Advocate Hubert Nguyen © MongoDB
As a child, Nguyen was interested in architecture, but after first encountering a video game console, he was fascinated by the pixelated graphics of arcade games and early consumer-level computers and consoles, and wanted to become a game programmer. “I liked making things,” Nguyen said. He always drew on paper, and the possibilities of computer graphics seemed promising, if not infinite. It’s ironic considering how primitive these graphics are today.”  Back then, high schools didn’t offer many computer science classes, and computers were still expensive. Passion for 3D graphics
While studying at HEIG, Nguyen worked as a software engineer on the research and development team at Cryo Interactive Entertainment, a game developer and publisher. “At the time, there was no formal ‘game coding’ curriculum, so everyone had to teach themselves,” Nguyen said. He was part of a small R&D team writing a next-generation 3D engine, focusing on 3D rendering code in assembly language, a skill he learned in a coding contest.”
In 1999, Nguyen joined computer hardware company 3DFX Interactive as a senior software engineer. After spending several months doing developer support jobs, he joined the Developer Technology Group to demonstrate the power of the 3DFX GPU. “The PC graphics business was booming, but competition was fierce,” said Nguyen. The day before the holiday, 3DFX went bankrupt, and all of its intellectual property was due to be acquired by rival Nvidia. It was the beginning of a truly wonderful vacation,” he recalled. But while Nguyen was on vacation, Nvidia offered him a position as a graphics engineer on the demo team. As I did at 3DFX, my job was to conduct research and development on next-generation 3D graphics rendering technology. Nguyen explained that 3D graphics rendering technology motivates game developers to adopt new GPU 3D features in upcoming games, which in turn leads to adoption of new GPUs. “It’s been a great way to accelerate the adoption of new hardware in a situation where general computing isn’t possible with GPUs,” he said. My position at Nvidia was the same type of work I was doing at 3DFX, but I could use better and faster 3D hardware. A few years later, Nguyen was appointed Developer Training Manager, managing the creation, production, and distribution of computer graphics training materials such as NVIDIA’s developer website, publications, and conferences. *The article has been translated based on the content of ITWorld Korea by www.itworld.co.kr . If there is any problem regarding the content, copyright, please leave a report below the article. We will try to process as quickly as possible to protect the rights of the author. Thank you very much! *We just want readers to access information more quickly and easily with other multilingual content, instead of information only available in a certain language. *We always respect the copyright of the content of the author and always include the original link of the source article.If the author disagrees, just leave the report below the article, the article will be edited or deleted at the request of the author. Thanks very much! Best regards! Report Content

Career Roadmap |  Developer Advocate ‘supporting the growth of developers’

