Can someone repeat the 3dfx out of business?

[alan]

I was partially following the 3dfx going out of business thing but I do not know enough about the various companies to know who makes what video cards. I read somewhere CompUSA was dumping support on someones's video cards and another company is taking it over. Now I am in the hunt for a new gaming video card and wish I had followed it more closely. I have Geforce and Voodoo AGP models in mind. How does this shakeup affect my choices? Suggestions?

[Xayd]

Per the memo that was sent to Best Buy stores a couple weeks ago, Voodoo support will end around mid-February.

The only consideration there is drivers, which will not be updated. For current games, it's not an issue, since the Voodoo line of drivers, especially the Voodoo3's, are very advanced.

The problem will be next year's games, which may or may not work well on Voodoo cards. If you don't mind having to upgrade video cards again in a year to a year and a half (which is about right for a gamer anyways, if that's your main usage of video card features), the Voodoo5 is a great buy right now.

On the flipside nVIDIA is pushing the Geforce2 Ultra right now, so 32 meg Geforce2's are also a great buy, and will perform about as well as the Voodoo5 (the Voodoo5's anti-aliasing, or smoothing of jagged lines, works a bit better, while the Geforce2's are slightly faster in low resolutions and color depths).

The real consideration is what games do you play. If you still have Glide games that you play alot, such as Rune or Unreal Tournament, then a Voodoo would be the obvious choice. If you don't play any Glide games, get the Geforce, it'll be faster. If you need a PCI card instead of an AGP card, there are no Geforce PCI cards, so go Voodoo.

Xayd