3Dlabs

Ghost Corp Apparel — resurrecting iconic corporate ghosts.

3Dlabs Inc., Ltd. emerged in April 1994 from a management buyout of DuPont Pixel Systems’ UK operation. With a corporate headquarters in Sunnyvale, California, it became a fabless specialist in professional 3D graphics—the sort of Silicon Valley company that made CAD workstations feel dramatically more expensive, because they were.

Its GLINT and Permedia processors powered graphics boards for design, visualization, animation, and other jobs where ordinary pixels were apparently not invited. 3Dlabs also sold its own Oxygen and Wildcat graphics cards, bringing its chip work all the way to the workstation slot. The company joined the NASDAQ in October 1996.

Expansion came by acquisition: Dynamic Pictures joined in July 1998, followed by Intergraph’s Intense3D graphics division in July 2000. Creative Technology completed its acquisition of 3Dlabs on May 16, 2002. During the Creative era, 3Dlabs operated from Milpitas, California, while its professional graphics identity kept swinging at polygons, drivers, and very serious-looking CAD displays.

In 2006, the company stopped developing professional 3D graphics chips and shifted toward media processors for handheld and embedded devices. In January 2009, that operation merged with a Creative product division and was rebranded ZiiLABS. Our 3Dlabs collection celebrates the glorious era when “workstation graphics” meant serious silicon, serious beige towers, and a Wildcat that never once purred.