My recollection as a nerdy teenager who had a Voodoo 3 at the time. The Voodoo 4 and Voodoo 5 series were highly hyped and anticipated and after the success of 1, 2 and 3 this kinda made sense. They were quite delayed however and before they made it to market they were slightly blindsided by the NVidia's release of the Geforce 256, which was (iirc) the first graphics card which had its own onboard transform & lighting support, which when supported gave an insane performance bump. In the end the Voodoo 4/5s were released late, board + driver quality was supposedly not great and the range of cards was far less than originally promised (only the low end Voodoo 4 4500 and upper-middle Voodoo 5 5500 were released, the lower-mid range Voodoo5 5000 and ambitious top-end 6000 never saw light of day). Performance wasn't great either, it was generally slower than the G256 even in games that didn't utilise the G256's T&L unit. Then shortly after NVidia released the Geforce 2 series (I ended up getting a Geforce 2 MX, which was insane for the price) which was so far ahead of 3dfx's offerings it wasn't even funny.

Hope I remembered this rightly but I really remember that Geforce 256 being so much better it was like night and day. I stopped playing PC games when I went to university around the Geforce 3 era, so that's when my knowledge of the topic drops off a cliff :D

edit: and now I reached the end of the article it seems Fabien has said exactly this! Note to self: read first then comment