Support for 3Dfx Cards on Mac OS X

In a deal which began on December 15, 2000 and completed on April 19, 2001, graphics-card maker NVidia Corporation bought the assets of rival graphics-card maker 3Dfx Interactive, Inc. At that time, 3Dfx's video cards had been very popular, earning over $324 million in revenue for the company in the previous year. Even today, though new cards have not entered the market for some time, those which remain continue to sell. Sadly, even this was not enough to save the company, which in the end was forced to make the sale of their assets.

Before the sale took place, 3Dfx had promised support for their Voodoo3 (which at the time was just starting to be replaced in the market by its successor products), Voodoo4 and Voodoo5 video cards on the then-unreleased operating system, Mac OS X. Mac users, many of whom were dissatisfied with rival ATi Technologies, Inc.'s cards due to a history of arguably substandard driver support, flocked to the Voodoo4 and Voodoo5. They bought these cards in anticipation of good support, then and into the future, from a company that had shown its commitment to the Mac OS. It should be noted that at the time, NVidia had no products for the Macintosh platform.

Few in the Mac OS community, or anywhere else, expected the buyout by NVidia when it came later that year. Many users, however, were dismayed when NVidia apparently discontinued all support for 3Dfx's technology. Mac users were particularly hurt by this, as this left many of them with cards which only work with substandard performance -if indeed they work at all- on Mac OS X. These users' investments had been for nothing, as many have been forced to revert to earlier cards in order to run the new operating system.

Of course, NVidia is not bound by the promises of 3Dfx. However, they run the risk of severely alienating a userbase world-renowned for their loyalty to a platform, namely Mac users, by rendering their investments in 3Dfx equipment worthless. We the undersigned implore NVidia to re-examine their plans for supporting 3Dfx products, at least those based around the VSA-100 chip (Voodoo4 and Voodoo5), on Mac OS X.

NVidia was recently chosen by Apple to be the OEM supplier of graphics chipsets for high-end Macintosh computers. What we ask of NVidia is to show a commitment support for their newest customer bases -namely Mac users and the owners of 3Dfx hardware- by protecting their investment, so that when the time comes for these people to buy new hardware they might be more favorably inclined towards NVidia.