3DFX Lives! Sort of...

I guess many of you still remember the times when 3dfx delivered mind-blowing image quality with its Voodoo series graphics cards. Unfortunately 3dfx did not get to release any drivers for Microsotf's Windows XP OS, since NVIDIA managed a corporate takeover in late 2000. Unlike AMD+ATI, NVIDIA decided to stop the entire support for 3dfx products, claiming these had nothing to do with their plans at that time. Ever since, driver support for 3dfx cards has been up to the enthusiast community.

Almost seven years after this series of unfortunate events, we see drivers for 3dfx cards still appearing on specialized websites. The enthusiast community managed quite an achievement, continuing to develop drivers for Windows XP, which were still in the works at the time of the infamous takeover. Hardcore 3dfx fans are proud to offer both 32-bit and 64-bit Windows drivers and it seems there is room for further improvements.

All you 3dfx nostalgic fans, grab those safely stored graphics cards and plug them back in (if you still have an AGP slot, that is)! If you'd like like to remember the good ol' days, just download the latest drivers from the 3dfx Italia community website (http://www.3dfxzone.it/dir/news/3dfx/sfft_alpha45_voodoo3_4_5/).

The new SSFT drivers feature a Unified Architecure that isn't just a simple re-do of drivers that came out over half a decade ago. The new Unified Architecture has now reached the Alpha 4.5 release. Unlike previous driver packages which split Voodoo3 and Vodoo4/5 product families, the unified driver supports all Voodoo3 family cards (Voodoo3 2000, Voodoo3 3000 and Voodoo3 3500 cards), and all 3dfx VSA-100 products (Voodoo4 4500, Voodoo5 5500 and Voodoo5 6000).
The SFFT drivers offer support for a wide variety of games that appeared from 2000 onwards and the Italian designers claim that they will further develop the driver in order to support windows Vista and new games.