What does a developer advocate do and how can you start on this rewarding career path? A MongoDB developer advocate shares his story and tips for success. Table of Contents
Show More
A developer advocate is someone who promotes the interests of developers and works to make it easier for them to use software to accomplish their goals. Developers in this role are "the voice of a community of developers who may have insight into enhancing or changing a product,” according to ZipRecruiter. “Your duties are to listen to the issues that developers are having [...] research possible ways to address these problems, and bring them to the attention of the company that makes the product.”
IDG
Hubert Nguyen is a senior developer advocate for MongoDB. To become a developer advocate, an individual should have spent several years working in the application development and user experience fields, ZipRecruiter says. You also should be able to understand the issues developers might face when trying to use a particular platform. Other attributes include strong communication skills and the ability to listen to people’s concerns and develop actionable plans for addressing them. To find out what’s involved in becoming a developer advocate, I spoke with Hubert Nguyen, senior developer advocate at the database software company, MongoDB. Early education and interests
Nguyen attended HEIG Marnes La Vallee, a private school near Paris, France, where he studied computer science for two years with an emphasis on databases. There's no one-to-one equivalent to a US degree, he says, but the French degree he earned in 1995, along with four years of professional experience in France, was deemed by the US government to be equivalent to a Bachelor of Science degree in computer science. “I learned of this during my US immigration process, when my immigration attorneys arranged for the translation and evaluation of my diploma,” Nguyen says. As a child, Nguyen had an interest in architecture, but seeing the first videogame consoles made him want to become a game programmer. “I always liked building things, and software engineering is a career where I do just that,” he says. High school didn’t offer much in computer science at the time and computers were still expensive, Nguyen says. “However, I was fascinated by the pixel graphics of arcade games and early consumer-level computers and consoles,” he says. “I always had a knack for drawing on paper, and the possibilities of computer graphics seemed promising, if not unlimited. It's ironic given how primitive these graphics were.”
A passion for 3D graphics
While still studying at HEIG, Nguyen worked for the game development and publishing company Cryo Interactive Entertainment as a research and development (R&D team) software engineer. “At this time, there was no formal ‘game coding’ curriculum and everyone was self-taught,” Nguyen says. “I was part of the small R&D team tasked to write the company's next-generation 3D engine. My area of focus was 3D rendering code, mostly in assembly language, a skill I had acquired from coding contests.”
In 1999, Nguyen joined computer hardware company 3DFX Interactive as a senior software engineer. He spent a few months doing developer support work, then joined the Developer Technology Group to code 3D graphics applications and techniques to demonstrate the power of the 3DFX graphics processing unit (GPU). “The PC graphics business was booming, but was also extremely competitive, and a day prior to my departure to a nice European vacation, 3DFX announced it was going under and all of its intellectual property would be acquired by arch-rival NVIDIA,” Nguyen says. “What a great start to my vacation.”
But while Nguyen was on vacation, NVIDIA offered him a position as a graphics engineer on its Demo Team. “This group is also meant to do the same kind of research and development on next-generation 3D graphics rendering techniques,” he says. Such techniques would inspire game developers to adopt new GPU 3D features in their upcoming games, which would spur new GPUs adoption, Nguyen says. “This was a great way to accelerate new hardware adoption at a time when GPUs were [not] yet capable of general computing,” he says. The position at NVIDIA was essentially the same type of job he was doing at 3DFX, Nguyen says, but with better, faster 3D hardware After several years Nguyen was named manager of developer education at the company, managing the creation, production, and distribution of computer graphics educational material such as the NVIDIA developer website, publications, and conferences. Becoming a developer advocate
In August 2007, Nguyen left NVIDIA to pursue a new venture, Ubergizmo , a consumer technology media company he co-founded as a hobby. “The site quickly became popular, got mentions from big media, and gathered a great following,” he says. With his background, Nguyen could write about technology with a different perspective. At the same time, his programming skills let him and his team run the website cost-effectively with near-perfect Google Speed performance scores. In 2014, they built a product database with complex data structures typically found in much larger websites. “That database was built using an impressive up-and-coming developer data platform, MongoDB,” he says. At a very high level, our job as developer advocates is to make other developers better and more productive. And this led to Nguyen’s current position as a senior developer advocate at MongoDB. “During the pandemic, I had helped some businesses boost their online presence and I really liked helping other developers and entrepreneurs improve their immediate technical skills,” he says. “I wanted more. I tried freelancing and it was nice, but the jobs were repetitive because people tend to hire you based on something you had previously done.”
