A never-shipped 3dfx Voodoo5 6000 AGP graphics card has popped up on eBay to tempt fans of historical GPUs. Speaking of fans, this boy has four of ’em, one each for the four VSA-100 graphics chips the board sports – along with 128MB of frame-buffer memory. The full-length card requires a 3.3V AGP slot should the successful bidder care to try the thing out. It also requires a power feed from the host system’s PSU. Later incarnations of the card were bundled with their own, external power supply brick. The GPUs are clocked to 166MHz.
I soooo badly want one of those, i would throw my 7800gs in a pond to get one. This card is the card of all my dreams, and i have wanted one since 3dfx announced the vsa100 chipset. This is just painfull to watch.. now i still think there is hope =(((( But i guess it ends up at 10k dollars just as last time one of those went up on ebay.
Indeed. That would be a whole lot of fun. I still have my Voodoo3 and Voodoo 2 daughterboard sitting arround. A Voodoo5 would be a whole lot of fun to play with.
My Voodoo3 was pretty nice – I used it for years after 3dfx went out of business, and only switched it out because the driver support “disappeared” (the “3rd party” drivers kinda suck)
I kinda wish they were still around.
Indeed,
I really miss 3dfx.
I’m sorry to say but I have never been fully satisfied with Nvidia and ATI products, and many other companies are almost pointless to use for gaming… Matrox, lol!
3Dfx was great. But my old Verite Rendition 1000 was the winner (until the voodoo2 came out).
The Verite V1000 wasn’t as fast as even a Voodoo 1 but it had better image quality. I still remember many a game playing VQuake on it when I used to have one (Sierra Screamin’ 3D).
Anyway.. to me 3Dfx was the company that was more of the gamers company than either nVidia or ATI which at the time specially during the Voodoo 2 era didn’t have anything that could match perfomancewise. So for me it was also sad to see them go by the wayside and to see nVidia buy them out to put them out of their misery so to speak.
I’d like to see what kind of performance that last 3Dfx card the Voodoo5 6000 would get in games. I bet it has some killer performance in it’s own style of antialiasing which is really nice.
“The Verite V1000 wasn’t as fast as even a Voodoo 1 but it had better image quality.”
Yup, that about sums it up. To maintain the same framerate as people with the VooDoo1 I had to drop my resolution a bit. But being a 2D/3D card it was a better bang for the buck and saved some space not needing a second card.
3Dfx did seem to be a real gamers company. I remember sitting arround bad mouthing the GF1 and its heat issues. Now I have an Nvidia card that could burn a whole through the earth if its fans failed.
I know what you mean, my 16MB Banshee(16bit only but fast) always performed fantastically, having to switch to less polished OpenGL and Direct3D rendering for games was depressing, especially when the performance of the newer TNT/2 was decidedly poor in comparison. Such a shame that nVidia swallowed up and killed off the 3dfx family rather than taking advantage of the technology.
Wasn’t 3dfx the first to have SLI technology… I was a little annoyed when Nvidia came out with it, knowing that they were the ones to take 3dfx down. I kind of forget why 3dfx went out of business. From what I remember they apparently stole or were stealing (copyright) some stuff from Nvidia. I’m not quite sure.
Either way, I always like the name Voodoo and it would be awesome if they came out with a new card / company.
Stealing? No, not at all.
The VooDoo3 was garbage compared to the TNT2, and the VooDoo 4 and 5 were even worse, while the GeForce 256 was revolutionary.
That is not true.
Compare the image quality!
You had to run games on 32 bit (less fps) if you used the TNT2, while the games looked nearly the same in 16 bit with the Voodoo, only in some games like Freespace 2 the explosions would not be that colourfull.
Additionally the TNT did not suport Glide (UT e.g). So the image quality was worse in many occations.
It is interesting that 3dfx was regarded dated with their technology and now everyone is using antialiasing, SLI …
Just interested: Did you ever own a Voodoo?
I actually had a VooDoo3, and drueled at Voodoo2’s quite often.
Oh yes, and that being said, I do miss 3DFx, however they did kill themselves as they just could not keep up with nVidia.
I guess the main reason why they disappeared weren’t their cards, but their policy:
Producing their own cards!
nVidia and ATI let other companies produce their cards (ASUS, MSI etc.). So 3dfx forced its retailers like Creative Labs to produce ATI and nVidia cards or to leave that area of business and created a lot of additional competition as they bought a facility to produce their cards on a large scale.
Interesting is that nVidia bought 3dfx for less money than 3dfx had bought that facility just a few months before.
ATi exclusively manufactured their own cards until relatively recently (I think when the Radeon originally came out is when they switched).
nVidia purchased all manner of bits and pieces from 3Dfx including the brands and technology.
I’m quite happy they are gone. I remember the frustratuin if having a Riva 128 and not being able to use it until a few years later because a lot of games only supported glide.
And you can’t believe the frustration in having an alternative OS and not being able to play most of the games released because they’re only in D3D..
take a hike.
Umm.. Yes I can.. That’s one of the reasons I dual boot. I take it you weren’t around in those days otherwise you would realize that one has a better chance getting a modern game working on linux or other OS’s than getting games of there era to work on a non 3dfx card.
yeah, really dude, take a hike! 3dfx was the best thing to ever happen to computer gaming and the hardware industry. If they were arround today the world would only be a better place. The guys knew their stuff very well only they had no clue about the business world …
I still have somewhere in my closet my Voodoo5 5500 dual-gpu gfx card. It has served me well…
I would love to have one of those. I just recently stopped using my voodoo 5 5500. Awesome card in its own right.
anyone want to buy it off me?
works perfectly. ‘Voodoo 5 5500 64mb AGP’.
actually, I may pop it back into my tower… hmm..
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btw, the voodoo 5 5500 is a dual gpu card.
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3dfx was ahead of their time in terms of wasting power with GPUs. NVidia and ATI have definitely filled the gap in the market that 3dfx left when it went out of business.
is this news?
this is actually Voodoo 6 ( or what was supposed to be Voodoo 6 ). As some people already mentioned this is not the first time some of those boards are being sold on ebay so I fail to see the newsworthiness of this particular time …