3DFX was one of the first to market with a 3D card, the V3's where teh first wit 2d built in. NV wasnt far behind for 3d back then, we also had PowerVR based cards as well as Intels around the time of Quake3A.
the biggest thing that hurt 3DFX was the getting the Voodoo 5 6000 out. which would have been the first retail card to need a power supply aka voodoo volts. it never made it out of prototype stage. it had 4 vsa 100 chips, but due to the cost of the project and not having anything to beat nv or ati. they went under, NV bought of the IP that 3DFX had.
now the odd part, forget the name of the company. they were already using boards with 8 vsa100 chips with interlinks to other boards, so they were the first to need its own psu, being 5v with i think it was 60amps. also the first 2+ sli setup, they mainly sold to the GOV for flight sim training graphics processing. they were able to do 2xAA back then with no FPS drop, as in able to keep a solid 60fps with 2xAA. was never able to find out what resolution they were running but they were running three displays.
i didnt think rage was OGL? MS was more incontrol on the pc side with its DX push. they would off money to devs to push DX as a standard.
More people are getting on board with this. Steam is a big movement in that direction competition and diversity is only good for us! The other big announcement recently was with 