Nguyen learned that MongoDB was looking for developer advocates, so he applied to a position that seemed like a perfect match for his skills and interests. “As a paying MongoDB customer, I already knew important aspects of the product and could bring that organic customer perspective with me,” he says. In his new role, “there is much more to learn because MongoDB's platform has such breadth and depth,” he says. “I need to be able to help the broadest possible spectrum of developers.”
Typical workday or week
“At a very high level, our job as developer advocates is to make other developers better and more productive,” Nguyen says. “On a daily basis, it might be implemented by writing technical articles, code samples, or applications in the MongoDB developer center.”
Nguyen might also be presenting at a conference including the company’s own MongoDB World. “Our team also has a podcast, produces YouTube videos, [and] contributes to our developer forums and to in-person developer community events,” he says. “These are the most visible aspects of developer advocacy. Internally, some developer advocate's demos and workshops are subsequently re-used by field engineers, sales, and marketing.”
A typical week involves working on a mix of these activities, based on ever-changing developer needs and wants. “At any given time, I have about five projects in flight that I juggle,” Nguyen says. “This is a team activity too, and it is common for several of us to work on a project.”
Learning on the job
After the onboarding process at MongoDB, “our team has an internal training program to help new developer advocates quickly grasp the most critical aspects of MongoDB,” Nguyen says. “In my case, I joined with some experience of the MongoDB platform, but as an external developer I only had a narrow set of knowledge required to make my product work. As developer advocates, we need to have a much broader understanding of ‘data’ in general. Developers have been using all kinds of legacy data systems, and we must be as knowledgeable as possible to relate with their struggles and show them how they could be more productive.”
Memorable career moments
In 2000, Nguyen was on stage at the 3DFX Immersion event during the Game Developer Conference. “It was my first professional talk and I presented [two demonstrations] to hundreds of developers, including my former Cryo colleagues seated in the front row,” he says. “The audience gave a standing ovation, and that's something I'll never forget.”
During the original iPad launch, Ubergizmo was at the event and featured a "live blog" site with minute-by-minute text and photo updates. “The consumer interest was so huge, other tech sites were crashing one after the other so people flocked to Ubergizmo,” Nguyen says. “Our infrastructure held up and within that hour we had accumulated more than 6 million views. What a blast!”
Biggest inspirations
“As a child, I was fascinated by animation movies and anime, so the creativity of people like Walt Disney or prolific Japanese manga author Tsukasa Hojo have been inspirations for me,” Nguyen says. “At age nine I could accurately draw the poster of Disney's 'The Rescuers.' In my teens, I often drew characters from the manga 'City Hunter. '”
It was the introduction of 3D games that Nguyen says changed his life and career path. “The work of talented game developers like Yu Suzuki (SEGA) inspired me to be one of the first hobbyists to create animated 3D fighters in a coding contest,” he says. “Watching programming geniuses [showed] how much a small team could handle in the mid-'90s and 2000s. They inspired me to write my first 3D engine from scratch. From a business standpoint, NVIDIA's CEO Jensen Huang is the most talented and visionary leader I have interacted with. It was amazing to see him operate and motivate thousands of people towards a clearly defined goal.”
Best career advice
“My mom always told me ‘find a job you enjoy,’ and I certainly followed that one,” Nguyen says. “The NVIDIA Demo Team taught me to be a team player, as it was a colossal group effort where individual contributions are celebrated and credit was given. No one was ever left behind. One of my employers emphasized to be confident yet humble. It's okay to embrace failure if you learn something from it. It's impossible to innovate without failing—often—along the way.”
“Listen to others and have empathy,” Nguyen says. “Listening and understanding others is really important to figure out what others might be struggling with before helping them. You need good communication skills to educate and help developers improve their knowledge and skills. Love learning. Be curious. You're at the forefront of a technology that moves fast, and it takes a lot of work to keep up.”
Related:

