Where ATI Rage, S3, and the Verge de-accelerator almost succeeded, where the nVidia Riva polygon cracked, the nVidia 3dfx brought the graphic accelerator to the masses, and with a little help from John Carmac, OpenGL became commonplace.
[As someone who was spec’ing computers during the day, and level-editing at night, I remember it as the late-coming of 3dfx’s almost compatible Banshee card, and the overheating issues in their later cards that finished them off, and dropped them into nVidia’s lap. I owned both a Voodoo 1 and 2, with pass-through cables, because that’s how it was.]
