I Wrote the First Full Review of the Voodoo 5 6000. 3dfx Isn’t Coming Back [Updated]

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— 3dfx (@3dfxofficial) August 6, 2021

Original Story Below:

If you haven’t been paying attention this week, some individuals who appear to have acquired (or at least used) some old logos and references to 3dfx have claimed they will bring its products — and new products — to market. They’ve released a slideshow claiming that they’ll ship a Voodoo 5 6000 and a grab bag of assorted branded stuff, including a smartphone, TV, home theater system, and tablet.

Before we jump into that, let’s talk about the claim I made in the headline. 18 years ago, I bought a Voodoo 5 6000 from eBay for $800 and reviewed it. I wrote a three-part series of articles entitled “A Fallen Titan’s Former Glory,” and I published the first full review of the Voodoo 5 6000. You can read that series of articles here, here, and here. You will need to use the “Next Page” button to advance in order to access the story from the Internet Archive; selecting individual pages will break the article. There are benchmark results in the second article, some of which I’ll refer to here. I owned a fully functional Voodoo 5 6000 for several years. If you want to read a thorough account of the company written much closer to the events in question, read the articles linked above.

Let’s talk about what 3dfx “announced” today. The declaration that they will ship a PCI Voodoo 5 6000 graphics card is not intrinsically surprising. The Voodoo 3, 4, and 5 shipped in an AGP format but did not support AGP texturing and did not benefit from the AGP standard. This was something of a positive point for legacy buyers who only had PCI slot, though it also foreshadowed the problems 3dfx had when keeping up with industry standards.

It is possible that this company could have found a tranche of old 3dfx Voodoo 5 6000 GPUs and gotten them working? Such cards existed. I’ve actually owned two 3dfx Voodoo 5 6000 cards from one of the later revisions, a HiNT 3700+ (the same make and model as shown above). So the 3dfx Voodoo 5 6000 claim? That could be true. I can’t say for certain that it isn’t. One reason to build PCI instead of AGP cards, in addition to the fact that Voodoo cards couldn’t use AGP effectively, is that the 3dfx Voodoo family is not compatible with many 4x and 8x AGP boards. There were no such problems with the PCI standard.

If that was all this company had claimed, I might be willing to believe it. But the claims about slapping “3dfx” branding on products make it clear that this is not an effort to rescue and rebuild a handful of old graphics cards to a modern standard and ship them for legacy and retro owners. This is an effort to cash in on a brand that a certain age group has an affinity for. Like Atari, this version of 3dfx has nothing to do with the original company.

Why Did 3dfx Die, and How Did the Voodoo 5 6000 Actually Perform?

I’m so glad you asked. I loved the company and I loved the card, but both had serious problems.

The Voodoo 5 6000 is probably the most complex piece of circuitry I ever owned relative to the era in which it was built. The original GPUs were supposed to be laid out in a 2×2 configuration but circuitry routing problems made that impossible. That’s why my GPU is laid out in a 1×4 configuration — but this necessitated a brace mounted at the back of the card to stabilize the board. There was no standard for delivering additional power to a GPU internally, which is why the Voodoo 5 6000 was originally supposed to ship with an external power supply. While 128MB was staggering for a GPU in 2000, the individual VSA-100 chips only had 32MB each. It was a 4x32MB configuration, not a 1x128MB configuration.

I want to stress that 3dfx did not fail because the Voodoo 5 6000 was delayed. 3dfx failed because it didn’t prioritize developing products that appealed to OEMs instead of enthusiasts and because it didn’t iterate its own GPU designs quickly enough. It focused on making each Voodoo iteration faster, but not necessarily all that much better.

Nvidia began life with a misstep that nearly killed the company, the NV-1, and early cards like the Riva TNT did not distinguish themselves. 3dfx seized a huge early lead with products like the Voodoo and Voodoo 2, but its first attempts to integrate 2D and 3D (the Voodoo 2 was a 3D card you installed in addition to your 2D graphics card and connected with a cable), the Voodoo Rush and Voodoo Banshee, failed. Nvidia, meanwhile, focused on improving its feature set and building cards OEMs wanted to buy.