IT career roadmap: Developer advocate

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.

Seemingly Fake Twitter Account Claims the Return of 3dfx Interactive

TechSpot
Founded in San Jose, California in 1994 by a trio of former Silicon Graphics employees, 3Dfx got its start making hardware for arcade machines . The company’s first-gen Voodoo chipset powered arcade hits like San Francisco Rush, ICE Home Run Derby and Wayne Gretzky’s 3D Hockey. But by the second half of 1996, memory prices had dipped significantly which turned 3Dfx's attention to the consumer PC market. 3Dfx's Voodoo graphics consisted of a 3D-only add-in card that required a VGA cable pass-through from a separate 2D card to the Voodoo, which then connected to the display. The cards were sold by a large number of companies. Orchid Technologies was first to market with the $299 Orchid Righteous 3D, a board noted for having mechanical relays that “clicked” when the chipset was in use. That card was followed by Diamond Multimedia’s Monster 3D, the Canopus Pure3D, Colormaster Voodoomania, Quantum3D Obsidian, Miro Hiscore, Skywell Magic3D, among others. Voodoo Graphics revolutionized personal computer graphics nearly overnight and rendered many other designs obsolete, including a vast swathe of 2D-only graphics producers. The 3D landscape in 1996 favored S3 with around 50% of the market. That was to change soon, however. It was estimated that 3Dfx accounted for 80-85% of the 3D accelerator market during the heyday of Voodoo’s reign. Eventually most of 3Dfx's competition came from companies that were already established in the market producing 2D graphics, and were meaning to produce combo cards capable of 2D and 3D. While these products didn't match the image quality or performance of Voodoo, their lower price points and ease of use made them a hit with many OEMs. Demand and public's interest was there for the taking. At the time, 3Dfx appeared to be in a unique position where it didn't make graphics cards directly, but sold its chipset to third-party OEMs to use in their own branded cards. The company thought this was an issue which would attempt to address later in its life, but more on that in a bit. 3Dfx's answer to the combo card came a year later with the launch of the Voodoo Rush, which paired its original Voodoo accelerator with a 2D graphics chip on the same board. The Rush carried the same specifications as a standalone Voodoo but because it had to share memory bandwidth with the 2D chip, performance suffered. 3Dfx attempted to remedy this with later revisions featuring more memory and higher clock speeds but it was all for nothing. The Voodoo Rush was discontinued less than a year after launch. On a personal note... The December 1995 issue of GamePro magazine featured a piece on DigiPen , a school in Vancouver that teaches video game programming. News of this "Applied Computer Graphics" school couldn’t have come at a better time as my computer teacher had just issued an assignment regarding our dream job and how it might relate to technology. I knew right then and there what I was destined to do. I’d been into video games for as long as I can remember. For a brief period in the mid-80s, my aunt owned and operated a video rental store. It was the sort of shop you’d find in any small town before Blockbuster monopolized the industry, with a respectable selection of movies and – most importantly for us kids – Nintendo games. This only further solidified my interest in gaming. I was fully enveloped by the late 90s, having laid claim to nearly every major console on the market. Nary a week would go by that I didn’t receive at least a few issues of the latest gaming mag in the mail. Heck, I even circled release dates on my calendar and counted down the days until launch in earnest. So there I was, an impressionable 13-year-old in computer class with his entire life already charted out. I’d finish grade school, get accepted into DigiPen, graduate with some sort of degree and start living the dream of making video games. In hindsight, that’s probably how it would have played out had my other interest – the personal computer – not intervened. I got my first computer in 1998 and it literally changed the entire trajectory of my life. I was still into gaming, mind you, but the focus immediately shifted from consoles to the PC and it didn’t take long to realize that my AMD K6-2 CPU with 3DNow! instruction set needed some help in the graphics department. Enter 3Dfx Interactive. The pinnacle of 3Dfx’s relatively short run – and where my story intersects with them – came in 1998 with the launch of the wildly successful Voodoo2. Built on a 350 nm manufacturing process, the Voodoo2 upped the ante with faster core and memory clock speeds of 90 MHz, respectively, up from 50 MHz on the first-gen Voodoo. There was simply nothing that could compete with it, let alone when a game had implemented the proprietary Glide API (before Direct3D and OpenGL were seen as standard). 3Dfx also added a second texture mapping unit in Voodoo2, which allowed two textures to be drawn in a single pass without a performance hit. They went back to being a pure 3D accelerator, and the work put in resonated with gamers. 3Dfx's Voodoo and Voodoo2 chipsets are widely credited with jump-starting 3D gaming. Some even consider this period to be the golden era for PC gaming with titles like Quake, Quake 2, Need for Speed II: SE, Virtua Fighter 2, Resident Evil, Tomb Raider, Diablo II, Unreal, and Rainbow Six all effectively making great use of the Glide API. As Shamus Young so eloquently put it, "it was after the stone age of DOS, but before the four horsemen of bugs, DRM, graphics fixation, and console-itis came in and made a mess of things." For a deeper dive on this subject, check out our compilation of some of the best 3Dfx Glide games ever created. The Voodoo2 was also noteworthy in that it introduced SLI (Scan-Line Interleave), a process in which two Voodoo 2 cards could be linked together and run simultaneously to theoretically double the graphics processing performance. SLI allowed for higher resolutions, up to 1,024 x 768, but compatibility issues and the sheer cost associated with buying two high-end graphics cards kept the feature squarely in the arena of enthusiasts and hardcore gamers. SLI would get a mulligan years later courtesy of Nvidia. Now known as Scalable Link Interface, the idea behind the modern implementation is the same although technology that powers it is quite different than what 3Dfx first introduced. Watch this video: 3Dfx Interactive documentary circa 1997
