T he first consumer 3D graphics cards appeared under 3DFX’s “Voodoo” branding in late 1996. These were add-in cards that still required a regular video card (or chip) to display 2D scenes. But they enabled games like Tomb Raider, Descent, Grand Theft Auto and Unreal to use 3DFX’s proprietary Glide API and render things (well, some things) much faster than software rendering. A number of other proprietary 3D graphics APIs appeared around this time, including the S3 3D Engine (used in Virge cards), the Nvidia Multimedia Library, the Creative 3D Library (used in Blaster 3D devices) and the