It wasn’t until the Voodoo 3 that 3dfx shipped a plausible solution with simultaneous 2D and 3D support, and that GPU lacked large texture support (V3 topped out at 256×256, compared to 2048×2048 for comparable Nvidia hardware) as well as 32-bit color output, though its internal 24-bit color did improve final image quality compared to 16-bit.

The Voodoo 4 and Voodoo 5 families were both based on the same VSA-100 chip, and the VSA-100 wasn’t all that different than the graphics processor that powered the original Voodoo. While 3dfx had added features, it primarily focused on increasing raw performance. Nvidia GPUs of the era took advantage of early AGP features; 3dfx cards didn’t. Nvidia cards offered features like 32-bit color and combined 2D+3D performance and larger VRAM buffers (used as a marketing point). 3dfx also made a terrible decision to compete against its former OEM partners by building its own GPUs. Its API, Glide, was very useful in the first few years of the 3D era, but D3D was supplanting it even before 3dfx died. Game developers wanted to program in one API for all GPUs, not use two different APIs to support 3dfx + everyone else.

Cards like the Voodoo 5 6000 ignited considerable interest and one could even argue they represent a road-not-taken, in which SLI became the primary method of improving video card performance, but the VSA-100 didn’t support features like hardware transform and lighting. This was behind Nvidia’s much-ballyhooed implementation of curved surfaces in Quake 3 with the original GeForce. I cannot find a reprint of the images, but there were screenshots distributed showing how other video cards rendered curves in Quake 3 with polygons, while only the original GeForce could manage a true curve.

Even the definition of a GPU dates to this time period. Nvidia’s original definition of a graphics processing unit was that the GPU must be capable of performing transform and lighting calculations in hardware. 3dfx VSA-100 chips could not do this. This made a fast CPU more important to a 3dfx card than it was to an Nvidia GPU.

When you examine the feature set of the VSA-100 in aggregate, the truth is, it was a stretched version of the original Voodoo architecture. While the graphics processor’s feature set had expanded, it had not kept pace with its competitors at ATI and Nvidia. It couldn’t have been cheap to build given the complexity and size of the PCB layout, the amount of RAM required, and the fact that it took four graphics processors while its competitors made due with a single GPU (the less said about ATI’s Rage Fury MAXX the better).

For all that, the performance really was impressive, as the benchmarks above show. The V5 6K could have taken on the GeForce 2 Ultra and even challenged the GeForce 3, in terms of raw frame rate. The thing to keep in mind when you see these graphs is that it didn’t come near to challenging them in feature set. It lacked features that became standard like hardware T&L or programmable pixel shaders. I unpack all of this in far more detail in the original articles linked above, as well as discussing 3dfx’s onetime plans for Rampage, so if you want to know more about the cards and the company, check there.

The company that announced its own existence a few days back may have some Voodoo 5 6000 cards it wants to fix up and sell. I suppose it’s even possible that it intends to produce the original hardware. The reason I’m so dubious of these plans, however, is that any enthusiast-oriented company would have led with the announcement of legacy hardware refurbishment, along with a discussion of how it was going to provide driver support. It would have discussed the fact that these cards need to be modded for internal power supplies. It would have talked about how it would cool the cards and validate that the prototypes it had were still in working condition. If it intended to produce new silicon, it would have led with that.

It is not impossible that this company has working, functional V5 6K silicon or intends to build it. But it’s also not impossible that whatever “Voodoo 5 6000” PCI card it intends to launch is nothing more than a joke / fraud in one way or another. If “3dfx” would like to prove otherwise, I’ve already demonstrated an ability to cover the card. I’d be more than happy to write a sequel.

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