This video shows the company on its early success, right before launching the very successful Voodoo2 add-in card
"... we were doing tests on a very popular game called "GL Quake" and it was running at 120 frames per second, which is just silly, I mean nobody's going to run a game and add at that kind of frame rate or want to, but what it illustrates is the headroom that's available for developers"
3Dfx would revisit the 2D / 3D combo card idea with the Voodoo Banshee and even submitted a design for Sega’s Dreamcast game console, but was ultimately passed over in favor of a chipset from NEC. Things only went downhill from there as 3Dfx decided to acquire video card manufacturer STB Systems for $141 million in a bid to make its own video cards rather than continuing to serve as an OEM supplier. In raw 3D performance, the Voodoo 2 had no equal, but the competition was gaining ground fast. Amid increasing competition from ATI and Nvidia, 3Dfx looked to retain a higher profit line by marketing and selling the boards themselves, something that was previously handled by a lengthy list of board partners. That's where the STB acquisition made sense, but the venture proved a giant misstep as quality and cost of manufacture from the foundry used by the company could not compete with TSMC (used by Nvidia) or UMC (used by ATI). Many of 3Dfx’s former partners formed ties with Nvidia instead. The first of 3Dfx’s Voodoo3 series arrived in 1999, backed by an extensive television and print advertising campaign, a new logo – now with a small “d” – and vivid box art. The company’s Voodoo3 and subsequent releases were not made available to hardware partners, effectively turning third-party manufacturing partners into rivals that had no choice but to source chipsets from competitors such as Nvidia. Various models featuring 3Dfx's Voodoo3 hit the market, catering to multiple price points. Nvidia returned fire that summer with the GeForce 256, which it billed as the world’s first GPU (graphics processing unit). The revolution that 3Dfx had ushered in three years earlier was now passing it by. 3Dfx's last hurrah came in the form of the VSA-100 graphics processor that was to serve as the backbone of the company’s next generation of cards. Only two, the Voodoo 4 4500 and Voodoo 5 5500, would ever make it to market. But where 3dfx was once a byword for raw performance, its strengths around this time laid in its full screen antialiasing image quality. The Voodoo 5 introduced T-buffer technology as an alternative to GeForce 256's T&L capabilities (transformation and lighting), by basically taking a few rendered frames and aggregating them into one image. This produced a slightly blurred picture that, when run in frame sequence, smoothed out the motion of the animation. 3Dfx’s technology became the forerunner of many image quality enhancements seen today, like soft shadows and reflections, motion blur, as well as depth of field blurring. That however was not enough to keep them out of financial trouble. The Voodoo5 5000, which was to resemble the 5500 but with half the RAM, never launched. Neither did the Voodoo 5 6000, a hulking card packing four VSA-100 processors and 128MB of total memory. 3Dfx reportedly made around 1,000 prototype cards for testing purposes, but again, none were ever sold to the public. Some of these fabled pre-production cards did survive although very few working examples are known to exist today. They’re considered among the holy grail of gaming hardware. If you can find someone willing to part with theirs, be expected to pay several thousand dollars. 3Dfx pulled the trigger on a $186 million acquisition of graphics IP provider GigaPixel in March 2000 in an effort to help get products to market faster but it proved to be too little, too late. Shortly after the first Voodoo4 products hit the market later that year, 3Dfx's creditors initiated bankruptcy proceedings. With few options, 3Dfx waved the white flag in December 2000 and sold most of its assets to Nvidia . Nearly 13 years later, 3Dfx's founders reunited for an oral history on the company hosted by the Computer History museum. It's an admittedly lengthy piece although if you've come this far, what's another two and a half hours? And if you’re in the mood for a bit of retro gaming, you’ll be happy to learn that second-hand Voodoo-based video cards are readily available through outlets like eBay . They’re a bit more expensive than you likely would have guessed (nostalgia will cost you), but they’re up for grabs if you’re in the market. On a personal note... The December 1995 issue of GamePro magazine featured a piece on DigiPen , a school in Vancouver that teaches video game programming. News of this "Applied Computer Graphics" school couldn’t have come at a better time as my computer teacher had just issued an assignment regarding our dream job and how it might relate to technology. I knew right then and there what I was destined to do. I’d been into video games for as long as I can remember. For a brief period in the mid-80s, my aunt owned and operated a video rental store. It was the sort of shop you’d find in any small town before Blockbuster monopolized the industry, with a respectable selection of movies and – most importantly for us kids – Nintendo games. This only further solidified my interest in gaming. I was fully enveloped by the late 90s, having laid claim to nearly every major console on the market. Nary a week would go by that I didn’t receive at least a few issues of the latest gaming mag in the mail. Heck, I even circled release dates on my calendar and counted down the days until launch in earnest. So there I was, an impressionable 13-year-old in computer class with his entire life already charted out. I’d finish grade school, get accepted into DigiPen, graduate with some sort of degree and start living the dream of making video games. In hindsight, that’s probably how it would have played out had my other interest – the personal computer – not intervened. I got my first computer in 1998 and it literally changed the entire trajectory of my life. I was still into gaming, mind you, but the focus immediately shifted from consoles to the PC and it didn’t take long to realize that my AMD K6-2 CPU with 3DNow! instruction set needed some help in the graphics department. Enter 3Dfx Interactive.

