After 3dfx disappeared, NVIDIA acquired much of its intellectual property and hired many of its employees. ATI vanished as a brand following its acquisition by AMD, but Radeon continued as AMD’s graphics business. Cyrix disappeared through acquisitions, while parts of its technology and engineering legacy continued elsewhere.

Companies such as S3, DEC and Transmeta also contributed ideas, patents and engineering talent that influenced computer hardware long after their names faded from view.

Explore how acquisitions, patents and the movement of engineers allow technology to outlive the companies that created it—and why your PC has more ancestors than you might think.

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Just four years later, 3dfx was collapsing. What went wrong? Explore its purchase of board manufacturer STB Systems, its shift toward selling its own graphics cards, and the product delays that left it vulnerable to increasingly aggressive competition from NVIDIA.

Discover how NVIDIA’s GeForce 256 reshaped expectations for modern GPUs and why, by late 2000, 3dfx had agreed to sell most of its assets to its rival.

This rise-and-fall story traces how a pioneer of the 3D graphics revolution lost its lead during the very transformation it helped create.

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As NVIDIA and ATI drove an increasingly expensive race for gaming GPU performance, Matrox chose a different strategy: specialized professional markets where reliability mattered more than benchmark scores.

Explore how Matrox shifted toward professional video, multi-display systems, broadcast, medical imaging and control rooms—and why that move helped it survive while competitors like 3dfx disappeared.

Discover how leaving the mainstream gaming graphics battle behind allowed Matrox to keep operating decades later, and what its story reveals about survival and profitability in the hardware industry.

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But PC gaming exposed a critical weakness. Cyrix processors had relatively weak floating-point performance, just as real-time 3D games were making that capability increasingly important. A computer that felt fast on the desktop could struggle with games optimized for Intel's stronger floating-point unit (FPU).

Explore how Cyrix challenged Intel, why the rise of 3D gaming exposed its limitations, and how growing competition from AMD helped push it out of contention. Through acquisitions, Cyrix eventually disappeared, leaving Intel and AMD to dominate desktop x86 CPUs.

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Marketed as an affordable 3D accelerator, ViRGE combined 2D graphics and 3D hardware on a single chip. On paper, it promised a leap forward. In practice, its 3D performance could be painfully slow.

In some games and configurations, ViRGE's hardware acceleration offered little advantage over software rendering—and could even perform worse. Gamers jokingly dubbed it the world's first “3D decelerator.”

Meanwhile, rival 3dfx showed what dedicated 3D acceleration could deliver, helping turn Voodoo into a PC gaming legend while S3 struggled to keep up.

Explore how the S3 ViRGE earned its notorious reputation, why its 3D acceleration fell short, and what its story reveals about the race to bring 3D graphics to PC games.

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