The demise of 3dfx was quite sudden and a slap in the face to the open source community. I still remember my friend Gabe Rosa emailing me with just "Look at /. " and seeing the news. It was the 2nd worst day for Linux gaming (the 1st being the demise of Loki). And it was also a shame. 3dfx was getting ready to release a new Voodoo V featuring 4 GPU's which would've trounced the ATI and nVidia offerings, as well as a new card code named "Rampage" which reportedly would've put them firmly back as the king of the hill. There are reports that the Rampage's technology (which was sold to nVidia) went into the GeForce 5900. Not too shabby for 3 year old technology!
At first, things were still simple. Linux gamers would either keep their open source Voodoos, get an open source Radeon or a closed source GeForce. However, with bigger and better games on the horizon, it was only a matter of time before the Voodoos would no longer be a viable graphics card for modern gaming. People were still using Voodoo's, but they were essentially out of the game at this point.
ATI started to release a tremendous number of versions of each video card, and keeping up with them and their terminology started to become very difficult. ATI, together with nVidia, played king of hill. Their products have been neck to neck ever since, with GeForce taking the lead a bit more times than the Radeon. But the Radeon's drivers were open source, so many Linux users stuck by them. Then things got even more complicated.
ATI started becoming more and more reluctant to open source drivers for their new releases, and suddenly, it wasn't clear who the "good guy" was anymore. nVidia's party line was they license some of their GL code from another company, and is thus non-releasable. Presumably, ATI doesn't want to release drivers to keep their trade secrets, well, a secret. And it gets worse. The ATI Linux drivers have been plagued by extremely poor performance. Even when an ATI offering is better than the current GeForce offering for Windows, the card is always trounced by GeForce on Linux. Because of the ATI Linux driver woes, Linux users cannot use MS Windows based benchmarks or card stats. They simply don't apply to us. And that's pretty much where we are right now.
As a last note, the only systematic Linux video card benchmarking effort I'm aware of was done, unfortunately, in March 2001, between a Radeon 32 DDR and a GeForce 2. You can read it for yourself at http://www.linuxhardware.org/features/01/03/19/0357219.shtml , but conclusion is that the GeForce 2 firmly and soundly trounced the Radeon 32 DDR.