Gone but Not Forgotten: 3Dfx Interactive

3Dfx Brought the GPU Industry to Life But Didn't Live to See It Thrive
In a few short years, the graphics card company 3Dfx Interactive provided a polygon-laden shock to the PC world—then fell apart, fast. What happened? A version of this post originally appeared on Tedium , a twice-weekly newsletter that hunts for the end of the long tail. Today’s startup companies seem to have a certain arc to them: they get some seed funding, they launch, they draw some interest for their good idea, they keep growing, and maybe they become a part of the fabric of our lives … or a part of the fabric of a significantly larger company. Strangely, 3Dfx didn’t so much draw interest as blow the lid off of a trend that redefined how we think of video games. Its graphics processing units were just the right technology for their time. And, for that reason, the company was everywhere for a few years … until it wasn’t. So, what happened—why did 3Dfx turn into a cautionary tale? It's complicated, but today’s Tedium sifts through all the polygons and the shaded textures. “It was painful to watch 3Dfx slip from the archetypical kick-ass technology startup 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.”
— John Carmack, the longtime id Software programming guru who currently serves as Oculus VR’s chief technical officer, discussing the shutdown of 3Dfx in 2000 . (He made these comments, somewhat ironically, to Voodoo Extreme, a 3Dfx enthusiast site.) Carmack served on the graphics card maker’s technical advisory board and expressed frustration with the slow pace of the company’s Rampage project. A Voodoo2 graphics add-on card, as produced by Diamond. In particular, Diamond saw much success working with 3Dfx. Image: Wikimedia Commons
The corporate failures and missed opportunities that set the stage for 3Dfx
Around the time that 3Dfx and other 3D graphics card makers were just getting their footing in the market, the computer maker Silicon Graphics International was helping to supply Nintendo with much of the 3D technology it was using in its Nintendo 64. SGI had much of the technology to drive the industry forward, but the company was built around ultra-high-end supercomputers, and that left standard PCs out of the equation. But the thing was, there was a market on the PC—potentially, a big one, one that was only being hinted at by the early success of shareware games like Doom. SGI, which was selling $100,000 development kits to aspiring N64 publishers, was not the right vessel to reach what promised to become a sizable market. Put another way, they were the Wang Computers of 3D graphics—a company riding the prior generation’s horse. But there were signs something important was coming. In 1995, Microsoft purchased a startup called RenderMorphics , whose technology became the basis of Direct3D, which became a fundamental standard for 3D games on the PC. Around that same time, id Software was knee-deep in development on Quake , which had an engine built from the ground up to generate 3D worlds from even modestly fast Pentium processors. While the earlier Doom is arguably more influential overall, Quake would prove to be something of a killer app, helping to drive interest in 3D graphics cards. While SGI wasn’t well-suited to take advantage of the market shift toward commodity graphics, its alumni were. And in 1994, three of those alumni—Scott Sellers, Ross Smith, and Gary Tarolli—launched 3Dfx. The path that got them to the point of creating a startup was a bit messy. A quite in-depth oral history done by the Computer History Museum , which I’ll reference a lot here, notes that a prior offshoot of SGI, Pellucid, eyed the idea of making 3D graphics cards for PCs, and the firm was acquired by Media Vision, a firm known for selling competitors to the Sound Blaster. Media Vision, which often bundled its multimedia tools into a single kit, would have been a fit for what the trio was trying to do. “So it made a lot of sense to actually build this 3D product as part of Media Vision,” Sellers recalled. “Except there was just one minor problem, which was Media Vision was run by crooks.”
That company soon splintered after reports of financial malfeasance , and that led the trio into the arms of venture capitalist Gordon Campbell, who funded what became 3Dfx. Home Run Derby, the first arcade game to use a 3Dfx chip. Image: The Arcade Flyer Archive
Initially, 3Dfx and its Voodoo technology were focused intently on the arcades, and the company’s big debut came at the 1996 edition of the Electronic Entertainment Expo. The first game that used its GPU technology, believe it or not, was a virtual batter’s box called Home Run Derby . The game was massive and players used a baseball bat to play. “To play, a batter enters a batting cage and stands at home plate in front of a big screen monitor, awaiting a pitch. A 3-D ball is then hurled towards the batter,” an early press release explained of the game. “As it nears home plate, the batter swings. Interactive Light's proprietary infrared sensors instantly measure the batter's timing to determine speed, angle and orientation. These measurements determine the direction of the ball, and whether or not it will be a home run. The ‘camera’ follows the ball into the field on a hit or into the crowd on a home run.”
Sure, the arcades were a great place to introduce 3D graphics to the world. But the arcade industry was a struggling beast by that point. And soon, a much larger opening emerged—in the form of RAM prices. At the beginning of 1996, aftermarket RAM cost around $30 per megabyte, according to a detailed price comparison of Byte magazine ads by retired computer science professor John C. McCallum. (You might remember his analysis from my piece about the RAM shortage of 1988 .) In the two years prior, the price per megabyte actually jumped significantly, but by the end of 1996, the price per megabyte had fallen to just $5.25 per meg. That sharp drop, especially for the extended data output (EDO) RAM preferred at the time, helped make 3D graphics cards much cheaper than they would have been otherwise—and effectively made the products accessible to consumers. 3Dfx was just the company to take advantage of this market opportunity. A video of what Quake looked like on a Voodoo chipset. Four reasons 3Dfx’s Voodoo Graphics took the PC world by storm
3Dfx had its own API and successfully pitched it to developers. In the Computer History Museum’s oral history, company co-founder Ross Smith noted that the company was able to take advantage of the fact that most games were being developed in DOS at the time of its release to create its own API, GLide, and sell it to game developers. “And that was very radical for a graphics company to be doing that,” Smith recalled. “Because normally, you would just use whatever API Microsoft published or whatever. And you'd build this hardware and hope for the best. We couldn't do that, because there were no APIs.” This meant all the big games that supported 3D graphics backed 3Dfx. It won over Quake—and John Carmack. Quake was considered 3Dfx’s initial killer app, per Sellers, but 3Dfx played a direct role in making that win happen. The company took advantage of the fact that id Software made available the ability to extend the game’s rendering capabilities, then showed them to Carmack, who built the Quake engine. “And that was a huge step for us. Because once he saw it, then his mind just started cranking,” Sellers noted in the oral history. “And he very quickly went from being kind of a software rendering purist, to one saying, hey, I don't need to do all this stuff anymore. I can take advantage of the hardware.” The result of winning over Carmack was an instant surge in the company’s sales—as well as helping to influence the industry as a whole. It focused on 3D—and 3D alone—at first. Rather than adding 2D graphics capabilities to its system and threatening lower performance, 3Dfx basically chose to focus only on 3D graphics at first. This meant that the company would have better performance on its 3D card than companies that tried to tack on 3D functionality after the fact. It leaned heavily on partnerships with larger companies. Sellers notes that when the company first started selling chips for PC boards, it wasn’t very well known, but it soon collaborated with Creative Labs and Diamond Multimedia, two major expansion board companies, to offer cards based on 3Dfx chips. ( Diamond’s Monster3D, in particular , was an iconic graphics board during this era that was based on 3Dfx.) This created branding opportunities that helped boost the company’s recognition. “Buying into 3Dfx is a very, very smart move for Sega. Not only is the company the best there is at what they do, but the technology is also well-liked by the developing community.”
