On March 20, 1996, Orchid Technologies announced the Orchid Righteous 3D, the first consumer graphics card based on 3Dfx technology. It retailed for $299, achieved FCC certification July 24, 1996, and reached retail shelves October 6, 1996, beating Diamond Multimedia’s Monster 3D to market. Orchid was 3Dfx’s first OEM partner and the maker of the first 3Dfx Voodoo card.
Who was Orchid?
Orchid was no newcomer to PC graphics or the PC market in 1996. Orchid produced a monochrome graphics card that competed with Hercules in 1982. In the mid 1980s, it produced EGA and VGA video cards.
It also produced memory expansion cards and CPU upgrade cards for the original IBM PC and PC/XT, such as the Orchid Tiny Turbo 286. In the days before baby AT motherboards, these devices provided an upgrade path for an 8088-based system where a full-sized AT motherboard didn’t fit. The result wasn’t a fully 16-bit system, but at least it was faster.
Needless to say, to someone who knew their PCs in the mid 90s, Orchid was probably a familiar name.
Bringing the Orchid Righteous 3D to market
Although it took seven months to reach the market, early examples of the retail Orchid Righteous 3D cards contain engineering sample 3Dfx chips. This reflects 3Dfx having yield problems and insufficient quantities of the chips early on.
The retail box carried the tagline “3D so real it must be righteous,” and the back of the box promised true arcade 3D performance for the PC. This was a completely fair claim to make, as 3Dfx technology was in use in arcade machines in the late 1990s. Various companies had promised arcade-quality graphics for consumers over the years, but in this case, Orchid Technologies was delivering the very same hardware the latest arcade games were using.
Orchid elaborated on the claims in its official press release:
Righteous 3D is the first graphics adapter of its kind that delivers true arcade quality graphics at full motion frame rates. The product incorporates critical 3D features which are essential for visually realistic texture-mapped entertainment applications. Advanced filtering and anti-aliasing techniques produce smooth textured images. High precision 3D accuracy generates realistic three dimensional objects. Transparent and translucent effects like fog, smoke and haze create stunning atmospheric conditions. In addition to its core capabilities, Righteous 3D incorporates some of the most advanced features ever designed into a 3D accelerator including unique special effects like texture compositing and morphing, per-pixel atmospheric effects and texture animation. These features dramatically enhance the visual realism necessary to create a radically unique gaming experience.
Orchid and 3Dfx promised the following, all in hardware:
- Perspective correct texture mapping
- Bi-linear and advanced filtered textures
- Level of Detail (LOD) MIP Mapping
- Double and triple buffering
- Gouraud modulated textures
- Z-buffering
- Alpha blending
- Anti-aliasing
- Per-pixel fog, smoke and haze effects
- Texture composition and texture morphing
- Texture animated and modulation
The catch with 3Dfx in the early days
The catch was that 3Dfx used its own proprietary API, Glide, to accomplish this. There wasn’t a suitable open industry standard yet, partly because in 1996, many games still ran under MS-DOS. That was OK though, as the first 3Dfx cards quickly gained enough market share to attract developers to its solution. Developers incorporated the 3Dfx Glide API into their games to take advantage of the new capabilities.
Like all other 3Dfx Voodoo-based cards–we didn’t call them GPUs yet, and didn’t necessarily even distinguish between video and graphics cards either–the Orchid Righteous 3D lacked any 2D capability. Instead, the Orchid Righteous 3D functioned as an add-in card, complementing a regular 2D-capable card and using a VGA cable pass-through to connect both cards inline to a VGA monitor. It plugged into the PCI bus, alongside your existing 2D card. When AGP was released in 1997, using a Righteous 3D alongside an AGP 2D card became normal. The Righteous 3D had mechanical relays that clicked audibly when you were using it, giving a distinctive case of sensory recall to the people who used one in the late 1990s.
The Orchid Righteous 3D and other competing Voodoo cards became popular due to their much higher performance than graphics cards based on S3 or Matrox chipsets. Soon 3Dfx had 80 percent of the market for 3D-capable graphics cards. And that market grew pretty fast, partly because it meant you could buy a cheaper CPU. It could be cheaper to buy an AMD K6 CPU or an Intel Celeron and a 3Dfx Voodoo-based card than it was to buy a Pentium II. And even if it wasn’t, you still got somewhat better graphics from a the cheaper CPU plus 3DFX than you did from a Pentium II alone. This wasn’t lost on hardware enthusiast sites like Tom’s Hardware Guide and Anandtech.
Two years later, in mid 1998, rival graphics card maker Diamond Multimedia acquired Micronics Computers, Orchid Technologies’ parent company. Diamond phased out the Orchid name.
Orchid Righteous 3D collectibility and value
I can’t find many examples of an Orchid Righteous 3D for sale. Given the caveat of extremely small sample size, I found a couple of examples of 2-megabyte cards changing hands in 2024 for around $100, and a 4-megabyte card for around $150. In 2025, I saw two examples of 4-megabyte cards change hands for an average of $190, and broken examples for $90.
I’ve seen asking prices higher than that, but actual sale prices are a much better indication of actual value.
In all cases, these cards were loose, without the retail box or packaging. Finding boxed examples of early Voodoo cards may be a bit more challenging than with later cards. The reason for that is retail boxes often survived due to upgraders swapping out their old video card, then putting it in the new card’s box for safekeeping. But since the Orchid Righteous 3D coexisted with the existing card, there was one less reason to keep the box.
Any 3Dfx Voodoo card is a nice collectible, but with the Orchid Righteous 3D being the first, that’s especially the case.
David Farquhar is a computer security professional, entrepreneur, and author. He has written professionally about computers since 1991, so he was writing about retro computers when they were still new. He has been working in IT professionally since 1994 and has specialized in vulnerability management since 2013. He holds Security+ and CISSP certifications. Today he blogs five times a week, mostly about retro computers and retro gaming covering the time period from 1975 to 2000.
–the Orchid Righteous 3D lacked any 2D capability. Instead, the Orchid Righteous 3D functioned as an add-in card, complementing a regular 2D-capable card and using a VGA cable pass-through to connect both cards inline to a VGA monitor. It plugged into the PCI bus, alongside your existing 2D card. When AGP was released in 1997, using a Righteous 3D alongside an AGP 2D card became normal.
we no longer have a 3D functioned as an add-in card, complementing a regular 2D-capable card and using a VGA cable pass-through to connect both cards inline to a VGA monitor so what changes
The change was making chipsets that could do both 2D and 3D so there wasn’t a need for separate cards.
Oh man, my cousin gave me one of these, along with the box and cd’s in the early 2000’s. I don’t know what I did with it, but I wish it still had it!
I can relate a little. I never had an Orchid Righteous 3D, but have had multiple 3dfx cards pass through my hands. I only still have one of them, and don’t know what happened to the rest. I saved a lot of stuff, but I got rid of a lot of good stuff too, and the stuff I got rid of would be worth a fortune today.