Since this was a 3D graphics accelerator, those who bought it still had to buy a separate 2D card. Without the 2D card, the 3dfx Voodoo wouldn’t be able to show any video at all, so this was ...

3dfx continued through a glorious period. Its 1997 Voodoo Rush 2D/3D graphics chipset was admittedly a dud, suffering from a lack of memory bandwidth and sync issues with the onboard 2D graphics chip.

This was the Accelerated Graphics Port, or AGP, a standard created to more quickly serve the 3D graphics cards which were then taking the world by storm.

For SGI it was the surge in commodity 3D graphics cards in the 1990s alongside affordable (and cluster-capable; insert Beowulf cluster jokes here) server hardware that posed a major problem.