— A Sega Saturn Magazine take from July 1997 on Sega’s deal with 3Dfx to produce the graphics hardware for the Dreamcast. The agreement was perhaps the most significant in the company’s history up to that point, but it was not to be permanently. Near the end of July 1997, Sega infamously backed out of the deal and went with NEC’s competing PowerVR technology instead. The wound may have been at least partly self-inflicted; Sega was reportedly none too pleased when 3Dfx, ahead of its initial public offering, revealed the existence of the deal in an investor document . Nonetheless, it was the first major knock of many the company would face. (Despite the ultimate failure of the Dreamcast in the market, PowerVR would become a key element of many mobile platforms, serving as something of the ARM chip of the computer graphics world.) The acquisition that really screwed up a good thing for 3Dfx
In October of 1997, iconic 1990s gaming mag Next Generation, which is still well regarded today even though it hasn’t published in more than 15 years, published an article that seemed to finally assess the fact that this company came out of basically nowhere to dominate the gaming sector: “ Is 3Dfx Here to Stay? ”
With the recent bruises from the aborted Sega deal, it wasn’t the worst question to ask. Greg Ballard, the CEO of the company who was brought in from Capcom, put a suitably rosy picture on the situation. “It has taken the industry—our competitors—14 months to even catch up with us, and within several months, we’ll be leaping ahead of them again,” he stated. “That’s what happens when you have a year-to-14-month lead on the industry. And we think our next leap in technology will be an improvement of an order of magnitude in the technology.”
Unfortunately for the company, the room for error was closing. Between 1996 and 1998, 3Dfx struggled to do much in the way of wrong, but it did have its stumbles. Among them was the company’s attempt to combine 2D graphics and 3D graphics on a single chipset type called the Voodoo Rush. The dedicated approach for which it was known made sense in the first generation, but didn’t work so well in integrated form, with the 2D half of the equation suffering. On the other hand, the Voodoo2 line , which continued the dedicated approach, was just as successful as the first model, while offering some of that expected leapfrogging. However, the company’s leapfrogging capabilities would soon be hobbled by strategic shifts. At the tail end of 1998, the company announced it would acquire STB Systems , a major manufacturer of graphics cards. The result of the merger was that the company would stop selling its chipsets to other companies, acting as an original equipment manufacturer, or OEM, and instead would manufacture its own cards, starting with the Voodoo 3. The approach came at a time when competition from other major competitors, particularly Nvidia and ATI, was heating up, and the decision by 3Dfx to stop acting as an OEM for its latest chips meant that the company suddenly had both a new business model and a ton of competition. The firm’s initial willingness to supply lots of manufacturers was effective, but it was one factor behind what became a massive glut in the graphics card space. CNET reported that by 1999 , there were more than 40 companies producing graphics accelerators, a market complexity that meant any strategic errors would not be tolerated. On one hand, it meant that consumers were benefiting from the high level of competition, and this meant that things were improving on all fronts. On the other hand, this created a treadmill effect, one that 3Dfx was unable to keep up with. “And so it really was a we're-going-to-do-it-all kind of strategy. And that's a big bet,” 3Dfx’s Scott Sellers recalled in the Computer History Museum’s oral history. “And when—just a little bit of slip as we did—we were a little bit late coming out with some of the next generation products and didn't have the runway to come up with the next generation products, which I think would have been very compelling on the market. But ultimately, we ran out of time.”
The company’s inability to execute on its pipeline, particularly on its next-generation Rampage endeavor, eventually cost it momentum, developer support (John Carmack didn’t exactly sound happy with 3Dfx by the end, did he? ), and ultimately its lifeline. Nvidia, which has emerged as one of the two main players in the graphics processing unit market (ATI, later bought by AMD, was the other), bought out 3Dfx’s intellectual property in late 2000 . Nvidia, in a way, got a twofer deal out of the equation—3Dfx had acquired Gigapixel, a firm that had competed with Nvidia for a spot in the Xbox, just a few months before. 3Dfx created the treadmill, but only its competitors could keep up. Currently, the GPU industry is facing a major shortage, one caused by reasons completely unrelated to the root causes of the GPU flood of the late 1990s. Back then, a whole lot of companies saw an opportunity to bring high graphics capabilities to home users; today, GPUs are used for things as diverse as cryptocurrency, artificial intelligence, and automobiles. Supply pipelines, once flush with chips and cards, are running dry, with the rising popularity of crypto-mining a main factor . A video clip featuring Valley of Ra, one of 3Dfx's demos of its rendering technology. Clearly, none of this stuff was even a glimmer of an idea at the time 3Dfx shook up the GPU market in 1996. But it’s hard not to wonder whether the competitive spirit that the company fostered didn’t help to start off a world where GPU complexity would take so many alternate paths beyond graphics. When asked if 3Dfx would have been able to take advantage of the general-purpose uses commonly seen with GPUs today, Sellers noted in the company’s oral history that things were just getting to the point where it might have been feasible to think in those terms. “It was predominantly gaming. We didn't really have the ability to program the chips, per se, what you would need to have that kind of flexibility in terms of the GPU-like capability today,” he noted. “The product that we were working on at the very end before we sold to Nvidia, we did have a separate geometry chip that we were working on that perhaps could have done some of those types of things.”
Clearly, 3Dfx—once an icon of PC gaming—lost the plot at some point, only to be usurped by other companies. But I admit to wondering what might have happened had it been able to stay on that treadmill.

