3Dfx Interactive - the company that added a whole dimension to computers and gaming
It was the year 1996 and the first real 3D accelerator appeared on the market. It was called Voodoo. It technically wasn't the first and many other claimed to support 3D, but this was specialized for3D computing. And that was quite strange at that time.
3Dfx Voodoo 2 - source WikiMedia Commons
While others tried to combined 2D and 3D graphics cards into a single card, 3Dfx took a very different route. You took your regular card and slotted it into the Voodoo card. It came with many issue and a lot of people didn't do it correctly, but whoever managed to connect everything correctly - he immediately saw the differences. It's hard to describe, maybe the closest feeling today is trying out VR - so big was the difference at the time. Specially in FPS and racing games that supported this graphics cards, the view was just completely different. Although - many would argue (from today POV) that is still looked like crap.
nVidia Riva 128 - source WikiMedia Commons
There was a time when everybody thought that this was the pinnacle of graphical acceleration, but then the nVidia Riva 128 came and started a fight that pretty much is happening to this day. Some of the fighters changed in that time, but it's still the same fight.
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I cannot imagine how people must have felt when they tried the GPUs for the first time. My first graphic card was an nvidia FX5500, and the first time I played a game with it was totally mesmerizing.
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The Voodoo 2 was my first video card. I'll never forget it.
I remember playing the original Tomb Raider on my 486 and it ran like crap. After installing the Voodoo2 card, holy crap the graphics seemed 100 times better and the FPS was so smooth.
Oh the good old times. I still remember the first time I saw what a Voodoo 1 could do. A buddy of mine bought a Diamond Monster 3D 4MB card and added it to his 2MB ATI Rage in his Pentium 200MMX. We played Need for Speed 2 SE in 640x480. In Glide mode (now long gone but was something similar to OpenGL or Direct3D back in the day) you had weather effects and nicely filtered textures. Amazing... Then Quake 2 also running smoothly in 640x480 with colored lights. And of course the original Unreal which also had native 3Dfx Glide support.
I couldn't afford such a card back then, my first own PC I bought around 1999 already had a NVidia Riva TNT2 Pro in it. But then the 3Dfx era was already past it's best. They got acquired by NVidia in late 2000 for a mere 20 million USD.
A lot more info about various 3DFx cards including rare engineering samples can be found here: http://www.thedodgegarage.com/3dfx/ (I do not own this page but in my opinion this guy has the greatest 3Dfx collection on the planet)