3Dfx Brought the GPU Industry to Life But Didn't Live to See It Thrive

3Dfx Interactive

Funding Date

Pre-Money Valuation

Post-Money Valuation

Amount Raised

Shares Authorized

Issuance Price

Dividend Rate

Liquidation Preferences

Liquidation Price

Participation

Conversion Price

Anti Dilution

General Voting

Board Voting

Par Value

Companies in this collection develop everything from microprocessors to flash memory, integrated circuits specifically for quantum computing and artificial intelligence to OLED for displays, massive production fabs to circuit design firms, and everything in between.

Semiconductors, Chips, and Advanced Electronics

Asset Sale

3Dfx Interactive is a developer of high performance, cost-effective 3D media processors, software and related technology for the interactive electronic entertainment market.

Name	Work History	Title	Status
Scott D Sellers		Founder, Executive Vice President	Former
Subscribe to see more	Subscribe to see more	Subscribe to see more	Subscribe to see more
Subscribe to see more	Subscribe to see more	Subscribe to see more	Subscribe to see more
Subscribe to see more	Subscribe to see more	Subscribe to see more	Subscribe to see more
Subscribe to see more	Subscribe to see more	Subscribe to see more	Subscribe to see more

Name	Scott D Sellers	Subscribe to see more	Subscribe to see more	Subscribe to see more	Subscribe to see more
Work History		Subscribe to see more	Subscribe to see more	Subscribe to see more	Subscribe to see more
Title	Founder, Executive Vice President	Subscribe to see more	Subscribe to see more	Subscribe to see more	Subscribe to see more
Status	Former	Subscribe to see more	Subscribe to see more	Subscribe to see more	Subscribe to see more

Name	Scott Sellers
Firm
Work History	VP, Research & Development, 3DFX Interactive; Principal Engineer, MediaVision Technology
Other Seats	3Dfx Interactive

Wells Fargo Success Story

Professional Services

Platform Overview

3Dfx Interactive

Executives

Board of Directors

3Dfx Interactive Management Team

6 Team Members

This profile has not been claimed.

3Dfx Interactive Board of Director

Discover the right solution for your team